When talking about marketing for a young business, I often get the impression that guest blogging is passing by quietly under the radar.
For many entrepreneurs, that means they are missing out. And it is not only young founders who could give their marketing the extra push with guest blogging – matured marketers can also profit from writing articles for well-established blogs.
There are many famous marketers like Danny Iny, who started out to market their business by blogging on other peoples’ blogs. And if you are a regular reader of some of the largest blogs about online marketing, you might have noticed that most of them are regular guest authors on other great blogs about Social Media and online marketing. And they do it for a reason.
There are many advantages of including guest blogging into your online marketing strategy. To give you an idea, how your own business can profit from writing articles for other blogs, here are just a handful of reasons, why guest blogging is a good idea for marketing your business:
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1. Get yourself in front of an established audience
Especially in the beginning when your audience is still small, the opportunity to get yourself and your content in front of an already established audience are an excellent reason to start guest blogging. Without an audience, your content will pass by somewhat unnoticed. Guest blogging gives you the chance to have an audience right from the start.
2. Get more followers for your Social Accounts
When we started out with our Social Media marketing one of the first issues we had to solve was the question “how can I get more followers to my social accounts?”. And one very simple answer was guest blogging. One of my first ever guest posts on Jeff Bullas’ blog, easily doubled my followers on Twitter giving me a few hundred new followers. How did I do that? I simply included my Twitter handle together with a call to action into my author bio: “You can follow Susanna on Twitter: @dreckbaerfrau”.
3. Connect to (influential) people from your niche
Many people in online marketing try desperately to get the attention of more influential people. They tweet to them, they write emails and ask for retweets, mentions, and advice. To be honest: It is hard to not only get the attention of influential people but, also, to get them to do something for you if they do not already know you. But, if they do know you because you are the author of at least one great guest post they published on their blog, they will be much more interested and open to you and are much more likely to respond to you.
Guest posting is a great and un-intrusive way of starting to build relationships with more influential people from your niche.
4. Build your Email list
Are you building an audience for your online marketing? Then, most likely you do not stop at building followers in Social Media. Most likely you are also building an email list. One legitimate way to grow your list is guest blogging. The mechanism is similar to mentioning your social accounts in your guest author bio. But you should consider offering additional information in a freebie in return for the signup. The call to action in your author bio then could be something like: “You can download his/her free ebook/whitepaper on how to do something great” and link this to your landing page where they can sign up.
Building an audience with guest blogging will work even better if your guest post is covering a related topic.
5. Practice writing and get feedback from influencers
On your blog, you can publish whatever you like. Sending a guest post to a more famous blog, often makes you reread your writing and spend an extra round on optimizing and rewriting. This is an excellent practice. Also, sending in guest posts often means, you get some feedback on your writing from more experienced bloggers, and some of these bloggers are willing to spend a considerable amount of time working on your post with you. You should be open to the feedback and help they offer. Do not be offended, simply take the advice and see what you can learn from it.
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6. Get traction without running a top blog yourself
You can even use guest posting when you have no blog of your own at all. Many marketers are focusing more on guest posting instead of building their own blog audience. While there are advantages of an own blog, it is entirely legitimate to decide against an own blog. You then can use guest posting to get yourself in front of an interested audience and use writing as a way to build your business.
7. Get Backlinks
There is a reason I put this one last. There was a time when guest blogging for link building was the thing to do for SEO. Then Google declared guest blogging for backlinks black hat SEO and something they do not want. But… It still works, and it has a positive effect on your search rankings. Just write great posts for your audience and not for Google and do not overdo it (Paying an army of busy bees to write as many guest posts that link to your website, may not be the best way to go). The links you gain from legitimate guest blogging, are definitely going to help your search engine rankings as they totally fit the “natural link pattern” Google claims it is looking for.
Final words on guest blogging
While there are many good reasons to include guest posting into your marketing strategy, you should be clear about why YOU are doing it. After all, it is good to get your content in front of a larger audience, but your primary goal in marketing is probably not to get more readers to someone else’s blog. And getting a lot of comments and shares on your guest post is nice and probably good for your ego, but it does not help your marketing, does it?
Once you decided on your goals for your guest posting activity, you need to optimize your activity accordingly. Choose the right blog to guest post on. Choose the right topics to write about. Make sure to use a headline that works, include the right call to action in your author bio, if you are using a landing page at your end, make sure it works and if you are offering something for a signup, make sure it is something people want to have.
There is not a huge secret to getting a guest post published. Most blogs are happy to add another voice to their blog and take guest posts. Only take a thorough look at what kind of posts the blog usually publishes and send the best post you have ever written.
To get optimal results from your guest blogging effort may not be as simple as it looks. There is so much more to guest blogging success than building links for SEO purposes.
If you get it right, guest blogging can also give you an additional audience, traffic, signups, social media followers and more.
Do you want to learn how to grow your business with guest blogging? Get our step-by-step guide: “Write. Publish. Grow. The Ultimate Guide To Guest Blogging“
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