When it comes to list building and expanding your audience with your blog, one of the best ways to accomplish this is to guest blog. Guest blogging simply means that you write content–blog posts–for other bloggers and allow them to post and share your content on their platform. The act of creating content that is relative to a specific niche has a way building community, or in other words, building an audience.
People are attracted to what you talk about most. So if you spend the next 12 months creating content around personal development and you share that with other personal development bloggers in the online community, over time, people will want to follow you.
Most bloggers stick to a routine of creating content in quantity, and not in quality. While having a large amount of content is good for Google rankings, it does very little in way of building you a quality audience, which in turn builds a quality and very niche email list.
There is a win in strategizing and doing things the right way when it comes to guest blogging. If followed correctly, this can help bring more email subscribers.
Why Guest Blogging?
The internet is about community. In the same way you find that people have flocked to make Facebook one of the largest social websites in the world, wherever their are a lot of people you can be sure that more people will flock. It’s all about creating the dopest party, and inviting your friends to participate. Or, in other words–community.
There are some bloggers that have built audiences are platforms so large that they were able to successfully turn around and sell their blogs for tens of thousands of dollars years later.
There are a lot of factors that allow for people to find your blog relatively easy, but it’s the continuous flow of traffic and staying power of that traffic that makes the difference.
Guest posting is a strategy and a tactic that works!
So, I’ve done some research to comprise the top 8 strategies for guest blogging:
1. Find a Blogger in Your Niche to Connect with
This is fairly simple. Do a Google search for Bloggers in your niche or area of expertise. Many established blogs have guidelines that you can follow to get a guest post submitted. Study the blogs that you are interested in and evaluate writing style, kinds of content, and the topics that are covered. Make connections, network, and contact bloggers to discuss your wanting to guest post on their blog. In this exchange find ways to SERVE them as it shows that you are genuinely interested in helping them as well as yourself.
2. Your Guest Post should Send People to a Specific Solution, not the home page of your Blog
When you create guest blog posts, within the post you are allowed to post links. You are also allowed to include a link within the bio section of the post that direct readers back to your blog. The common mistake here is not giving thought to the strategy behind where you are going to send visitors that click on your link. You need to send people who click on your link to a very specific solution that relates to what they are reading.
A successful funnel entails:
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Creating a free giveaway that is niche-tailored. You can write an eBook to satisfy this. The eBook should cater to a very specific topic that is relevant to a particular interest group.
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Create a landing page for that eBook. You will add this eBook to your blog and give it away for free in exchange for a visitors email address, which in turn builds your email list. For email lists you can use services like Aweber or MailChimp.
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Guest post on topics that are related. What’s great about this is now you can go out and guest post on topics that are related to your free giveaway. You still want to link back to your eBook, but even if you aren’t capable of doing that you can still build brand visibility for your blog and the eBook.
3. Write The Best post Possible
A guest blog post is your best possible content and traffic driving tool to help build your email list and drive traffic back to your blog. So it would benefit you that you really produce the best content possible. Your brand and your reputation is on the line here.
4. Speak to the Most Popular Bloggers in your Niche
There are already bloggers out there that are well established with a lot of notoriety and popularity. One thing you’ll notice that is very popular amongst a lot of online marketers, is that many of them share resources, and market for each other. Again, community. When you connect and associate yourself with the community, you will gain access to audiences that you couldn’t have had access to otherwise.
This also allows other bloggers to get to know who you are and promote you. Again, community, networking, and connections. Give and serve first, then receive.
5. Guest Posting is a Long-term strategy
Creating content isn’t always a click-and-done success strategy. It takes years sometimes for content to have a noticeable and significant impact on your blogging efforts. So, think of blogging as a long-term strategy and not just short term. You want to be in this for the long-haul.
Consider these important points:
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Are you ranking for specific keywords on Google that have the ability benefit your blog?
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Are you further building your reputation in your respective community?
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Is it increasing engagement and conversation somewhere else on the internet? Are people talking about what you wrote?
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Is it bringing you new contacts
The key here is to write resource-rich content that aids in bringing solutions to real-world problems that your audience has. This kind of content ranks very well and has long-lasting affects on your blogging efforts.
6. Include Anchor text as part of your Guest posting Strategy
Anchor text is easy to understand: It’s basically a link back to your blog that is included in the guest blog post. Or, it could be a word or group of words that you have hyperlinked that lead back to your blog.
Most online marketers understand that relevant backlinks help with ranking well on Google, but the anchor text of those backlinks also plays a vital role in what exact keywords we rank for.
When you do a guest post, you should have already done keyword research and know specifically what phrases you want to rank for, based on how much traffic they bring and how competitive they are. Always remember, you want your guest post to be bringing you tons of love from Google for years to come.
You want to link back to help with SEO rankings so this is very important. Also consider that you always want to write for people first, than the search engines. Your content and everything it is linked to has to be relevant to what readers are looking for.
7. Ensure Comments are Answered on Guest Posts
This is very questionable because at the time of this writing there is a debate as to whether or not comments should be included on blogs with the extreme popularity of social media. There are some bloggers that now only take comments on Facebook fanpages and have deactivated comments on their blogs altogether.
There are a lot of ways to look at the benefit of monitoring comments on guest blog posts. You have the ability establish connections with others, you also have the opportunity to develop more loyal readers. If a really good debate stirs because of your blog post, you can take the conversation back to Social Media, or perhaps, use the comments to create a new blog post on the topic
8. You should Write your Guest Posts for Novice Beginners
When you really think about this, most of the people that are searching for information online are people that really need help getting something done and they don’t know where to begin.
This is why it’s necessary to create content that is instructional, has a ton of resources, and has lists of information that aid in helping readers get what they and solve their problems.
Has guest posting worked well for you?
I would like to hear from you. If you tried something and it’s worked well for you, leave a comment below. I welcome all ideas and points of view!
