What is guest posting in general?
In essence – a guest post entails finding a niche relevant website to your website (so if you’re running a local dentistry – a blog about oral health, or a resource wiki on everthing to do with braces and teeth), contacting the webmaster, negotiating with them an agreement to allow an article you’ll write for them to be placed on their website, writing the article, sending it for approval to the webmaster, emailing back and forth until the article is acceptable for placement and placed in a visually appealing manner on the blog, and then compensate the webmaster if it’s within the agreement (sometimes great content is enough). If you think this already sounds like a lot of work – you’re not wrong, but as you might perceive, grants you some pretty sweet backlinks (especially if you’re outsourcing the process to someone like us). In the end – they get free content and/or compensation, and you get a solid backlink from a great website relevant (or even authority) within your niche
Is there a difference between guest posting and outreach? If so, what is it?
When speaking in a guest posting versus custom outreach context – guest posting GENERALLY means pre-established relationships with webmasters who are already ready to place guest posts on their websites, or have already been paid to do so and are happy to post more guest posts.
Meanwhile, custom outreach is just the FIRST STEP in generating successfully negotiated guest posts – the “first contact”, if you will. Companies will often try to charge more for “custom outreach” campaigns, implying that there’s an additional level of work because they have to start the outreach process from scratch for each individual customer – but not everyone does this! Here at MashOn, we don’t charge differently what’s essentially the same process. For example, if someone orders 20 guest posts in a niche, and the pre-established relationships only had 15 perfect placements, we go right to work by putting together a quick custom outreach campaign around this niche, finding targets and initiating contact to negotiate with them. In our opinion, every pre-established guest post relationship come from initial custom outreach campaigns.
How is guest posting different from PBN builds or niche edits?
Unlike guest posts, which give you control of the entire article being posted with your anchors/URLs in it since you’re the one who wrote it/had it written – niche edits are simply content snippets placed into existing content in a naturally flowing manner. You can’t really build much of a narrative for maximum SEO impact with edits in the same way as you can with guest posts.
PBN builds, on the other hand – are entire networks of websites that you build (or have built for you) with the sole purpose of powering up the websites you choose to link back to from within the network. PBN websites, no matter how large a network – are usually not as powerful as established authority websites guest posts are negotiated on – and take time to build out and power up properly. This is why PBNs are generally seen as a long-term strategy, something that is built out over months and sometimes years – with the future plan to take over a specific market/niche/locality.
Pros and Cons of Guest Posts
The three main pros of using guest posts in your SEO campaigns are:
i. Full control of the content your backlink is placed in.
ii. Guest posting is considered one of the most white hat forms of SEO. People rarely get penalized for guest posting as an SEO method.
iii. With time – you can get some extremely powerful links that PBNs and niche edits just can’t compare with in terms of SEO power.
The main cons of guest posting as an SEO tactic are:
i. An ironic complete lack of control over every other piece of content on the website. If a webmaster chooses to start accepting guest posts about drugs and sex toys, there’s not much you can do about it except ask to have your link removed from your post.
ii. Inherently long turnaround times. With the negotiations, content production and busy webmaster lives who run the websites you want guest posts on – 8 week turnaround times are the industry standard. While MashOn aims for 4-6 weeks in our guest posting service, we understand there are only so many variables in the guest post and outreach process that can be controlled.
iii. Labor intensive process. As explained in the beginning of the article – it takes a lot of time, both waiting and actively working, to secure a dozen guest posts in any niche. This makes it that much harder to scale without a team taking care of the process for you.
Overall – guest posts are something we recommend as a great SEO method to add to your overall white hat campaign mix for long-term holding of SERPs. They’re ideal for building authority websites and long-term affiliate websites, and over time can develop some lifetime links that carry the website along more than any other SEO method.