Last updated on September 11th, 2023 at 06:52 am
In today’s guide, you will learn what guest blogging in Nigeria is all about. You will learn how you can use it to boost your blog traffic and build authority in your chosen niche.
What is Guest Blogging?
Guest blogging is the practice of writing a post for someone else’s blog or website.
You, as the blogger are known as the ‘guest’, and the website hosting the blog is known as the ‘host’.
Although you are the ‘guest’, you are responsible for creating a guest post that is relevant to the host’s topic and offers your own unique spin on it.
Why Is Guest Blogging Important?
There are two crucial benefits of guest blogging in Nigeria:
a). Boost Your Website Traffic
When you get into writing guest posts, you always create content for websites related to your own.
This means that if you are in the fitness niche, you should seek guest posting opportunities from other health and fitness websites.
Now, when you publish a post on these related websites, you can easily drive traffic back to your own blog by using an author bio or ‘about me’ section at the end of each post where you link back to your own blog.
As such, you should always encourage the readers to visit your own blog for more information about yourself and what you are doing online today!
b). Using Guest Blogging in Nigeria To Build Authority
In most cases, bloggers in Nigeria engage in guest blogging for the sake of acquiring links from authoritative websites.
See, Google relies heavily on the backlink profile (number and quality of unique domains linking to your website) to determine whether you qualify to rank for certain keywords.
And that is where link building comes in.
At the same time, to become an authority in your niche, you have to cultivate a genuine relationship with readers.
The best way to do that is by regularly publishing quality content that they can relate to (both within your blog and on other related blogs).
In other words, you have to be genuine.
As soon as you start thinking about it in terms of SEO, things start to look a little different.
You can’t just throw up a post, walk away and hope that it will automatically rank well in search results.
You have to be patient and work hard at it. In order to drive traffic to your blog and build your authority, you have to consistently publish quality content.
You need links pointing to a certain page/post for it to have a chance of showing up on the #1 page on the Google SERP.
And then there are other secondary benefits of guest blogging in Nigeria, which include:
c). Build Relationships
Guest blogging in Nigeria is a great way to make connections with other bloggers in your niche.
In fact, it is often one of the reasons why you choose to guest blog on a specific blog.
You get to interact and connect with fellow bloggers. Here, you share ideas, and trends, and motivate each other to soar higher within your industry.
d). Get Feedback
As you write, you can always get feedback from other writers who are reading your content.
This will help you improve the quality of your writing and give you valuable insight into what people are looking for when they visit blogs in your niche.
e). Build Social Proof
The more people link to something, the more credible it seems. This is especially true on blogs where most of the readers come through search engines and not social media or email campaigns.
By having multiple links pointing back to your website, even if they are not all from high authority websites (which they likely won’t be at first), it will still give visitors the sense that this is an important site that should be visited regularly.
For example, indicating that you have been published on Forbes, for example, is enough to make people trust your work.
f). Reach New Reader Audiences
When you’re writing on other blogs, you’re also building an audience of people who don’t know who you are.
If they like your articles, they may visit your blog and become regular readers. This is especially true if you write in a way that builds trust with the reader.
g). Get Your Name Out There
This is a great way to get your name out there and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.
If you can get featured on a popular blog, then people will know who you are and will share your articles with their friends when they find them interesting.
How to Get Started with Guest Blogging in Nigeria
Now that you know how guest blogging in Nigeria can help boost your online presence, here are the steps you can follow now to get started immediately:
1). Set specific, achievable goals
Before you start guest blogging, you should set specific, achievable goals for yourself.
The goals will vary from person to person based on what your aim is, but the most important thing is to figure out what you want to achieve and go for it.
For example, if you are looking to establish yourself as an authority in your niche, then your goal might be to get a certain number of backlinks or establish a certain level of traffic.
And if you are looking for more traffic and backlinks to your own site, then your goal might be something like getting 1 backlink per day on top sites in your niche or getting 3 comments on each guest post.
Whatever the case may be with your goals, make sure they are specific and achievable.
If they are too vague or hard to measure, then you won’t know when they have been met and will end up giving up before reaching them.
2). Find blogs that accept guest posts
Once you have some ideas about the type of goals that would be worthwhile achieving through guest blogging in Nigeria, it is time to figure out where you can find blogs that allow guest posts.
The easiest way to find blogs that accept guest posts is to head over to Google and do a search for “niche + guest post”.
For example, if you were looking for blogs that allow guest posts in the tech niche, then you would type “tech + guest post” into Google and it will return a list of results like the one below:
Just click on the first result (which is a blog called TechBlitz.org) and you will be taken to their submission page where you can see which categories they accept guest posts for as well as all of the other requirements for getting your article accepted.
For example, take a look at this submission page for TechBlitz.org:
As you can see, this particular blog only accepts articles in the category of:
- Business, Finance, Marketing, Insurance.
- eCommerce
- Technology, Cryptocurrency, Internet, SEO, Gadget, Software
- Internet Marketing
- Social Media
- Lifestyle, Fashion, Food, Health, Travel
- Entertainment, Gaming, Sports
If your article doesn’t fit into one of their categories, then it won’t be accepted regardless of how good it is or how many backlinks it has.
