What is guest blogging?
Guest blogging is publishing content on the blogs that do not belong to you. Guest blogging can be:
– Free (you do not get paid anything)
– Paid (you get paid to write on someone else’s blogs. This typically happens when you are a recognized expert in your field)
– A part of a complex deal. For example, you may have a blog of your own and you decide to guest blog in exchange for publishing someone’s content on your blog
Why guest blog?
There are several reasons why you may choose to guest blog:
1. Guest blogging positions you as an authority in your field and adds credibility to your name.
When someone publishes a guest blog from you, they de facto endorse you and your content. For example, Social Media Examiner describes how Ekaterina Walter became a social innovator for Intel and how she guest blogged for websites such as Fast Company, Mashable and others.
People who have never heard of you and come to your website for the first time tend to be very skeptical. An article in Time Magazine from 2012 claimed that 98% of people do not trust the Internet.
Most of us have been lied to some many times that our level of trust is usually very low. This is why websites like Yelp.com work so well: they offer unbiased testimonials about different businesses.
Guest posting is a form of a testimonial. It tells your prospects and prospective partners that someone else finds your content and your expertise really valuable.
2. Guest posting gives you exposure to your audience and traffic to your website.A guest post would typically include your information and a link to your website. A link gives people who find your content valuable an opportunity to go to your website and get more content directly from you.As mentioned earlier, if the visitors learn about you on a website that they trust, they will immediately trust you more, too.
3. Guest posting allows you to build links back to your website.Links to other authority sites will improve your SEO and boost the rank of your website. To check domain authority, use a free toolbar from Moz.
What you need to understand about free guest blogging
Some people think that they will get a lot of guest blogging opportunities immediately if they would be willing to guest blog for free.
The reality is completely the opposite. An authority website or a blog has probably spent years building a relationship with its visitors. Great websites have content calendars, curate content and are very picky about what they post. Here, for example, are Michael Hyatt’s notes on the presentation about 8 blogging tips by Tim Ferris.
Unless you are a widely recognized expert, you should not be expecting an authority site to post your content simply because you are willing to provide it for free.
Moreover, we all know that there is no such thing as free lunch. When you are offering someone something for free, the first thought they will most likely have is going to be “what’s the catch here?” Addressing this issue and being strategic about who and how you approach is very important. In his book Influence Robert Cialdini gives an example about how making a seemingly damaging admission can significantly boost the response.
Discovering guest blogging opportunities
To find guest blogging opportunities you need to look at two categories: your competitors and your comparables.
Competitors Market Analysis
Many people do not even think about approaching their competitors. They often believe that competitors are enemies. Truth is, whatever you do or sell, you will almost never be able to sell to 100% of the market. Some people may not like the taste of your product. Some may not like your approach to a certain subject. For some, the price is wrong. Some may simply not like you personally.
This is why there’s Coca-Cola, but there’s also Pepsi and a countless number of store-branded generic colas. There’s McDonald’s, but there’s also Burger King, Wendy’s, White Castle and now Subway, which, by positioning itself as “healthy and fast option,” became the largest restaurant operator in the world (44,882 restaurants in 112 countries versus 36,615 McDonald’s restaurants).
This is why you want to create a list of your competitors and ask yourself the following questions:
– What are we doing that are not doing and not going to do?
– Are they doing what’s of interest to us in the right way?
– Where do we want to stay different and what do we want to model after them?
– How can we position ourselves in such a way that we complement each other and not compete?
Comparables
Comparables are products or services different from yours, yet sold to the same customers. You want to identify businesses and individuals who are very successful with your target audience but are not in competition with you. Moreover, what they do may have nothing to do with what you do except for the fact that you are serving the same market.
For example, if you sell SEO services to auto repair shops, somebody selling point-of-sale systems to auto repair shops is going to be your comparable in this context.
By guest posting on the blogs and websites of your comparables, you can meet all three of the goals that we discussed above. All you would need is a smart approach and a link between what you do and what your comparables do.
The best way to find that link is to think about what value both of your provide to your customers. For example, it could be that “we both are helping you get more customers,” “we both are helping you to stay healthy” and so on.
If you would like to learn more about doing market research, Dan Kennedy’s book the Ultimate Marketing Plan is a great resource.
Your pitch should not be about you
A lot of beginner guest bloggers do not understand that guest blogging is not about them. When pitching THEIR guest blogs, THEY talk about THEIR experience, THEIR content, goals THEY have and so on.This approach is 100% wrong.
Truth is, bloggers that you want to guest post for do not care about you. They have their own goals, their own agenda. They want to deliver value to their readers, not sacrifice what they are doing so that they could help you.
The most powerful word in marketing is the word YOU. What you want to do when pitching your guest posts is explain how you can add value to what they do, how you can help them accomplish their goals faster and
easier, how your content will help them get what they want, not help you get what you want.
