Guest blogging – writing and posting an article on another individual or business’s website or blog – is a great way to forge new relationships, build your brand and attract prospective customers. You gain new relationships out of the connections you make by publishing work on other sites or blogs. You extend the reach and influence of your brand by becoming a more widely acknowledged industry expert. The connections you make and the influence you wield can lead to many previously unexplored opportunities to interest prospects in your product or service.
So how does an entrepreneur or business owner get started with guest blogging?
Identify specific goals. Knowing precisely what you hope to achieve will affect the type of content you create for your guest blog. But regardless of whether you want to be known as a thought leader or simply draw more traffic back to your own website (since your guest blog will have at least one link to your site), you have to focus on providing content of value to readers – not blatant self-promotion or other kinds of self-serving information that will likely be rejected by the host website.
Seek out blogging opportunities. You may already be familiar with prominent websites and blogs in your niche or industry. Obviously, you want to reach an audience that’s engaged and active in social media (because both that audience and the blog owner will promote your guest blog). Let’s say you run a commercial landscaping business. To locate industry blogs that accept guest posts, try a Google search along the lines of “commercial landscaping submit guest post” or “commercial landscaping accepting guest posts.” This should turn up useful information to narrow the search process.
Study the target blog’s content. If you’re successful in making contact with an individual or industry blog, the next step is closely studying the type of content it provides. It’s important to know the level of audience knowledge (beginning, intermediate, advanced), as well as whether you’re writing for consumers or a B2B audience. You also want to determine if the target blog features general concepts for their content or more practical, “how-to” information.
Provide compelling content. If you’re going to the trouble of being a guest blogger, then it only makes sense to produce the highest quality content available. Look for an angle or perspective no one’s considered before. Offer a fresh “take” on prevailing industry obstacles and opportunities and be sure that your content provides genuine takeaway value to readers. Not only will that make your posts more memorable, but it will enhance your “blog cred” and garner requests for more contributions.
Share in promoting the blog. Writing and submitting quality content isn’t the end of your involvement in the guest-blogging process. In addition to whatever promotion is done by the host website/blog, you should be actively publicizing the blog in all of your social media platforms. If and when readers comment on what you’ve written, follow up with a reply to their comments and try to keep the conversation going. Look for issues relating to your blog post and consider them as fodder for future guest posts.
If you put effort into doing a guest blog right, the audience (and the individual or business hosting the blog) will come back to you clamoring for more.
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