How good is guest blogging for your blog

The answer is, it’s probably the best marketing strategy for your blog. It’s not just good. It’s the best.

Many website or blog owners with commercial purpose usually has one goal for their blog: to be able to monetize their web and blog, either through advertisement or selling their own product or service. Whichever route they want to take, they’re going to need a lot of potential visitors that can be loyal customer base later.

There are many marketing strategy to do that. From applying real good SEO to ensure they can rank high on search engine result and getting organic visitors to using social media to boost popularity. One of the strategies is guest blogging.

Although the concept it old, guest blogging has been gaining popularity for the last few years, and there are reasons for that. Big companies such as Evernote and big name bloggers like Ekaterina Walter uses guest blogging to propel their digital presence.

Why you should do guest blogging?

Guest blogging, in rather crude words, essentially means you providing free content for other blog or website.

You must be wondering why you should do that, when you yourself are often struggling providing quality content of your own blog. What’s in it for you?

There are two main benefits for you to do guest blogging. First, guest blogging increase your authority. Second, guest blogging will gain you traffic, which you can then convert to generate lead and deal.

How guest blogging increase your authority

With the number of blogs and websites increasing every day, these days to be able to even have chance to stand out, you’ll want your website to be authority site. After all, when people are looking for information, they’ll head to those who are perceived as knowing their game. Authority makes people trust you, and trust is important to convert visitors into customers

How guest blogging increase your website exposure and bring back traffic

If you manage to make an effective guest post, people would want to check your website out. That’s important too. The wider you reach your audience, the more chance some of them get interested to become returning visitors, or even subscribers and customers.

How to start guest blogging?

After reading the benefit of guest blogging, I understand if you want to immediately jump to open your email and write some offers. But, before you start sending email to famous blog owners offering your expertise, you need to do several things.

First, do your research. What should you look for? Many things. First, you must look where you want to do your guest-blogging. Here is some criterion that will be helpful in deciding where you should guesting:

  • It is in your niche,or closely related to it
    The key here is to get the website visitors interested to visit your own website. Visitors who come to that website is clearly those that are interested in that niche, and will be more likely to see how your website may benefit them. If you’re writing blog about flowers, you’ll want to guest blog in a florist’s blog or gardening blog. Their visitors are more likely to be interested in checking your website compared to visitors of, say, automotive blog.
  • It has big-sized visitors and high engagement
    It’s important to guest blog in blog that is already successful. Check the website rank in Alexa or Technorati, visit their social media and see how many followers they have, and also check the average engagement for each of the blog post. Don’t guest post in blog that has few visitors if your target is to get traffic back to your website.

Second, after you pin your target website, make a research about the website and the post itself.

  • What is the most popular blog post all time in that website?
    Usually, website pin their most popular post on the home page, or even on the widget, because it helps to attract visitor’s attention to check out more post. However, some website doesn’t do this. Instead, you can use external service such as Open Site Explorer from Moz or Buzzsumo to check what post has the most inbound link and gets the most shares in social media.
    Now, read those posts carefully and take notes on why those post are well-liked. What is the type of the post? Experience-sharing, guide, listicles, or others? How long is the post? What are the topic? The result of this observation will help you during the writing process of the guest post later.
  • What is the style of the website?
    Who is the target audience for the website? Website targeted for young people are usually less formal, while website targeted for businessman and B2B usually wants to look professional. Using wrong tone and language will make your post unfit for the website where you are guesting.
  • Who is the owner of the website?
    Read her or his profile, follow her or him on social media. Deduce what she or he likes, what kind articles or blog post they love enough to share, what kind of topic they like, and so on. Say hi and introduce yourself. Share their post, or even better, reply with relevant content. Establishing contact with the owner makes you no longer a complete stranger to them, which may help when later you write your pitch.

Lastly, it’s time to offer the pitch. After you get clear and detailed idea about what kind of post you want to write, it’s time to pitch your idea to the blog owner. Here are some important rule to follow:

  • Keep it short. Don’t write more than a page of email. Your ability to convey your message clearly in efficient wording shows your ability in writing.
  • Show that you’ve done your research. Tell her or him that you know what the visitors of the website like and need, and what the website currently has not explored yet. Tell her or him how the topic you choose can be beneficial for the blog reader.
  • Show the title and the outline of your post. Title is important because it grabs reader’s attention for the first time, and one of the factor that make them want to click on the post or not. Make sure you already have a title on your head when you’re pitching. Next, show brief outline of the post to convince the blog owner that this plan of yours is solid.

Guest blogging does require effort, but it has been proven effective to bring exposure to both your personal branding and your website. Stronger personal branding and popularity can increase your authority, while exposure to website will clearly bring new influx of visitors.

Of course, this will work only if you’ve put high quality and useful content in your own website. Otherwise, those hard-earned visitors won’t be returning. So, are you convinced that guest blogging is good for your blog? Are you planning any guesting? Tell us in the comment below.

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