Guest Blogging: Meet Your New Favorite Marketing Strategy

A good content and digital marketing plan aimed at brand & link building should include an effective guest blogging marketing strategy

In today’s digital landscape, you need all hands on deck to find the right marketing strategy for your small business. This means getting more creative with design, link building, content creation, paid advertisements, and social media. A recent study found that 57.7% of small and medium-sized business owners plan to invest in a higher quality website. And for many, boosting their blog is part of this.

Blogging has long been a critical part of search engine marketing, and there’s no doubt that blogging works.

So, how can you take your blogging and content marketing to the next level? Guest blogging may be the solution you’ve been looking for.

“Guest blogging is, indeed, one of the powerful ways of building strong, high-quality relationships that may help you in multiple ways, including developing business opportunities and professional connections, setting brand value and, of course, acquisition of link juice,” Moosa Hermani writes on the Moz Blog.

This digital marketing strategy is extremely effective in widening your audience and pushing your content further out into the web. You just need to do it well.

Take the following steps to find guest blogging opportunities and execute them effectively.

Step 1: Find the right blogging opportunity

This may seem like the most intimidating step, but with the right networks, you can find a compatible blog to post your content. One of the best ways to start is with a targeted web search. Search for blogs that share a similar audience, have a high domain rating, and published quality content in the past year. Social media can also be a useful tool for finding blogs, since bloggers are generally quite active.

Step 2: Choose a relevant topic

Once you find potential blogs, it’s time to choose the right topic. While you should think about your own business’s focus, the topic may not be in line with what you would post on your own blog. You want to curate your pitch to the host blog’s audience and theme. So, adjust slightly without completely sacrificing your brand.

Step 3: Pitch a quality post

Remember that today’s web users want to read engaging content that will teach them something. Try to make your post as informative as possible. Consider adding an infographic or other multimedia to really boost the post’s effectiveness. Make sure that any links to your site fit naturally in the post, since you likely don’t want readers to know that they are reading marketing copy.

Once you have a great piece of content, reach out to the bloggers on your list to see if they would be interesting in sharing the story with their audience.

Step 4: Share and promote

Marketing data shows that 41% of local businesses depend on social media networks to drive revenue. Your blog posts are no exception. Once you’ve found a blog that will publish your guest post, share your post widely on social media, and hopefully others in your network will do the same. This is a mutually beneficial step that should be appreciated by the blogger you’re working with. Sharing the piece could also help you find more guest blogging opportunities, which could make your link building strategy even more effective.

Step 5: Check your analytics

The best way to determine the effectiveness of your blog post is to keep track of the numbers. Look at how many people shared or commented on the story. Social media engagement will tell you whether your post is making an impact. If you engage in guest blogging often, you can use these metrics to fine tune your approach.

Step 6: Keep up the blogging relationship

If you like what your analytics showed, keep up a relationship with the host blog. You may be interested in writing another guest blog post in the future, or perhaps you can collaborate with the blogger on another project. This is a form of digital networking, so do what you can to keep the connection. Remember: your success online depends on the number of positive connections you can make with other influencers.

Today’s digital landscape is changing rapidly. A recent survey found that 82% of companies saved money by switching to cloud computing, and more and more business networking takes place entirely online.

Guest blogging has been a popular search engine optimization strategy for many years, but with Google placing a higher premium on high quality content and link placements, it’s becoming more and more valuable. By investing time in your guest blogging opportunities, you will find that your small business forges relationships with other digital professionals. Remember that you are all trying to do the same thing, so consider returning the favor and inviting them to post on your blog. In business and in life, a little bit of extra relationship building goes a long way.

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Valerie M.

Contributor at Small Business Marketing Tools

Valerie M. is a writer from Upstate New York. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from The State University of New York at Fredonia in 2016 and is currently working at a digital marketing agency where she writes blog posts for a variety of small businesses all over the country. Valerie enjoys writing about music, animals, nature, and traveling.