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Originally Posted On: What is Guest Blogging and How Does It Help Lenders Improve their Website Rankings? – Lender Success

Some bloggers swear by blog posting, and according to Hubspot it not only helps direct traffic to your site, but can also boost your revenue. Social media is not the only way to get traffic to your blog, or even the most effective way to marketing. In this Lender Success article, we break down why you should try guest posts as an effective content marketing strategy.

Many content marketers believe that you only need a website, blog, newsletter or subscription ideas to increase your audience. If your goal in marketing your blog is to place your content in front of your ideal audience, then your marketing strategy should be to work with other bloggers in the lending and mortgage/financial industry to create guest posts. When you connect with new bloggers, this shares your articles with a whole new audience.

Why Guest Blogging?

After Google came out with their PageRank patent, it became the wild-wild west of people trying to fool or game Google, and back in the day people would buy cheap, fake links and Google would get tricked, but now they are smarter, and the only way to boost your site now is to acquire real links.

You can use guest posting to attract an audience, build your email list, acquire natural links from these high-quality websites, and drive relevant traffic to your content after investing in your link profile. Business blogging is a proven traffic generator for your website. It is a content marketing technique involving an article written for one of the most popular websites in your industry, such as NBC, ABC, or Fox, and directing relevant traffic back to your own blog or website, thereby increasing your organic search placements.

If you regularly add helpful and informative blog posts to your site, you will increase traffic exponentially, appear in search results, have fresh content to share on your social media channels, and are much more likely to share it across all your media.

It can also help improve your SEO, and you can establish yourself as an authority figure in the mortgage and lending industry. Guest contributions are, therefore, one of the most effective advertising strategies for mortgage lenders.

There are hundreds of thousands of websites that would love to host quality articles and give you a backlink, but you can’t get just any backlinks, some backlinks are actually harmful to your rankings, outreach should be handled with care.

According to Social Marketing Writing found that 62.96% of people perceive blogs with multiple authors to be more credible.”

Guest blogging isn’t a shortcut to getting the top spot or a shortcut to grow you blog although it’s a necessary part of your overall inbound marketing success strategy.

The main difficulty for most lenders or loan originators is they don’t know how to create the right content, meaning articles that help customers make buying decisions by answering their most pressing questions.

This is the process if you want to obtain guest posts for your website on your own.

1. Research your market and discover the top bloggers and websites in the lending and financial niche.
2. You can start with searching the topic of blog post and see what blogs are currently ranked in the top 5 positions.

• Research their Domain Authority (DA) developed by the Moz industry professionals understand this number, the higher this number is, the more likely the site will have strong traffic and high rank, and if your blog post was featured on their property, your post would perform well too.
• Top blogs with high DA will have thousands of people connected to them and will access your content.
• You’ll increase your own domain authority by guest posting and getting backlinks to your website.
• If the blog has received over 50 comments, it’s a signal that they have an engaged community.
• If they fit the above criteria, begin your outreach campaign, find out if they accept guest posts, if they offer a do-follow link back to your site, do they have a “Promoted or Sponsored” post category, can you get your article added naturally? How much will it cost? Are they legitimate?
• After you’ve identified the websites you want to place your guest blog post, develop guest post topic ideas, this may be time-consuming for you to do yourself, consider outsourcing the freelance writing to a professional.

The two lessons I learned that have turned out to be effective in inbound marketing strategy are: using headlines that people would search for and create more list posts.

Headlines that contain numbers outperform other types of headlines. For example, if your topic was “How to Know if I Qualify for a Refinance,” could be “6 Things to Consider for Your Next Refinance.”

You can also find blogs in your industry that are accepting guest posts by conducting a quick search in Google using any of these search queries.

• Home loans + “submit guest post”
• Home refinance + “write for us”
• Contribute guest article + “home loan” + blog
• Guest post by + “name of author” [eg. Guest post by Greg Wilson]
• Article written by “name of writer”

Regardless if your website is currently getting 50 or 1000 visitors every day, guest blogging can impact your website, your own personal experiences and knowledge can make you believe that you already know your target audience, but often that’s not true, how your customer searches for information has likely changed and most appreciate reading original quality-written content.

You can conduct market research and poll your audience by asking them questions, learn from your users, listen to their questions on Quora and respond to their comments, all this will strengthen your brand.

Learn more about guest posts here.

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