Guest Blogging: How To Do It The Right Way

Guest Blogging: How To Do It The Right Way

Guest Post by Mark S Cooper 

Blogging is becoming very common in the online world as a majority of people either read or write articles online. The current generation of marketers has started incorporating blogging in the online marketing strategies of companies and businesses to attract the right visitors. Guest blogging is one such marketing strategy that has helped many businesses in expanding their customer base as it

Offers mutual benefits to both the blogger and host website. Just by featuring the posts of guest bloggers on your website you will not only be able to generate traffic but also help the blogger in expanding their readership.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is also known as guest posting where a blogger writes content for another company's website. A guest blogger creates content for host websites based on their requirement which might be a challenge for them. Both you and your host website benefit with this guest blogging strategy in the following ways:

1. Attracting traffic to a company's website so that they might improve lead generation and get new subscribers.

2. SEO ranking improves as links are built from high-quality sites. This helps in improving your website's position in various search engine results.

3. The credibility and brand awareness also increase due to the fact that a third-party, the guest blogger, has written about their experience with your company.

If implemented correctly, guest blogging can be a great asset to your digital marketing strategy and increase your brand's reach out within no time. Let us now look at some of the tips and tricks that will help you in implementing an effective guest blogging strategy:

1. Define goals: 

Make sure that you and your marketing team have clearly defined and understood the vision and the goal of your company or brand. You can even create sub-goals that you wish to achieve by implementing this strategy. Some of the goals can be increasing website traffic, improving SEO rating, increasing subscriber count, creating product awareness, etc. Having clarity on goals will help you in creating crisp blogging content so that your target audience gets the message that you wish to pass on. Clarity will help build trust with your potential customers.

2. Find the right website: 

A simple way to find a website that accepts guest post is through an online search engine. You can use keywords like 'write for us', 'guest article', contribute for us', etc. To search the websites. You can also find websites where your competitors are guest blogging and approach them for the same. Your competitor's newsletter or social media account will give you the links to their blogs. Alltop lists top websites in multiple domains. You can even start your website search from here.

3. Discussions with site owners: 

When you start your discussions with a website owner, make sure that your content is updated and conveys your thoughts accurately. Poor content and irrelevant pitch formats will disengage the interest of the site owners. It would be good if your proposal is in sync with their website and the content that is being published on it. A well-researched work will help you in forming a genuine relationship with the site owner and achieve goals at a faster rate.

4. Choice of topic: 

Research the website that would be posting your guest blog on. Study some insights related to the target audience that you plan to reach out with the post. Use all this research in deciding the topic for your blog. The more popular the topic is more the number of hits you will get on the blog. Generally, the posts that share life experiences and life hacks are more popular among readers. Buzzsumo is a good tool to get an idea about the potential topics that will generate good hits.

5. Content quality: 

The content that you wish to publish should reflect value addition, qualities for the audience that sees it. While writing the articles make sure that the tone isn't promotional, else the audience will lose interest in reading the blogs. Some of the below points will help you with the content quality:

a. Include one relevant internal link to any of your company's blog posts.

b. Write a concise, crisp, and clear bio for the audience to engage with.

c. Include popular keywords to attract more traffic to your blog post.

d. End the post with a call-to-action which asks the readers to share their thoughts and comments.

e. Use various available analytic tools to track the traffic on the guest blogs to get insights on further improvements.

6. Be Engaging: 

Try to subscribe to the comments section on your guest blog if the website the owner allows it. Once your blog is posted and has started to receive hits and comments, then make sure that you respond to these viewer interactions. This will help you in connecting with your new audience and in return, you might earn subscribers in them. If you are responsive, then the website owner would also feel positive about working with you and this long-lasting relationship will help you both in expanding your online audience.

7. Promote the guest blog: 

The content promotion will help you in reaching out to a wider set of audience and even the website owner will benefit from the increased traffic. You can use the same channels for promoting the guest blog as you use to promote your brand and products. You can also post links to your guest article on various social media websites. Keep writing and promoting guest posts to reach your aims and goals that you have defined in the marketing strategy.

Now you are well aware of the steps that you need to follow to create an effective marketing strategy based on guest blogging. Just avoid the common content marketing mistakes and keep a track of the goals that you set while defining your market strategy. This will help you in boosting the brand credibility and reaching out to a larger set of audience in your industry. Do share your thoughts in the comments section below.