The Social Dangers of Guest Posting

Gaining guest posting opportunities on credible blogs and websites has been a staple in the Internet marketing strategies of brands, businesses and bloggers for the past several years. Building and maintaining social relationships with bloggers and audiences has always been the foolproof formula for achieving such opportunities.

Marketers worldwide have been frequently making use of Email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ to solidify their relationships with bloggers, thought leaders and key figures within their niches. However, many Internet marketers have given very little thought to how guest posting could actually be severely damaging their social standing with the very individuals they are trying to connect with.

The following article tackles and showcases the four major pitfalls that guest posting could land Internet marketers in.

Getting Caught Out

There are Black Hat strategies towards every possible Internet marketing campaign and guest posting is no exception. One of the biggest pitfalls marketers make is submitting spun or unoriginal content to numerous websites. Now, you may very well get away with such an approach in terms of beating the Google bots, but when it comes to maintaining that social relationship with bloggers and Webmasters, you’re going to find yourself in a whole world of trouble.

If you Tweet/ReTweet, post or share unoriginal/spun content on your social medias the chances are it will get spotted very quickly by your social media audiences, the leaders in your niche and of course the individuals you actually submitted the post too. This will put you in a very bad social position. If the thought leaders of your niche see what you’re up to, you will rapidly receive a bad reputation online, your posts will more than likely get taken down, and the relationships you worked so hard to build will most definitely be gone instantly.

Think of guest posting as a marriage, you wouldn’t cheat on your partner, so don’t try to deceive bloggers and website owners either.

Losing Your Personality

One of the biggest ways to ‘turn off’ your social following as a blogger, brand or even as a business is to lose your online personality. The reason an online audience Follows you, adds you as a Friend or adds you to their Circle is because they are interested in what you’re doing, and what you’re posting about. Yet so many marketers forget about this.

The social media websites of guest authors are constantly full of blanket Retweets and link filled automated posts, which are about as engaging to an audience as staring at a blank wall. Marketers overuse apps like TweetDeck and HootSuite in order to cut down on the time and effort they have to put in to keeping their social medias updated. Although, abusing these tools is one sure fire way to lose your social following, and kill those valued connections with bloggers, site owners and thought leaders.

Look at your social media profiles, if each day there are more blanket, linked filled updates than personalised or ‘human’ posts, you’re going to quickly start losing those engaging audiences you sought after to benefit from guest posting in the first place.

Don’t lose your personality as a guest author. Spare a few minutes each day to make each social media status update personal and personable. If you don’t, you’ll soon see both your audience and your guest posting relationships begin to disappear.

Making Posting A One Way Street

Guest blogging marketers are all about ‘getting the link’, they’ll do whatever it takes to get their link in their post. in order to boost their website traffic, get SEO value and make a name for themselves as a guest author. This activity in itself isn’t a bad thing at all, in fact it’s the sign of a good Internet marketer, but sometimes in their quest for their link they forget one of the most standard human attributes – being polite.

It’s worth remembering that a blogger or Webmaster may actually really want your content to benefit their website, but more often than not they are doing you a favour by letting you post on their website. They are in reality ‘giving’ you a link, letting you connect with their audience/subscribers and allowing you to take traffic from their website and send them to your own site. That’s one staggeringly big favour they just did for you, so do you ever repay the favour?

Politeness shouldn’t just stop at a polite conversation. If you want to solidify and maintain your guest blogging relationships you should never make guest posting a one way street, always try and reciprocate. Allow bloggers (if they wish) to guest post on your site. By allowing the same privileges guest bloggers give you, you’ll be able to maintain your guest blogging relationships far more effectively.

Not Making A Connection

The only thing worse than not maintaining a relationship with bloggers and site owners, is to fail to make a connection with them full-stop. As guest bloggers are so ‘link hungry’ it’s very common for marketers to fail to make a connection with those individuals giving them their guest post opportunity.

Typically connections are lost if a guest author hasn’t been successful in achieving their desired post, but just because a site doesn’t want a guest post, doesn’t mean you can’t build a connection. Thank users for their time in actually replying to you (whether they reject your post or not), ask if you can connect with them on social media websites and always be as polite and positive as possible throughout your exchanges.

If you can build a connection with bloggers and key individuals by making your social exchanges memorable, you may be able to benefit from such a relationship later down the road. Users you make a strong connection with may re-post your social activity, suggest you to other powerful individuals, and help you to build a stronger more prominent social status.

Summary

By understanding the common social dangers that come with both achieving guest post opportunities, and promoting successful opportunities, you can help to keep your connections with your audiences, bloggers, site owners and thought leaders as strong as possible. These relationships are extremely powerful for Internet marketers and should never be overlooked no matter how busy you are, how small a bloggers website is, or how tiny their social following may be. The time and effort you put in to creating and maintaining these prosperous relationships will undoubtedly prove to be priceless in the long run.