21 Feb Guest Blogging Ireland
So you may or may not have heard of the idea of guest blogging or contributing. It is a basic enough concept and one that in theory can work and help you grow your business. I want caution all readers here as guest blogging has become similar to infographics, in that it is being manipulated and now sold as an SEM concept.
As you can gather from the large can of Spam above I have little respect for these ‘services’ and I want to make sure that no one falls for this SEO nonsense in the future.
The Good
So you have a seen a site that relates to your business and you think I could contribute there, give them some insight and who knows cross promote my own business and web property. This is real guest blogging it is you, finding contacts via twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or any other normal way to find people. You make a connection, you write a post and where possible you link back. Sounds simple, that’s because it is. Read on cause what you get offered as service in the field of Guest blogging is totally different story.
The Bad
Someone approaches you and offers to write posts for you on other sites, they talk about IPs and SEO and basically offer you a Trojan horse of a proposal, on the surface it seems reasonable. They will find related websites and blogs and try to add articles or basically do what you should do from the step above. Why is this bad? It is kind of like hiring a person to sit as your buffer at a conference or business get together. Basically there is no rocket science to making connections you look, ask and follow up, simple no. So why on earth would you pay for this and more importantly why do these services exist. They exist in that lovely strata of SEO that is grey and black and mainly very misguided. Generally they are trawling the internet to find sites that seem similar to yours, they are not high end business analysts or even native English speakers in most case and the end result is a large can of spam.
The Ugly
Now the ugly side of this business is directory submission, they take you article and they auto spam post it to a variety of affiliate sites, long story short there is no reason for this service to exist, there is no reason for your business to want, need or use this. Do it yourself, talk to your PR/SEO people and start to network and post online in the same way you would offline and by all means contact me if you need and real SEO advice.
