Living Radically Ambitious

A big part of establishing your business or your brand is visibility. Many people live in the shock and awe of social media - something spreading on Twitter, a Facebook post or even a blog post worth sharing. While these things can be great for your brand, they have a unique flaw. They are all time sensitive.

Didn’t log into Facebook today - you missed that post. Tweets are yesterday’s news only minutes later and blog posts generally fade after a few days.

On the contrary, blog posts can have long term effectiveness via search. People logging onto Google and looking for the things you are writing about.

One way that many bloggers look to add value and gain leverage in the process is through effective guest posting. If you want to learn more about that art of making a great guest post, Ramit Sethi does an amazing job that should be required reading for anyone looking to use this medium as a promotion tool. What I wanted to talk to you about was in the effectiveness of leveraging that guest post to benefit you with links that give you more visibility in the search engines.

In order to do this, I created an 9 minute video that walks you through some examples of guest posts and what they could have done, what your links are telling search engines about your site and how you can make them more effective.

I hope you enjoyed that little clip and those reading in RSS, may have to click through to see the video.

To sum it up, when you write a guest post you are receiving exposure on another site that can give you a “vote” back to your site. When you place that vote (link) use anchor text (the words that are underlined and link to your site) that tells search engines what your site is about and not your fancy title.

In other words, something like this:

This guest post was written by Joe Smith, a blogger and Orlando area electrician. He loves long walks on the beach and avoiding electrocution while working on your kitchen.

In the example (not a live link) we are telling Google that Joe’s site is about “Orlando area electrician.” This is much more effective for Joe than saying what we typically see as

This guest post was written by blogger and electrician Joe Smith. He loves long walks on the beach and driving in his pick up truck with the ladder in the back.

In that example we are telling the search engines that Joe Smith is about Job Smith, which doesn’t help us leverage the site we are linking from, because the poor girl who’s kitchen lights won’t come on is searching for an “Orlando Electrician” and not “Joe Smith”, sorry Joe.

So there you have it, a quick example of beefing up your online profile when guest posting. I admit that I am guilty of the above as well, but have been on a guest posting tear with the launch of this site.  With only a few links (including some big ones) from guest posting, I have been able to sit right around the 10 spot for “Lifestyle Design.” For the minimal amount of work I have done it brings me steady new traffic. Through grabbing some more links and leveraging some other big blogs, I am confident that I can get into the top 3 in a few days/weeks.

Hopefully that shows you a real life account of what guest posting and some simple SEO framing can do to help you site!

-Greg Rollett

P.S. Yes, the video is a promotion for our Under 30 Rock Star Business Series. I think the content is going to be phenomenal and you are crazy to pass it up (but I am biased I guess). The price is $97 for 4 workshops, some PDF homework files and some other things up our sleeve. We are getting close to filling up, so please grab a seat today before the 1st session begins on September 14th!

P.P.S. If you want to learn more about the Under 30 Rock Star Series, you can also check out what Monica O’Brien and Ben Spark had to say. I am sure they would love your support by clicking on their links as well!