You’ve likely put a significant amount of time into your website’s blog, but have you considered expanding your blogging reach to outside sites? This is a strategy called guest blogging. You lend your expertise to other publishers, expanding your brand awareness and building your authority.
It’s easier than you might think to get started. Plus, there are numerous benefits to be had from guest blog opportunities.
What is guest blogging?
Simply, guest blogging is writing posts for someone else’s website. Your posts might happen monthly or even just as a one-off on a particular site. You’re listed as a contributor or guest expert, writing about areas in your niche. It’s a great way to elevate knowledge of your brand among the website’s followers.
The guest blog should include your photo and a biography that mentions your business. There’s a kind of “cross-pollination” that happens with both your existing followers and those of the website you’re posting on, so you both gain page views and clicks.
Benefits of guest blogging
Guest blogging can bring many benefits to your business and your own profile as an influencer or thought leader. It can increase your profile across digital media outlets, so people begin to learn more about what you have to offer. There’s also a real benefit to your digital marketing efforts as guest blogging opportunities lend authority to your own website.
Expertise
Guest blogging allows you to build your profile as an expert in your industry. That translates into a positive reputation for your brand or business. Your in-depth knowledge means that people are more likely to trust claims you make about your products or services.
Credibility
By agreeing to host your writing and showcase your biography, an external website bolsters your credibility. This is another element of building trust in your brand that can translate into more sales. In short, it’s helping to lay the groundwork for potential customers to believe your value proposition.
Backlinks (inbound links)
Whether it’s in your bio or in the text of your blog post, backlinks can get readers to check out your own website. A backlink is a hyperlink that leads to your website URL. It not only increases traffic to your digital spaces but also helps improve search engine optimization (SEO). Stronger SEO means ranking higher in organic search results.
Referral traffic
Backlinks are a type of referral traffic, where a website gets hits through links on another site. It’s not the only possibility, however. Your guest blogging can increase credibility to the extent that other bloggers and website owners link back to your pages because you’re an authoritative source. That’s also great for SEO.
Brand awareness
Guest blogging increases brand awareness just by getting your business name out there. When you choose a guest blogging opportunity that aligns with your brand you can use the technique as part of an influencer marketing strategy. As followers of the external website trust that site, they will trust you by extension, and they may try out your products.
Increase in clients
Brand awareness and trust can translate directly into more clients with guest blogging. It can bring on new volumes of business whether you’re selling software or running a recruitment agency. With the knowledge of your company gained through guest blogging, readers are more likely to choose to partner with you instead of a rival business.
Co-marketing opportunities
Guest blogging can also open the door to marketing partnerships with businesses that complement yours. Let’s say you’re a jewelry maker — you could do a guest blog with a fashion brand about how to accessorize. The fashion outlet could also blog on your site, giving a trend perspective of what clothing to pair with which jewelry pieces.
Payment
Depending on the guest blog opportunity, you might receive payment for your efforts. This might be more common with larger sites that regularly feature guest contributors. Payment can be an added bonus for guest blogging — the main value is the boost to your marketing efforts.
Finding guest blogging opportunities
Before you dive deep into sending out inquiries about guest blogging, take a step back to decide on your goals. Use the SMART framework: Choose goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time Sensitive. You can think of your goals in terms of the results you want to come from your blogging, such as:
- Increase in referral traffic
- Increase in search engine ranking
- Increase in quality client leads
- Increase in backlinks
To make these goals SMART goals, you can reframe them like this:
- Increase referral traffic by 10%
- Increase search engine ranking by five spots for a specific search term
- Increase quality client leads by 10%
- Increase backlinks by 10%
Aligning your guest blogs with your marketing goals
Your next course of action is to find a guest blogging opportunity that helps you reach these goals. Let’s start with what not to do: Don’t find a site that tells you what topics to write about unless you’re the perfect fit for what they are looking for. If the topics don’t align with your marketing strategy, it’s the publisher who gets all the benefit.
Start by looking at the pages on your own site that you want to promote through your guest blogging strategy. Then conceive of blogging topics that you could develop around those pages and use to link back to them. Before you pitch your posts, you can develop a list of target keywords that help get your guest post seen by your target audience.
If you’re running an ecommerce site that sells fabric, you could have topics like eco-friendly fabrics, fabric trends, cost-effective fabric choices, and luxury fabrics. Then you might look for a guest posting opportunity that aligns with those topics: a furniture brand, a fashion brand, and a lifestyle newsletter are all possibilities.
