Syed Balkhi — July 24, 2018 — July 24, 2018
If you’re blogging for your business, you’re off to a great start. Blogging is an awesome way to gain more traffic to your website and present yourself as an expert in your industry. But you shouldn’t stop at posting only on your own blog, guest blogging needs to be a part of your inbound marketing strategy too.
Guest blogging is still one of the best ways to build authority links and to promote yourself and your business. Buffer even used guest blogging to gain 100,000 customers. It’s a win-win for both parties, your site and the site you’re guest posting on will both be able to attract relevant traffic by publishing engaging content. But there are some techniques you need to apply to your guest posting strategy if you want to see amazing results from it.
If you want to introduce your content to a whole new audience, let’s talk about how to create a guest posting strategy that works.
Determine your goals.
As with any marketing strategy, you have to go into it with a goal in mind in order to stay on track and see results. Determine what you want to achieve with guest posting, some of the most common goals are:
- Building awareness of your product, service or brand in general
- Improving SEO
- Driving more traffic to your site or a specific page
- Increasing email subscribers or social media followers
- Developing relationships with fellow bloggers and entrepreneurs
Determining your goals will help you decide what type of content to write and which sites you should guest post on. It’s also important to craft your bio with your goal in mind, which we’ll discuss further into this post.
Find viable sites to contribute to.
There are thousands of blogs out there that are looking for informative and entertaining blog posts for their readers. To find viable sites to contribute to, just do a simple Google search and you’ll get a ton of results. In the Google search bar enter your niche and write for us, like this for example, ‘content marketing’ + ‘write for us’ and start doing some research with the results you get.
In all honesty, you don’t want to waste your time guest posting for a blog that doesn’t have any readers. Take into account what niche the website is, how many email subscribers they have, how much website traffic they get and if they’re an authority in the industry. You can easily check domain authority by using Moz’s Open Site Explorer tool to find out if guest posting on certain sites will be valuable to you.
Huffington Post Page Authority Score from Moz. [Screenshot] https://moz.com/researchtools/ose
Reach out and work on your pitch.
After you’ve found some great sites that are accepting guest posts, start reaching out. It’s important to reach out and start building a relationship before sending a pitch as most websites don’t respond to cold pitches unless your content is crazy good. Connect with the blog owner on social media, share their content and comment on their posts so they’ll get to know you.
Guest Post Email Pitch. [Image] https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2015/07/guest-posts-published/
After spending some time building your relationship, you can start working on your pitch. The content you pitch needs to be original and it can’t be a post you’ve already published elsewhere. It should also be related to both your niche and the site you’re pitching to. Make your email pitch short and sweet and personalized to each contact. Include the post title and a brief description, site owners get a ton of requests for guest posting, getting to the point means your email will be more likely to get read.
Write an awesome bio.
The whole point of guest blogging is to get yourself out there and that means you’ll need a great bio to introduce yourself to new viewers. Your bio should match your original goals of your guest posting strategy, for example, if your goal is to get more traffic to your website, you should mention and link your site in your bio. Including clear call-to-actions will guide readers to do what you want them to do.
Your bio should make it clear what you do and who you work with in order to attract more of your target audience.
Promote your content.
When your post gets accepted and published, that doesn’t mean your job is done. Promoting your guest posting content will not only help your content to be seen by more eyes but it will help with your future relationship with the site owner you blogged for. They’ll be more likely to accept your future guest blogging pitches if they see that you’re promoting their content.
Alexandria Constantinova Szeman, Ph.D. Guest Blog Promo. [Screenshot] https://twitter.com/Alexandria_SZ
Share your guest posting content across different social media platforms multiple times, you can also let your email subscribers know about it by announcing it in a newsletter and encouraging them to share. The more you promote it, the more comments and shares you get and you’ll show your value as a guest poster.
Who wouldn’t want their blog and business to be recommended by some of the heavy hitters in their industry, that’s amazing promotion. That’s what guest posting on the right sites will do for you. Guest posting is an amazing way to build relationships and grow your trust with new readers and if you have a great guest posting strategy in place, you’ll be able to place yourself among the top thought leaders in your niche.
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