Transcript
Hi, guys, welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is what to do when someone asks if they can guest post on your website. I think everyone has gotten these emails before. And so I think it is worth a conversation about how to handle these and how we handle them with our clients. But before we begin, this is Zupo SEO Talk & Tea. So I want to introduce the tea we have today. We have a Pu'Er Tea, which is housed in this box. It's a fermented tea. Pu'Er tea is very similar to... It's the closest thing you can get to black coffee. That doesn't mean it tastes like black coffee, but it is a very dark liquid. It is very strong, has a kick to it. So this is the Pu'Er Tea we're going to be having today. And so this is a tea I drink quite a lot. But this one, specifically, this Pu'Er Tea, this is a cake.
Normally, I have a roasted Pu'Er, but this is a cake that's mashed together into a cake. So this one's a little bit smoother than the smokier ones I've had on this video, but that's beside the point. Let me go ahead and get this brewing and talking. So what to do when someone asks if they can guest post on your website. This happens a lot. And so generally, what I would say, is when someone asks if they can guest post on our site, generally I tell my clients, we can generally ignore them, because most of the offers to guest post on our website are, I would say, not worth it. In the sense that the value of their guest post and content on our website just isn't there.
It needs to truly align with what our site is trying to optimize for. And so we're not interested in managing someone else's content if it doesn't fit our content demands. Now, if you want to start a guest posting opportunity for your website and you want to get people to build your content, that's another discussion. A lot of websites do that successfully, but that requires a whole operation where you need an editor to evaluate if the content's on par with what you're doing. Can you acquire the writers? Can you manage them? Can you vet them? What I'm specifically talking about is, you are a business owner or you're running a website, and you get random offers for guest post opportunities. More often than not, we do say no, but there are occasions where we do strike up some conversation of relationship. If the opportunity to guest post on your website comes from a strong website that's relevant to your industry, it may be worth it if you can acquire some level of relationship.
Sometimes with some of our firms, when we get offers to do guest posts on our website, we'll take a look at their website and say, "Hey, you know what? They're strong and they are industry relevant." So a good example is, I have a client that did video production. They had another company reach out to them that was sound design. Hey, this actually is a little bit of synergy because the other company cares about sound and video, but we care about most about video production. So we went out to them and we said, "Hey, we actually would think that there's a better relationship we can form here. You guys can guest post on our site. Can we do the same on yours?" And then therefore, we can create a content relationship, right?
And so there are occasions where developing that relationship on the cold email is worth it, if they're relevant, if they're strong, and if you can get some relationship out of it. I don't allow much for my clients when other people cold pitch us, and they just want to leave a guest post and that's it. That's not really going to give us any value unless they're going to give us one really heck of a strong content piece. But generally, they're not going to, because they want to keep that for their own website. So what I would say is, generally, I don't allow the guest posts unless they're relevant, strong, and we think we can develop some relationship. If they're relevant and strong, but we can't get a relationship out of it, we generally don't accept it there.
The relationship is the final piece that will really drive the point home. So if you are getting a guest post opportunity, vet the person coming in. What is their website? If you can't find the website, that's a red flag, actually. Sometimes they have a generic email like Gmail or outlook. We don't do that. If they come from a domain like @something.com, at a business .com, we will then look at the website, see how many backend referring domains coming in? How strong are they? How spammy are they? And then will we get relationship? We'll email them back. So more often than not, we do ignore them, like most people do. But there are occasions where we have developed strong relationships off of cold email, asking to guest post on our website. So I would say moving forward, you could probably do what you probably have already been doing, which is ignoring them.
But there are occasions where I do think you should look through the opportunities and see if anything can come up. And then, therefore, maybe you can develop some content relationship with another firm. And content relationships are always great. It's always good to have allies and friends and other websites who would be willing to take your content and you willing to take their content as well. So hopefully that will help you when you're going about your guest posting opportunities that come to your website. It's really what we use in our agency, and so hopefully it'll help you guys as well. If you guys found this video valuable, you liked it, please like and subscribe. I'm going to go ahead and pour out my Pu'Er Tea today. And I hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks, everybody.