So make sure that you read through all of the requirements before submitting an article just in case they don’t accept what you want to submit.
To find guest posting sites in your niche, you can use Google’s advanced search operators like:
- Your Keyword “guest post”
- Your Keyword “write for us”
- Your Keyword “guest article”
- Your Keyword “guest post opportunities”
- Your Keyword “this is a guest post by”
- Your Keyword “contributing writer”
- Your Keyword “want to write for”
- Your Keyword “submit blog post”
- Your Keyword “contribute to our site”
- Your Keyword “guest column”
- Your Keyword “submit content”
- Your Keyword “submit your content”
- Your Keyword “submit post”
- Your Keyword “This post was written by”
3). Brainstorm article ideas based on their categories
As you can see from the example above, you’ll notice that each blog has a set of categories that they accept articles for.
So if you were to write an article on “how to drive a private jet in 10 simple steps” and submit it to TechBlitz.org, then it wouldn’t be accepted because it doesn’t fall under the category of general technology.
But if you were to write an article on “how to create a niche eCommerce website in 10 simple steps” and submit it to them, then it would be accepted because it falls under their eCommerce category.
Now, this might seem obvious, but I want to make sure that things are crystal clear so that there is no confusion later on.
The point I am trying to make here is this: before writing an article and submitting it somewhere, you need to make sure that it falls under one of their categories otherwise your article will not be accepted regardless of how many backlinks or social shares it has.
So here are some tips for creating your next guest post:
- Find relevant blogs in your niche by doing a search for “niche” + “guest post”
- Read through each submission page and make sure that your article fits into one of their categories
- Once you find a blog in your niche (that allows guest posts), you need to contact the author and make sure they’re interested in publishing your content. Most of the time you’ll need to do this through email, but some blogs may have a contact form on their site as well.
Let’s look at that last point below.
4). Reach out to the blog owner
The next step after you’ve identified the right websites accepting guest posts in your niche is to reach out and pitch your idea to the blog owner.
Most of the time, you can find the contact information on their contact page.
Some blogs will not have an email address listed on their contact page, so make sure you write them a message through Facebook or Twitter.
Here’s a simple guest post template you can use in Nigeria:
Hi [Name],
I’m a long-time reader. You may have noticed my comment on your post on [Article] (awesome article by the way).
I’m writing to you because I’d love to contribute a guest post on [Website].
I’ve been brainstorming some topics that I think your readers would get a ton of value from:
[Idea #1]
[Idea #2]
[Idea #3]
I’ll make sure the piece overflows with information that can’t be found anywhere else.
To give you an idea of the quality I’ll bring to your site, here’s a link to a guest post that I recently published on [Other Website].
Cheers,
[Your First Name]
Once you’ve gotten in touch with a blog, it’s time for the hard part. The actual writing.
5). Write and submit your guest post
Now that we know where we can find blogs that accept guest posts and what we need to do in order to get our articles accepted, it’s time to start writing our own articles!
When writing your article, try to keep these things in mind:
1). Make sure it’s long enough
The typical length of a guest post is between 800 and 2,000 words. If your article is too short, your host blog might not accept it.
If your article is too long, your host blog might not accept it and you might also be wasting time on an article that will never get accepted.
2). Make sure it’s interesting
If you want to rank in the search engines for a particular keyword, then make sure that keyword is mentioned in your article at least once.
3). Write unique content
Unless you Are writing an article for a completely new blog, there’s no guarantee that other people won’t have written about the same thing.
So if you want your guest post to be accepted and to rank in the search engines for a particular keyword, then make sure it is 100% unique.
4). Get links from other sites to backlink to your guest post
In order for Google to crawl and index all of the pages on your website, you need to have at least three links coming into each page from other websites.
So when you write articles like this one, make sure that you link out to other sites as well. Not only will they help drive traffic back to your website (which will help improve its rankings), but they will also help Google find all of the pages on your site so they can crawl them.
5). Get social signals
One of the best ways to get social signals is to write articles that can be easily shared on social media. So if you want to rank in the search engines for a particular keyword, then make sure that keyword is mentioned in your article at least once.
6). Use images
We’ve all heard it before; images are worth a thousand words.
In fact, an image can be worth much more than that because an image can tell a story and spark an emotional response.
So if you want to rank in the search engines for a particular keyword, then make sure that keyword is mentioned in your article at least once.
7). Optimize for on-page SEO
Make sure you’ve included the target keyword on the title, within the body, and in the meta description.
Also link to other pages within the host’s website.
Once done submit the guest post to the host and wait for it to be published.
6). Track your posts’ results over time
Now that you’ve submitted the guest post and it’s published, you need to track your results over time.
Keep watch of the impact the guest post has had on your website’s performance.
Remember when you got down to start guest blogging in Nigeria, you started with figuring out your goals.
Now, after the whole process is over, you need to monitor whether that goal (s) is met.
To make this easier, there are a variety of online business tools you can use to track the metrics.
Key Takeaways
Guest blogging in Nigeria is a great way to expand your knowledge and expertise in a new niche.
It can also build relationships with other bloggers and increase the authority of your site. It’s important to get proper advice before starting a guest blog as guest blogging is a risky business.
In order to achieve success with guest blogging, you must be careful with your content and take extra steps to guard against spam.