Guest blogging is a content marketing tactic that involves writing and publishing one or more articles for other websites.
These articles include your byline and, often times, are highlighted by the editor of that website (or publication) as being written by a "guest author" or a "contributor".
Depending on the publication, you might receive compensation for your guest blogging efforts. However, that's not always the case.
Some publications will offer non-monetary rewards for your post, instead, like a link back to your personal website or social media accounts.
Let's dive into a few major benefits of guest blogging:
Benefits of Guest Blogging
Here are some of the biggest benefits people get from guest blogging:
Build a profile as an industry expert/thought leader
Grow your personal brand
Grow an audience (social followers, subscribers etc.)
Improve SEO performance
Build authoritative backlinks
Build relationships and drive new partnerships e.g. co-marketing partnerships, job offers
Drive referral traffic
Improve a company's brand awareness
Get more leads, users and even customers
Now that we've covered that, let's dive-deep into each step of the guest blogging process if you want to become a successful guest blogger for major publications.
How to Become a Successful Guest Blogger
1. Set specific, achievable goals.
The first step to start a successful guest blogging process is to set attainable, measurable goals.
These goals might be related to your business performance (like getting more leads or clients) or your website performance (like improving your search visibility or your referral traffic).
Whatever your goal is, make it SMART. When you have a clear goal, it becomes much easier to the pick topics you write about, the blogs where you want to publish, how frequently you write, and so on. Most importantly, a SMART goal will tell you if this tactic is right for your business and how much you should invest in it in the future.
If you're just getting started, here are five examples of measurable goals you can set:
Get X referral visits from your guest posts OR Increase referral traffic by X% from your guest posts
Get X leads from referral traffic from your guest posts OR Increase the number of leads from from your guest posts by X%
Get X clients from your guest posts OR Increase clients from your guest posts by X%
Improve your SEO performance or SERP visibility by X%
Get X number of high-quality backlinks to relevant content from your guest posts
My personal preference is to set goals around referral visits, SEO traffic, and backlinks. A change in these metrics can be somewhat easily traced back to guest posts. Clients and leads are obviously more important for the business and can be influenced by guest blogging, but correct attribution can be a challenge.
Next let's talk about keyword research and how that fuels the content creation process.
2. Choose topics that will benefit your own business goals.
Many times, guest bloggers fail because they focus on the publications instead of the content. That's a good strategy to make sure you get published, but it serves the publishers' goals, instead of yours.
Comments
Post a Comment