Guest Blogging,

For anyone who is just starting out in Affiliate Marketing and/or blogging, it is important to understand that guest blogging is becoming more and more popular. Posting guest blog posts on other popular blogs is great way to get targeted visitors to your site. Its fast and best of all, its free. In this post, I am going to expand on the some of the many benefits.

*Guest blogging helps improve your exposure- Think about this, a blog owner has an established blog that they put a lot of effort into. Most likely they have an established a good following, or audience through all their hard work. You come along and do a guest blog post for the blog owner. Your guest post results in you and your Affiliate Marketing blog being exposed to the established audience.  This can have quite the positive effect on the traffic to your site.

Note- if you have created a brand for yourself, put your brand on your guest post. This will help it become more recognized, since more eyes will be seeing it.

*Guest blogging increases the traffic to your Affiliate Marketing site- This benefit follows right along with the benefit above. Traffic that is the result of guest blogging, is better than any other, especially paid traffic. See if a blog owner allows you to do a guest post, you can almost consider it to be an endorsement by that blog owner. So, when write a post on their blog and its within your niche, then the traffic that is directed to your site is considered to be qualified or is already targeted.  Basically, they will have been directed to your site by the endorsement of their favorite bloggers, rather than by advertising. Which is so much more beneficial.

*Guest blogging provides high quality backlinks- I have done a few posts (Links, Traffic and SEO, PageRank, What Is It & How To Improve It, Google’s Latest Update & Your Rankings) now about backlinks where I discussed how important they are and how they improve SEO along with PageRank. So, guest blogging is another great way to get high quality backlinks. See, your SEO  and Pagerank will most definitely improve since it’s exactly what the search engines are looking for in terms of linking.

*Guest blogging provides long term backlinks- In addition to high the quality backlinks noted above, guest blogging also results in long-term links. See the links on your guest blog post are pretty much permanent. This is because most blog owners keep their posts available for the life of their blog.

*Guest blogging can increase your social media followers- Almost all bloggers have sharing options on their blogs. So, if you write a guest post on their blog and it gets shared, just imagine where that can lead. 

I have only covered just a few of the many benefits of guest blogging above. So, go find a blog (or several) that is within your niche. See if you can provide a guest post (or several) for the bog owner. If the owner allows it, write a great post on their blog site. Then you can see all the benefits it has for your Affiliate Marketing site.
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Information on Links, Traffic & SEO

One question that I often hear is, how are links important in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Links are extremely important for SEO. Links help your Affiliate Marketing site in many ways. In this post, I am going to provide more information on links for SEO.

Links help your PageRank

PageRank, briefly, is the "reputation" of your Affiliate Marketing site. PageRank is based on the number and quality of sites that are linking to yours. It's one of the core ideas behind Google's ranking algorithms. (You may want you read my previous post (Google’s Latest Update & Your Rankings) on recent changes by Google.)  Even though it isn't the only thing that determines your search engine ranking, it's a useful thing to work on building. Just know that the only way to build PageRank is by getting links to your Affiliate Marketing site.

 Links bring you traffic

If you are a follower of my blog, you will know I have written many posts on how to increase traffic. If you look at them, almost all of them mention building backlinks. Simply stated, links bring the traffic to your site, which is the ultimate goal. So, if you can get your links in places where they will receive a lot of click-through traffic and/or targeted visitors, then you have done well. Just remember that you shouldn't overlook blog sites or social networking sites when you're building links. Both of them can generate lots of good, targeted traffic.
Links which get traffic are  typically enticing, interesting and/or arouse curiosity. One good trick is to leave a thought unfinished, or ask a question that people want to know the answer to. Then people have to click on your link to find out. Just don't be spammy, as was discussed in my previous post (SEO and Blog Commenting). Remember you're trying to get people to click on your link. Most likely They won't click on it if it looks like suspect or shady.

What is a good link?

So I bet you are asking, what makes a good link? Well, some links are better than others. What makes a good link depends on which of the benefits discussed above interests you the most. Generally links appear on prominent pages, rather than being buried deeply inside a site. Ideally, your links will appear on pages that get a lot of traffic and are relevant to your Affiliate Marketing site and niche. Relevant means that your link is on a site that is related to yours or is within your niche. There's not much point in your fishing website being linked to an automotive forum. Where ever possible, your links will come from authority sites and/or well-respected sites. High PageRank sites are great, as are  sites with a .edu top-level domain.

If you are trying to improving your ranking for keywords, then use Links that improve your ranking for a specific keyword use your keyword in their anchor text and aren't marked with the "nofollow" attribute. Links to Improving your PageRank come from sites with high PageRank. They appear on pages where there aren't too many other links and aren't marked with the "nofollow" attribute.

Is there a bad link?

We asked and answered the question about good links. So now lets cover a bad link.
For the most part, all inbound links to your site are good. They all help you, by giving you PageRank, helping you to rank for keywords, or sending you traffic. Even if they don't do any of these things very effectively, they certainly can't hurt you. Your Affiliate Marketing site won't be penalized in any way if bad, disreputable sites link to yours. The worst that can happen is that your site becomes the subject for a "Google bomb", which means it starts to rank well for undesirable keywords. That however can turn out to be a good thing though. Just be careful if being well ranked for undesirable keywords should start to happen since there are some bad things that can result from that. You can end up being penalized for associating with bad internet citizens. Your Affiliate Marketing site may end up getting tarred with the same brush as the other sites. You then might find your rankings plummeting or your Affiliate Marketing site being de-indexed. That's definitely a bad thing and not what you want for your Affiliate Marketing site.

So, now you have more information on how beneficial links are for your Affiliate Marketing site. Go out and work on them, as they are essential.
That's it for now, until the next post....