10 Steps for Starting the Perfect Guest Blogging Strategy
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Are you looking for the best guest blogging strategy for your content marketing plan? If you are not, it is high time you began doing so. Guest blogging remains to be one of the most effective approaches to promoting yourself and your brand.
This article will help you learn how to create a successful guest blogging strategy. Guest blogs can help you to increase your visibility in the search engine and improve lead generation. Let us begin by looking at the benefits of guest blogging before we learn how to develop a perfect strategy.
Guest Blogging Benefits:
If you use a content marketing strategy, guest blogging can be an excellent way of boosting your traffic and ROI on content marketing. It provides offsite expert content making is a critical component of your marketing efforts.
Guest blogging will help you to enhance your brand awareness because posting on other websites will inform new audiences about your brand. These new readers will visit your landing page or website. Therefore, guest blogging will help your brand to attract new subscribers and enhance lead generation.
Guest blogging can also help brands to build trust. If authoritative brands trust you, they will publish your content and the trust will rub off on you. Guest blogging regularly will help other people to view you as an expert and this will enhance your brand reputation.
SEO is the main benefit of guest blogging. Link Building from high-quality websites is a key ranking factor that will improve the position of your site in the SERPs.
The guest blogger is not the only person that will gain in this relationship. The blog that hosts your content also gains. It helps the site owners to meet their content requirements with a lot of ease.
However, you have to make sure that you are using the right content marketing strategy if you want to benefit. This article outlines some of the steps that you need to follow for a perfect guest blogging strategy.
1. Know Your Goals:
Like the other marketing strategies, you need to start an effective guest blogging strategy with a clear understanding of your goals. You cannot expect to get to your destination unless you know where you are heading to.
The typical goals for your guest blogging strategy go hand in hand with the above benefits. These include;
- Getting more sales and leads or driving traffic to a particular landing page
- Tracking inbound links to improve SEO
- Creating awareness for your business, products, or services
- Increasing your number of email subscribers or social media audience
- Positioning yourself like an expert so that other people can site you more often and receive speaking engagements
It is crucial to have a goal at the back of your mind so that you can appropriately frame your bio. You also need to make sure that the resources that individuals see whenever they arrive will deliver your promises. This will help you to build trust with the new set of audience that you attract.
2. Get Websites to Contribute to:
Before writing a blog post, you need to find a website that is actively looking for content and accepts guest bloggers. Beyond this, you have to make sure that posting on this website will assist you to meet your goals.
You can use several ways to find a site that accepts guest posts. Google searches can help you to find a site that accepts blog posts on your topics of interest. Type relevant keywords like the topic then followed by the phrase ‘guest blogs’ or ‘write for us.’ You may find several results and your duty will be to choose the best.
The other trick is to look at the origin of their inbound links. You can achieve this by logging into SEMRush and then going to Domain Analytics and then Backlinks. The next step is typing the URL of the site that you wish to check in the search box. The report will generate the anchor text, actual backlinks, and the referring domain among others. You can use this information to generate your guest blogging strategy.
After you find the sites, the next step is to access guest blogging opportunities. Find out whether the sites are worthwhile and whether they will help you in meeting your guest blogging needs. First, check the domain authority using the Open Site Explorer from Moz. Only go for sites that have a higher figure.
Alexa tool will help you to know the amount of traffic that the brand has been attracting for the past few months. Paste your URL in the on-screen box and this will give you a quick overview of the most important traffic metrics. It will also tell you that the number of people that you can reach and their location.
3. Connect With the Owner of the Website:
It is good to create a connection with the site owners before you approach them for guest posting opportunities. Most of the cold pitches will not work for site owners unless you produce a stellar piece of content.
Most site owners are tired of poor quality content and irrelevant pitches. Therefore, they only accept guest posts from the people they know. Once you know their site and content type, subscribe to their website in to get regular updates or follow them on Twitter as most people share their content here.
Consistently read their content for a few weeks so that you can tell what matters to their audience. From here, connect with the website owner on social media and tag him whenever you share their content. Include a comment in your shares so that it isn’t a plain link.
Respond to all their emails, signup to their email marketing newsletter, and comment on their blogs. These tips will help you to create a genuine relationship with the owner of the site. Don’t try to fake because they will discover and you won’t meet your needs.
4. Select a Winning Topic:
After you have a clear understanding of your target website and what the site owner values most, you need to get a topic to pitch. You know what is popular on the site and you need to think of the best way to add value.
