Guest blogging is unarguably one of the best methods for obtaining quality back links, and exposure for your website. If you are good at writing, doing a guest post every once in a while, shouldn’t be a problem. However not everybody has the talent or time to write high quality, informative content that will be accepted readily by the blog owners (as well as their readers). So it makes perfect sense to hire someone who has the knowledge and expertise to write such articles. But remember, guest posting is totally different from article marketing where you can hire someone at dirt cheap prices to write run-of-the-mill content, with the only criteria being “passing the copyscape test”.
A guest post with your website link in the bio will be a representative for your business or website, so you should do the due diligence when hiring someone to do the job. Given below are some qualities that you should be looking for.
English Comprehension
English comprehension is of course the first and the foremost requirement. To start with, a guest post with poor grammar or sentence structure will never be approved at good blogs. Even if you can find substandard blogs who will publish such substandard articles, these posts will do more harm to your business than good, since it will present your business in a poor way. People often consider native English speakers to be the ultimate writers; however, having English as your first language doesn’t makes you a good writer by default, so you shouldn’t set that as the only criteria. You must ask the applicants to submit some samples, if they don’t have any, ask them to get the first few posts approved from you before sending them to the blog owners, to make sure that your website reputation will not be marred by the substandard content.
SEO Acumen
You shouldn’t be too obsessed with SEO metrics like Page Rank or Alexa Rank, since they can be misleading, but SEO is a necessary evil because you can hardly survive at the World Wide Web without optimizing your website for the search engines. For that reasons, when you are doing a guest post, you should try to go for the best available opportunities in terms of exposure and link juice. Therefore, the guest blogger shouldn’t be totally oblivious to the “thingy” known as SEO.
Internet Savvy
It’s good to do more than one guest post on good, relevant blogs, but you cannot keep publishing one post after another on the same blog. So the guest blogger should be good at searching new blogs and guest blogging opportunities. There are platforms like myblogguest.com or postjoint.com where you can find the guest blogging opportunities or you can search at Google and social networks. To be able to do that, guest blogger needs to be Internet savvy, with good searching and social networking skills.
Good Understanding of your Target Market
Factual errors are worse than grammatical mistakes, because most grammatical errors will be highlighted and corrected by Microsoft Word, however, a factual error will be hard to find. It can be a howler if the post is getting published on a blog that caters your target market (i.e. home improvement, work from home moms, etc). Because in that case, these mistakes will be rectified by the readers and it will ruin your credibility and reputation.
Ready to Research:
Make sure that you are paying good remuneration that justifies the time spent in research, because the level of research will reflected in the post. In addition to that, they will need to stay updated with the latest trends and developments to know the trending right topics, instead of writing on stale ones.