guest blog content

Guest blogging is one of the best ways to increase traffic, generate leads, and build brand awareness. From a business perspective, well-chosen guest blogging opportunities can result in a massive amount of positive impact on a site. Guest blogging gets you noticed by the people who need to notice you. As a brand, guest blogging opportunities allow your company to get their name out there, while at the same time allowing the readers to then experience your content production skills firsthand. When you do guest blogging right, you’ll start to realize the massive return this form of organic content can afford. 3 Ways to Determine Your Guest Content Goals Before you embark upon the twists and turns of the guest blogging road, you’re going to need to determine what you want to get out of your guest blogging opportunities. Just like every other structured marketing campaign, you need to have an end-game in mind to properly utilize your guesting posts. Ideally, as a guest blogger, you will be seeking to do one or more of the following: Position yourself as a go-to person in the industry. Guest blogging allows you to share your experience and knowledge, which helps others perceive you as an expert. Gain exposure for your brand, products, or services. This also helps to generate backlinks that help your SEO campaign immensely. Drawing an audience. When done correctly, guest blogging can help you gain new readers that can become sales for your site. For these goals to come to fruition, you need to have a unique mix of skills and execution. Just having an idea isn’t enough to get the most out of your guest posting. You need to become an expert in your field, reading every bit of information you can get your hands on. Once you’ve done that, you need to develop a real and actionable plan for gaining the attention you deserve from your guest blogging efforts. How to Figure Out What’s a Good Guest Blogging Opportunity and What Isn’t Most of the major players in the content creation field are open to the idea of having a guest blogger on their site. The tough part can sometimes be being chosen from the crowd. After all, experienced guest bloggers are more likely to get first preference than inexperienced bloggers. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get your foot in the door, though. After all – everyone starts somewhere! When you’re just starting out, you may have to settle for less prestigious guest blogging opportunities. Although these aren’t as glamorous or far-reaching as the larger blogs, they are no less important in your quest to build a name as a well-known blogger. That said, it’s well worth your time and energy to learn to differentiate good guest blogging opportunities from bad ones. Here’s how: What Good Blogging Opportunities Look Like Good guest blogging opportunities are those that give you a decent amount of coverage for your time investment. Remember, your guest blog should be as well researched (or better!) than your personal or in-house blogging efforts. For professional guest blogging situations you are going to need to pitch your topic to the owner of the blog to see if it meshes with what they’re trying to achieve. Generally, you and the host can sit down and discuss what they expect and what you can deliver. From there, you may be able to develop a working topic and title before you get writing. Keep in mind that some guest blogging options will offer less support than others, and this is largely a function of traffic. The most in-demand guest blogging platforms get thousands of submissions each month, and it’s impossible to keep up with them all manually. That said, these platforms tend to use electronic forms and a team of editors and content managers to get guest blogs up on their sites. This shouldn’t rule a guest blogging platform out for you. Instead, pay attention to things like the professionalism of the staff, the Alexa Rank of the site, and the expedience with which staffers get back to you. What Bad Guest Blogging Opportunities Look Like To put it simply: bad guest blogging opportunities are those that don’t give you a lot of coverage or that abuse your work without giving you enough in return. Beware of sites that make it excessively easy to guest blog for them, since they’re among the worst offenders. While you shouldn’t have to jump through flaming hoops to get your post featured, you should expect there to be a review and quality assurance process. If this doesn’t exist, it’s a likely bet that, not only will your guest post not count for much, but that it will quickly be lost in the sea of low-quality blogs out there. Keep this in mind: If all you have to do is sign up and post then it’s probably not a very high-quality opportunity. Avoiding these sites is important since they don’t help you attain your guest blogging goals. These are usually the sites that take anything you give to them as a blog post without an actual discussion with the owner or content manager. Again: if you don’t have to talk to a real person or team, it’s probably not a good idea to guest post for them. Guest Blogging Doesn’t Mean the End of Direct Content Production Just because you’re getting into guest blogging doesn’t mean that you can stop producing your own original content. If anything, it’s an encouragement to continue with your own direct content. When you finally start to earn customers from a guest blog, you’ll still need to show them that you can back that content up with your own work. That’s why maintaining your own blog and content creation efforts is so important throughout. Setting up an internal content production schedule helps you to balance your private posting with whatever guest opportunities arise. Guest blogging allows you to create relationships with the audience of the host blog and this can translate into growing your own … Read more