The Art of the Guest Post

Left and right, entrepreneurs and businesses are using blogs to help build their businesses. From transparency blogs, which follow a journey, to straight up authority resources, people still like to read, and content marketers who can give them something nice to look at and valuable to read will have no problem expanding their reach with a blog.

While there are a number of ways to start gaining initial traction and readership, few are more effective – provided you’re willing to put in the time – than a genuine guest post. Guest posting doesn’t have the SEO and backlink umph that it used to, but it certainly is still highly effective as a means of leveraging an already established audience or readership to help grow your own.

Unfortunately, the way that many people go about guest posting is, well, just plain awful. They reach out with cold emails, beg, plead, or send half-baked ideas to editors and bloggers that have way too much on their minds to entertain the thought of babysitting someone who isn’t willing to put in the effort. Let’s learn how to overcome that.

Guest posting is about leverage

Leverage is a two-way street, and when you’re guest posting, you have to understand that you need to be able to offer another blog owner enough value that they are willing to give you their readership. Essentially, they’re risking their audience and credibility by letting someone else pen something for them, so they need to be convinced it’s worth their while.

This generally comes down to two factors:

Can you write as well and generate as good of a post as their readership is used to, and

Is your own audience, who you will be promoting your guest post to, large enough to help garner the blog owner some new owners.

The first is qualitative, and something that some people will just be naturally better at, and to develop with practice will take lots of time and study. The second is much more easily measurable and readily apparent: if you pitch a blog post to someone who gets 10,000 daily readers, and your social media followings are hovering in the 100-200 range, they probably aren’t going to see how putting the time in to partner with you is worthwhile for them, as there isn’t a large potential to gain new readers.

Instead, work on a stepping ladder type approach, in which you work with those who are just a small notch or two above you. If you get an average of 20 shares or so on each of your posts when you write it, look for blogs in the 50-100 per post range, this is a level of engagement that is above your own and is growing, but it’s not excessive and doesn’t indicate someone who is going to ignore you completely.

As you progress with this technique, you will be able to reach out to larger and larger bloggers each time, and before long you yourself just might be one of the big guys.

SEO’s Outer Appearance Finally Resembles Its Inner Working

Were you involved in the online marketing world back in 2010? Earlier? Ever as recently as a couple of years ago, actually, the strategies that were considered surefire paths to SEO domination were completely different from what they are today.

Interestingly enough, however, Google was saying the exact same things about how you should try and rank a website then as they are now: Provide detailed, relevant, helpful content, network naturally with others, and Google would notice.

Unfortunately, their desired reality just wasn’t the case for most marketers. Hitting the top of search results meant putting in the hours to create backlinks, make sure the anchor text of your links matched the phrases you wanted to rank for, etc. These practices were considered spammy by Google, but they worked… and so people kept right on doing them.

Now, however, Google has finally caught up with its own mantra, and since early 2014 those adhering to old school link building practices are probably walking away a little disappointed.

For Google, it’s a win.

For us marketers, it makes things more complicated, but it’s a win as well.

Right now, SEO is actually simpler than it has ever been, but it’s not easier. That is to say, there’s a lot of work involved, but the work you put in is more valuable to all parties involved now.

In fact, pages are ranking fairly easily for many website owners now, provided they do a great job of providing content. A key component now is Google’s paying attention to social media cues when determining how much of a buzz a page is creating, and therefore how many people find it interesting and useful.

Right now, you can create a page and be ranking on Google within a couple of hours, provided your piece catches social media fire and gets shared around.

Of course, that means you’ve got to come up with something really good. Honestly, though, this can only serve to elevate the level of content that gets produced, as webmasters will be able to spend more time focusing on creating really useful, interesting content for their sites instead of focusing on the post-care SEO of creating countless backlinks.

In order to win, then, you need to be onboard with this new thinking. In fact, if you’re still working within the old framework of SEO, you’re likely going to see more problems than benefits. Sites are constantly being penalized and thrown into the SERPs abyss because they have tried to game a system that has always been about staying one step ahead of those trying to game it (and a goal they’ve finally achieved).

Will SEO professionals still have specific strategies you can take to give your site a leg up?

Absolutely.

Will they work? Probably, but you need to think of SEO best practices these days as a side dish, because there is no longer a substitute for the main dish of hard work creating genuinely awesome pages for Google to crawl.

How Internet Marketers Can Hit A Grand Slam With Guest Posting

Recently, content marketing has been all the rage. It isn’t that it’s only now that content marketing is starting to be effective, but more so that larger, more traditional media and advertising powerhouses are finally starting to take the trend seriously.

Content marketing, for several years now, has been the true language of the blogging community, and the businesses who were smart enough to narrow in on and take advantage of these networks.

