Use advanced guest blogging
There are basically two ways to build an exceptional blog audience through content marketing:
i). Writing in-depth articles on your blog and telling the right people about them.
ii). Delivering content creation written for the relevant blogs of other people.
While you can build authority links through guest blogging, don’t make link-building your focus. Bloggers can add a nofollow tag to your link, thus keeping Google from passing SEO value to your site.
GrooveHQ documented how they reached 1 million people by guest blogging on KISSmetrics, AngelHack, Buffer, Onstartups, Shopify and other sites.
When it comes to guest blogging, my best advice is to do it to build your audience, not to get links or improve your rankings. Of course, in the process of guest blogging, you’ll benefit from natural organic rankings and increased brand mentions. In fact, your marketing strategy could well be to guest blog your way to success.
The most important benefit of guest posting is the opportunity to give value to a fresh audience and inspire them to pay your site a visit.
Danny Iny became the Freddy Krueger of blogging in 2013, largely by implementing a guest blogging strategy. He built a six-figure online marketing business from scratch. Today, he’s a renowned online expert with a highly popular blog.
If you’re ready to improve your guest blogging game, there is an advanced content marketing strategy that can help you acquire more clients. Here’s how it works:
Step #1: Research relevant blogs. A relevant blog could simply be any blog that attracts the ideal people you want.
Go to Google and type in “online marketing tips for beginners.”
If you’re a freelance website designer, for example, a relevant blog to you is a small business or startup blog, not a fellow designer’s blog. People reading small business and startup blogs will probably need a website designed for them at some point. Your fellow designer doesn’t have that same need.
Step #2: Gauge the site’s social influence – The fact that a web page is ranking well in Google doesn’t necessarily mean that it will drive a lot of search traffic to your site.
You also want to know how many people are likely going to share your guest post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. To find this out, plug the blog URL (e.g. SearchEngineJournal.com) into Buzzsumo and check out how many social shares each of their recent blog posts generated:
You can see that in the past 6 months, the blog posts that were published on Search Engine Journal generated over 2,000 tweets and Facebook shares.
This means that when you submit your guest post on this blog, you should expect a decent amount of instant traffic, social shares, authority links and long-term search traffic.
Step #3: Look through the target site’s archives for older posts covering your topic.
If you find a blog post that was well received, you’ve found a goldmine. Hack it. Craft a better headline. Improve on the existing idea and write a more in-depth blog post, taking advantage of the content upgrade strategy.
The above screenshot is a blog post that was written in March, 2014. It had 22 comments and generated 484 social shares. But, the headline isn’t really benefit-oriented. So, let’s rewrite it:
Original headline: Contrast in Web Visuals: Why You Looked at This Title First
Freshly crafted headline for your guest posts:
- How Web Visuals Influence Your Blog Readers to Click (Backed By Science)
- 15 Scientific Studies Showing Why Web Visuals Attract Blog Readers
Now that you’ve found an idea that will make for a great guest post, write outreach emails to connect with influencers who will promote your guest posts.
This advanced guest blogging marketing strategy can help you generate lots of qualified traffic, attract new clients and achieve improved and sustained search rankings.