This is not as hard as it may sound. Once you identify spots where you would like your guest posts to appear, study these spots.
How to quickly and easily find out what bloggers and website owners want
Get to know the content of the blogs and the websites. See if these bloggers gave interviews in the past. All you have to do to do that is find out the names and Google “name + interview.”
And these for finding relevant sites that accept:
Example:
• “Automotive” + “guest post”
• “food” + “This post was written by”
• “keyword” + “write for us”
Pay attention to how they talk to their audiences. Do they focus on beginners, intermediate or advanced?
What kinds of content do they prefer and why? What is working for them?
Finding out answers to these questions is also very simple. If you know that someone is really smart and you see them doing the same thing over and over again, for example, posting a lot of infographics, they probably are doing it because it is working for them really well.
Next, find out if they are already accepting guest posts. Again, you can find this with a Google search on a website (“guest post by site: www.example.com”).
Study the guest post separately. What do they have in common? Do they talk about certain subjects? Do they talk about subjects from a certain angle?
Finally, see what content has been the most popular. You can do so by looking for re-tweets, Google+ shares and saves on Delicious.
Before you pitch: build up some credibility
Now that you know what the bloggers that you want to guest blog for care about and want, it’s time to build some credibility.There is a number of ways how you can do this.
If you have your own blog and are getting traffic, you could get testimonials from your own visitors first. Then, when approaching the bloggers, you could show them the testimonials from the same target audience, maybe even from some of the people that the bloggers will know.
If you are starting from scratch, one of the ways to go is to actively engage with the bloggers that you want to guest post for.
Here, again, it’s all about them, not about you.If they host webinars, attend their webinars, ask questions, become active on twitter & Facebook, comment on their posts on Facebook. Comment on their latest posts on their blog. Add value to them and to their readers.
Practical tips about how to pitch
First, you want to familiarize yourself with the guest posting rules of the blog where you want to guest post. There is hardly anything worse than pitching someone and appearing clueless about the basic things.
Second, the best way to pitch anything is to pitch it to the people who already know you and trust you. With this in mind, is there a way how you could meet these bloggers in person? Do you live in the same town or go to the same events, be it meetups or industry gatherings? Are there certain conferences that are not about your industry where you could meet people that you are looking to meet?
For example, many New York City meetups have either Q&A sessions or after-parties where you can approach high caliber people who would typically not be otherwise available.
If you can’t meet the bloggers that you want to guest post for in person, do you know someone who knows both your and them? Use LinkedIn to see if you and them and any connections in common. See if you and they have any common friends on Facebook, if they engage with someone you know on Twitter and so on.
Never send a generic email
If you have to send a cold email, make sure to personalize it. Do not start your email with anything similar to “Dear Sir, Dear Webmaster, To the owner of the domain.”
Typically, finding a name of a blog owner is easy. If you searched the website and can’t find the name, try using who.is (who.is ) to see who the domain is registered to. Also, use the query “blog name + interview” to see if the owner gave any interviews. If he or she has been interviewed in the past, you will be able to get his or her name from the interviews.
Make sure to clearly state the value that your guest post will bring early in the email. Then, describe who you are and repeat your offer. People today do not read, especially when it comes to emails. They skim.
According to TextRequest.com, on average people receive 88 emails a day. This is why you want to have your offer in the very beginning and then at the end. Do not go for pages talking about yourself first.
How to introduce yourself in an email
Pay attention to how the blogger introduces him- or herself and how the guest authors are introduced on the blog. Then, create an introduction for yourself in a similar style. For example, if their bios talk about formal degrees and colleges they attended, talk about your formal degrees and colleges you attended in your bio. If they talk about their other accomplishments, talk about your other accomplishments, too.
Finally, be sure to include all the credibility that you’ve built, be it guest posts you published elsewhere, youtube videos with a lot of views, your own blog and so on.
Always pitch more than one specific headline or idea. Give the bloggers something to choose from. This way it will be harder for them to say no. They will not be thinking “should I say yes or no,” but instead they’ll be thinking “how can I use this on my blog?”
Submitting your blog post
At this step, you have two objectives. The first one is giving the bloggers who said yes to you what they want and making their life easy. This means formatting your blog post according to their requirements and providing them with all the necessary files, if needed, in the format and the way that they prefer. Ideally, you want them to be able to simply copy-and-paste what you send them. Zero extra work required.
The second objective is about getting what you want. If you want a backlink, make sure to have a link with a target anchor text.
If you want to get traffic, think about where you will send that traffic. Can you offer a freebie at the end of your guest post and drive the traffic to the free offer? (Here’s a great article about creating effective freebies: http://www.digitalmarketer.com/lead-magnet-ideas-funnel/ )
If you want to increase your following on social media, have your social media links and encourage readers to follow you and engage in a conversation with you.
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