How to Plan Your Guest Post Budget for Your Business

There’s a lot to consider when planning a marketing campaign. With so many small details, processes, and the cost it takes to accomplish your marketing goals, it can be challenging to keep up.

Content marketing is one facet of a broader marketing strategy that should be carefully planned and executed through concise action. When presenting yourself as a thought leader to the world or your brand as an authoritative figure in the market, you’ll need to plan your messaging and where it will be received.

Considering the current climate of the world and the detrimental effect that COVID-19 has had on many industries, it’s now more important than ever to consider where you allocate your marketing spend. Planning the budget for your guest posts way in advance can help to mitigate the risks of losing money but also losing the attention that you need from your audience and search engines.

What is a Guest Post

I’m sure you’ve heard of the term blogging and blog post. In short, guest posting is using another person’s website to post your own content.

There are a few different reasons that you may want to do this:

• Thought leadership: this is the process of positioning yourself as an authority in your industry. This contributes to reinforcing your personal brand and establishing your credibility as a well-known name. Brian from Emazing Group, which holds iHeartRaves , EmazingLights, and Into the AM is one such person in his field.
• Exposure: this could happen in a few different ways, but the general goal here is to bring traffic back to your website. Someone may read the guest post and be interested in what you’re saying, urging them to go to your website.
• Link building: building backlinks is an excellent way of increasing your trust with search engines.

Using niche content on the right website can help you check all three of those boxes. If you’re just planning a link building campaign, then it’s essential to find websites with high domain authority. Marketers and SEO experts know search engines like Google love authority. The more backlinks that you have from relevant websites with high authority, the greater trust you build with Google.

To avoid any mishaps and mayhem, it’s best to start with a solid plan. I’ve refined a series of steps over the years to allocate guest post budgets to prevent any loss of exposure and funds. In this post, I’ll detail the steps that can help you create your own guest post budget for your business.

Strategize

First things first, it’s time to get your ducks in a row and create a plan before pulling the trigger. It’s important to have the correct information readily available so that you’re not shooting in the dark and wasting an opportunity. To get quicker, long-lasting results, you need to audit your existing rankings and monitor the competition; it’ll make things easier in the end, and you won’t be going over-budget.

Check Yourself

It’s time to roll your sleeves up and get to know your website better. To avoid losing time and money by trying to rank for irrelevant terms, find out where your website traffic is coming from. Tracking tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console can help you to accomplish this task. However, if you want a more in-depth look at what your webpages are ranking at and other site stats, then it’s worthwhile to invest in enterprise SEO tools.

Scope Out the Competition

If you’re a startup, it’s highly unlikely that you have a large marketing budget and a big pot of cash in reserve. Checking out the competition and assessing what their websites rank as is a huge factor in how you plan and allocate your guest post’s budget. If you’re able to climb the ranks with only a few links, then a small link building campaign in conjunction with on-page SEO can be enough to improve your organic rankings and drive your website traffic up.

Take Affordability Into Account

It’s best to take a systematic approach when checking out which pages you want to rank higher than. By trying to rank every page on your website in one fell swoop, you run the risk of running through your entire budget without gaining the results you want. Identify those pages where you’re ranking in the top ten that display terms of buyer intent. For this to be a lucrative process, you need to analyze keywords that will draw more business towards your website from lead gen, conversions, or referrals.

Balancing Quality and Cost

Search engines provide link value predominantly based on how much authority and trust the referring site has. If a website has a high level of authority, it has built up trust with search engines like Google, and that juice is then passed onto your company’s website through the backlink. It may be tempting to find the cheapest websites that can provide your content with a backlink, but it’s counterproductive and can result in being severely penalized by Google.

Here’s what to look for:

• A combination of dofollow and nofollow links.
• The authority of the website you want a backlink from
• Matching the anchor text, whether it’s full or partial
• Link diversity
• Link Relevancy

Creating quality content that provides value to readers will give you more access to websites with higher domain authority. Despite having a great piece of content, the more top tier the website is, the higher they will charge to guest post on their website or the more difficult it will be to become a contributor.

It’s key to balance cost with content when determining which websites to use for guest posting. It’s far more valuable to put the extra effort in and spend more of your budget on a top tier website than it is to utilize dozens of cheaper websites with lower authority. For example, a website with an Ahrefs score of 60 holds way more value to your link building campaign than two sites with Ahrefs scores of 30.

To ensure that Google doesn’t penalize your link building campaign as suspicious or spammy, it’s important to balance this procedure out with links from lower-tier websites. Keep your high-quality content on premium websites to drive traffic to your website and boost your organic ranking but use press releases and citations on sites with lower authority.

PR Outreach

There are a few things that you need to prepare for before jumping in and contacting the website. You must get to know the blog’s content before creating any content yourself. With this knowledge in mind, you may also find that there are set guidelines that your content needs to adhere to. During this process, you can analyze the level of the audience you’re writing to and the type of audience you’re creating content for. If your content needs to be geared towards a B2B audience or it’s technical in nature, it may increase your costs if you’re not writing it yourself.

This is a great place to get some research on how well other guest posts are doing on websites you want to guest post on. Discovering how much traction guest posts get on a particular website will have a big impact on whether it’s worth it for you to post there to build authority or boost your reputation.

Get Creative With Outreach

Ideally, you want a backlink from a strong website with high authority that’s in your niche. Being in your niche is very important in the eyes of search engines and can give you the boost you need. However, depending on the products or services that you offer, it can be challenging to find a high ranking website in your niche.

Finding a website that relates to your niche may be the next best thing, so you’re going to have to get creative. There are only so many bloggers that you can reach out to for a guest post on their site. For example, if you’re a company that sells clothing, the competition won’t let you guest post on their website about your clothing. However, hitting up lifestyle websites with content about your clothing can broaden your reach and gain you a solid backlink.

The added bonus of targeting a website that directly correlates to your own niche can be a big win, especially when it comes to saving money. This gives you more room to negotiate the cost with websites and can even make contributor acceptance less stringent.

Outsourcing Content Creation

A lot of content doesn’t get created in-house nowadays and gets outsourced to agencies or freelancers. If your content isn’t getting created by a team member, then you’ll need to factor those costs into your guest post’s budget. Depending on the industry you’re in and the level of content that’s required for the website, a freelance content writer, could cost you anywhere between $50 – $400. That amount needs also to be included on top of how much it costs to get your content on the high authority website.

Conclusion

Guest posting can be very expensive if you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s why creating a strategy and making sure you have your budget planned ahead of time can save you a lot of hassle. It takes a lot of patience, research and hard work to plan out a guest post that’s going to help your rank, always make sure you act diligently to avoid spending your marketing budget too fast without getting results.

DepositPhotos – blog writer

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