Be Our Guest - Benefits of Guest Blogging

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So you’re starting a new blog, have absolutely no visitors besides you and your imaginary friends, and not a single cent for marketing and promotion. What do you do? There are many methods to handle this situation including SEO, social marketing, and guerilla marketing. However, the topic of this post is guest blogging. What the advantages are and how it can be used to leverage your brand and blog. Let’s look at why you should start guest blogging first.

The Advantages of Guest Blogging

• Your own blog has no visitors
  Make your debut at one that does have visitors. Preferably this is a blog in the same industry as yours. If your post is worthwhile, visitors may click through to your site and become frequent readers or RSS subscribers.
• Get feedback
  Since your blog is in its infancy and has no exposure, you can test some of your posts at other blogs. See what kind of response you get by looking at comments. From that, you can see what works and what doesn’t and tweak posts on your own blog.
• Get free links
  In terms of SEO, this is huge. Usually the owner of the blog will allow you to post blurbs about yourself that include a link or two. This exchange is to your advantage.

How to go about finding guest blogging gigs

If you know your industry well, you should know who the big guns are. If they have authoritative blogs, this is where you want to aim. Aim high and see what happens. If you have a good post, you’d be surprised as to where you could potentially get published. If you have no idea what the big blogs in your industry are, try doing a search on Google Blog Search. You should be able to come up with some good candidates this way. Create a list of blogs you want to target and include contact information. Next I’ll teach you how you should be contacting these top blogs.

Asking for the guest blogging gig

Many people make the mistake of emailing a top blogger and asking to guest blog. First of all, these people have tons of emails to sift through as well as lots of similar requests. Cut the garbage and go in for the kill. Tops bloggers aren’t going to trust you or your work if they don’t know who you are. Instead of asking if you can guest blog, create a tailored guest post and email it to the blogger asking if they’d be interested in featuring the content as a guest post. You’re much more likely to get a response as the blogger knows exactly what he or she is getting. So what exactly do you write in a guest post? Let’s find out.

The guest post

The guest post obviously should pertain to the topic of the blog you are targeting. Not only that but it should be interesting, different, and unique to what the current blogger is already offering. A fresh perspective is what’s needed to get any sort of attention. You also want to twist your content in a way that involves the original blogger. Add links to previous posts on the blog, mention the blogger by name, and show that you’re a frequent reader of the blog. Add in these elements and you’ll have a higher chance of being accepted.

I got the gig, what now?

So your post was accepted and published on the blog. Great! New traffic, more exposure, and a quality link. However, don’t just end it right there. Ask the blogger if you may continue to contribute to the blog and develop a relationship that will be beneficial to both parties. You’ll see great long-term results in doing so.

What if I was rejected?

Don’t take it personally and move on. Go down your list to the next biggest blog and repeat the process until someone accepts you. This may seem like a lot of work if you keep getting rejected, but the return on investment is high. You can always use rejected posts for your own blog anyway.

So there you have it. The reasons why you should guest blog as a marketing method and how you should do it. In fact, if you’re interested in guest blogging on WTW, feel free to contact me. Anyone have good results guest blogging?