Content marketing itself rests on one of the founding principles that most of you reading this will understand: providing value before asking for it.

Content marketing also has major crossover with “relationship marketing,” which is what we’re going to get into today. Specifically, those who have worked with content marketing have also found value in maintaining a blog or similar platform to regularly share content with and grow their audiences through.
Guest blogging is the act of posting on someone else’s blog, largely in the hopes of getting some attention and exposure for your own web property. The problem, however, lies in how to reframe that goal in a way that it becomes mutually beneficial.

If it’s your first time trying to land a guest blogging gig, you need to understand that these relationships are all about leverage: What can you offer someone else? What are you getting in return? In order for your offer to write a piece for another blog (even if it’s really good) to be tempting, you need to make sure you frame it in the right way. Here are a few steps you can take to massively boost your chances of successfully integrating guest blogging into your content marketing strategy.

Identify blogs in your weight class or just above it. Look for blogs in your market than have similar audiences and are getting some social engagement and shares on their posts, but who are not yet massive.

Make contact in a helpful way. Do not just blurt out that you want a guest post and try and pitch cold via email. Instead, leave insight comments over a few days and interact with the blog owner on twitter or another social platform. Share their content to show you like it.

Make a careful pitch by asking permission via one of these platforms to reach out via email. Once you have the greenlight, send an email with your idea, and highlight why it would be well-received by their audience and what you will do to help share the piece and grow their blog.

Write something truly amazing. If you get the honor of having a guest post pitch accepted, do it justice and get invited back by really creating something special. Whatever time you put into researching and creating your own posts, double it. Go above and beyond and make an infographic or embedded slideshare to help out – that kind of thing.

Promote like your life depends on it in order to get the blog you’re working with the biggest return possible and show that partnering up with you was worthwhile.

Simple, yep. Easy? Well, you’ll be putting in some work, but it’s nearly always worth your time.

Your 2015 Holiday Content Marketing Checklist

Targeted content is key for success in internet marketing, and there’s no other time quite like the holiday season for creating time-targeted content. Consumers spend with reckless abandon during the holiday season, so if you aren’t creating content specifically geared towards this time frame, you’re seriously missing out on a big opportunity. From Thanksgiving to Christmas to Kwanza to New Years and all the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales in between, it’s time to get cracking!

 

Holiday Content Marketing Checklist

Here’s a quick checklist for your holiday content marketing campaigns. Choose one, all or any combination thereof, as long as it fits your demographics’ preferred wheelhouse of data relay:

– Blog and Articles. The quintessential content marketing piece, it’s doubtful you will forget about this one. Try to capture the holiday spirit if you want them to go viral, or talk about the best deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday or gifts for Christmas, etc. Publish on your site and share vigorously through social media.

– Video Content. This is a great time of year to get inventive and festive with your marketing campaigns, even giving you a better chance at going viral if you pick the right theme and content. Stake out YouTube and Vimeo here, since Vine died off a bit (Instagram has 15 second videos, or if your market demographic fits, SnapChat can even be used).

– Holiday Podcasts. These are a great way to reach your mailing list members or site visitors that don’t have time to read through your content. You can also offer special deals and incentives for those who listen. Get up on iTunes, Blubrry and Stitcher Radio.

– Teleseminars and Webinars. Have products, concepts or services that can be best sold by demonstration or live talks? Then webinars and teleseminars are a great way to connect with your audience. Be sure to follow up with links to the webinars and teleseminars on your seasonal newsletter, as well as upload any slides or recording to your site in a blog or vlog.

– Interviews. Interviews with other sites or blogs are great, no matter what form they come in. Remember, any type of information is content, so even if it’s a speech or a workshop, it can all be used in the same manner (especially if you incorporate it into other types of content to add value e.g. turning a workshop into a webinar, turning a speech into a podcast, turning an interview into a blog, etc.).

– Using Powerpoints. If you have created, or are going to create, powerpoint presentations, turn them into content profit by uploading them to Slideshare, using them in a blog post or turning them into infographics.

– How To’s, Tutorials and Guides. Have some knowledge that you’ve been saving up? Is it extremely helpful? ‘Tis the season for giving! Provide your expertise to the world and make yourself an authority.

– White Papers, eBooks and Special Reports. Depending on how much time you have and how much content you need to cover, all three of these forms of content marketing will serve as enticers to sign up for an email list, opt in, or even just be enjoyed as a premium or free-mium item.

– Newsletters. If you already have one, craft a holiday edition with specials and deals. If you don’t have a newsletter, start one—it’s high time.

– Infographics. Wrap those boring facts and figures up into a visually fun infographic and start sharing it.