So, how do you find guest blogging opportunities? There are some lists of guest blogging sites that might serve as a starting point. Don’t forget to use your own knowledge of your industry and its most popular websites. There might be opportunities to partner with a niche publication that speaks directly to your audience.
It’s not always the amount of reach that’s important, but the quality: if you post on a site with 1,000,000 readers, you won’t get much benefit if only 1,000 are interested in your industry. You’ll get more benefits by posting on a site where all members of an audience of 10,000 want to read what you have to say.
It’s also important to ensure the websites are reputable. Guest posting on a site with a reputation for poor quality won’t benefit you or your business. Look for a low spam score and high domain authority. The site should also have an editorial process that supports quality content not only for your posts but for all posts on the site.
Beyond lists of sites and your own industry knowledge, you can also do a quick search on Google for websites that accept guest posts. Try using the advanced search term “intext:submit a guest post” to see what pages mention the phrase “submit a guest post.” You can try variations on the phrase, like “intext:guest post opportunities.”
Creating symbiotic relationships
Once you’ve developed a list of websites to pitch, you can think about how the website’s criteria impact your guest blogging objectives. You might find a perfect fit, but learn later you’ll have to write too many words on too short a deadline. Even if you can meet these terms, they might result in content that doesn’t reflect your voice, your expertise, or your brand. So look for features in a website that allow you to create a symbiotic relationship.
Exchange
Guest blogging involves an exchange of some sort. You might pitch a guest post and receive payment from the publisher in return. The website owners might alternatively not pay for your words, but offer to write guest posts for your site. It comes down to whatever arrangement you think best serves your interests and aligns with your marketing goals.
Deadlines
The publisher might insist on a very short deadline for guest post submission. This is because reputable websites often have content calendars they use to schedule uploads of new posts. Make sure you can work with these deadlines. At the same time, you might ask the publisher what the lag time is between your post submission and when it goes live on the site.
Keywords
Some websites might have their own SEO standards and prefer to target specific keywords. If your target keywords align with the publishers, it should be a good match, as you’re both reaping the benefits of visibility for that topic. But if you have a narrow set of search targets, you might want to inquire about whether the focus keywords will change to the publisher’s preference after you’ve submitted your content. Your blog post might still get traffic, but it might not be the kind of traffic you want to meet your SMART goals.
Ideas
Consider whether the website allows you to express your own ideas. Even within a target keyword, there can be different perspectives on a certain issue. Let’s say you’re a stock market analyst guest blogging on a financial website. You might want to predict a bear market, even though the website’s editorial staff believes a bull market is on the way. Apart from general topic areas, it’s a good idea to confirm how much leeway you can have before a site decides not to publish your guest post.
Length
A typical guest blog post is 1,000 words, but maybe you’re in the mood to write an ebook that’s closer to 5,000 words. That may or may not work with the site’s editorial practices. Have a look at the site guidelines and stick to them in order to stay in the site’s good graces — especially if you’re getting good results from your posts.
Backlinks
Those backlinks not only impact your SEO — they impact the publisher’s site as well. For that reason, the site might have a limit on the number of links you can have in a post. They might also restrict the type of page you can link to. It might not be possible to link to product pages or landing pages — just writer profiles and business home pages. If you’re really attached to a certain type of backlink for your inbound marketing, look at this guideline closely.
Pro tip: Some sites forbid posts that aim to promote or sell. Take a look at the guest post guidelines and consider pitching to a different site if commercial posts are disallowed.
Biography
Make sure you can include the biography you want — or that you’re ok with the limits set by the publisher. Perhaps it’s enough for your bio to read, “Ryan Reynolds is an actor and football club owner,” but you might want to add details like, “Ryan Reynolds has years of experience as an actor and producer and works with emerging filmmakers through his production company.”
Remember that synergy is the name of the game: when you put your time and energy into guest blogs, you want them to align as closely as possible with your marketing goals.
Sharing guest blogs to other marketing channels
So once you’ve started blogging, how do you share those blogs to expand their reach? There are at least two main options: email marketing and social media.
Email marketing uses emails to get measurable returns for a business. You can include a link to your guest blog in your regular customer newsletter, or send it out as its own correspondence to your subscriber list.
Social media is where your brand posts content for followers to enjoy. Consider sharing your guest post on sites like LinkedIn or Facebook. Depending on your industry, you might also spread the word through Instagram or X. Wherever your followers are, let them know about your latest blogging insights.
Next steps to get started with guest blogging
Guest blogging is a way to build your reputation as an expert in your niche. Combine it with a comprehensive digital marketing strategy to take your business to the next level. Learn how Constant Contact can help you grow and scale your business with expert digital marketing tools.
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