You can respond to what is on the website, shed more light on popular topics, or write a new thing on a topic that is likely to go viral with the audience. Buzzsumo can help you to find out the topics that are already popular on the website so that you can pitch. Typing the URL in this tool will show you the most shared content on the website.
Topics that utilize proprietary research, in-depth content and posts that share life hacks and experiences tend to be the most popular. Lastly, if the site has writing and pitching guidelines, make sure you read them. Site owners will reject your pitches before even reading them if you don’t follow the guidelines.
5. Make Your Pitch:
Your guest blogging strategy will only succeed if you avoid the generic guest posting pitches. A winning pitch should be personal to every individual website. The first rule is keeping your pitch short and straight to the point. Site owners, more so those with authoritative sites receive several pitches and you shouldn’t waste that time.
The second step is to use their name while pitching lest they ignore you. Also, include the post title in the email subject. You can also include it as a secondary heading in the email body. It is also good to provide a brief description of the post including what it will cover in a few bullet points or sentences.
Explain how the content can help the readers and this won’t be hard if you are familiar with the current content. Lastly, show why you are the right candidate to write the blog posts in a few high points.
6. Write Great Content:
If the site owner accepts your pitch, the next step is writing your guest post. Make sure that you produce the best to win the confidence from the site owner. The tips include crafting a stellar headline that shows the benefits to the reader, uses action words, and taps into emotion.
Research keyword phrases so that your content will rank in the SERP and drive traffic to the target website. Therefore, work on the content as if you are publishing it on your own website. Remember to avoid over-stuffing and optimize the website accordingly.
Use great linking profiles in your post to help in building authority and SEO. Therefore, include relevant external and internal links in the guest post that you are writing. If the site owner has linking guidelines, be keen to follow them to the later.
You also need to include images in your guest blog posts. Make sure the images you choose are relevant to the blog post. Make sure you use free images if you are getting them online or reference them accordingly.
The last thing that you need to do is correctly formatting the post. The post has to match the other publications on the website. Check on how they use lists, bold text, capitalization, and subheadings among others. You will be more popular if you leave less work to the owner of the website.
7. Work That Bio:
The bio payoff for the hard work you put in the guest blogging strategy. At this point, you will be linking the blog back to your site and resources. You can put a single link to your homepage, one link to any page or resource or resource on your website, a social media link and another link to your site, or using a couple of social media or web links.
Some site owners put restrictions on the bio even though the practice is not prevalent. You can link to your preferred URL and a social link. You have to make sure that you are using your bio to generate leads.
Make sure you include a clear call-to-action whether you are linking to your landing page or not. The CTA may ask the reader to follow you on social media, download a free resource, or visit your website.
The guest blogging bio shouldn’t be similar on all websites. Feel free to change the bio depending on your unique goals.
8. Be Responsive:
In this guest blogging tip, make sure you respond to all the mentions and comments on your post. Apart from being good manners, being responsive will help you to make connections that will help you meet part of your strategic goals.
Blog owners also like responsive guest bloggers and this may make them more receptive to your pitches. It will also help you to achieve most of your guest blogging strategy goals. You can subscribe to comments if the blog owners allow so that you will receive an email alert whenever a user comments. You may also track shares and mentions of the post through Google alert.
9. Promote Your Content:
Promotion of content is crucial to any guest blogging strategy. As more people continue to read your content, they will follow you on your website. It is a win-win situation since the site owner will also be happy to benefit from the high traffic.
There are several channels of promoting your guest blog posts. You can share them on social media or send to your email subscribers. Encourage your fans to visit, share and comment. Lastly, link your posts and mention them in any place where it makes sense.
10. Write More Guest Posts:
One blog post is not enough to help you achieve real success. The best blogging strategy encourages the publication of multiple guest articles. As you continue to write more posts, you will increase your online presence. More people will begin to view you as an authority in the industry.
You will begin to receive more invitations to participate in events and write. The result is more traffic to your website and a high number of sales and leads. However, remember to maintain quality in all your writings. Also, use tools like CoSchedule and Asana to track your blog posts so that you are in the know of what is taking place.
Conclusion:
To add on all this, you need to track the success of your guest blogging strategy. It is the best way to tell whether your guest blogging strategy is working or not. You can use several tools to achieve this objective.
For example, Google Analytics will help you to know whether the strategy brings more leads or in tracking traffic to your landing page. You can also use OptinMonster’s conversions analytics to evaluate how successful your marketing campaigns are. This guide will help you to make a perfect guest blogging strategy for your brand.
Are you in the process of developing a guest blogging strategy for your brand? Write to us on [email protected] and we will help you become an authority figure in your niche.
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