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Last Updated on February 3, 2019 by Work In My Pajamas
Just when you thought you were on top of everything you need to be doing to grow your business – like email marketing, social media, and networking – along comes another idea that isn’t new to the digital marketing scene, but is often overlooked. Guest blogging. It has the power to boost your business.
Guest blogging means simply writing blog posts for websites other than your own. But in order to make it work for your business, you need to understand how it works and set up a system to do it effectively. Follow these steps.
In This Post:
Do Your Homework
Identify the kinds of people who will want to hear what you have to say. These will be your target customers, of course, but there may be others as well. Don’t try to be all things to all people, however. Focus on the niche market that is most likely to want to hear from you.
Identify the Blogs You Want to Write For
Look for blogs that you like to read and blogs that your customers like to read. Do a little sleuthing on social media to see which blogs your customers are retweeting and posting links to. Once you start digging into the reading habits of your customers, a few blogs should start to stand out.
You want to write for the blogs that have the highest authority. To find out which ones those are, go to Alexa.com and enter the URL of the blog you’re considering in the search box and click on find. Alexa will show you the average number of visitors that site receives per day and the monthly pageviews. The more, the merrier – you want blogs with the most traffic.
Then look at the demographics, which you’ll find under the heading ‘Who visits (blog)? See how well these demographics match yours.
Write Good Content
Choose one blog and write a post you think their readers will want to read. Make sure it is sharp, to the point, and grammatically correct. It should not be a sales pitch, but needs to demonstrate your area of expertise.
Pitch Your Post
Contact the owner of the blog you want to publish your guest post. Don’t send the post yet – ask them if they use guest bloggers and tell them why you want to submit an article. Give them a one to two sentence synopsis of the post.
That’s really all there is to it. Once you’ve done it a time or two, you’ll get into a rhythm, and it will become easier. As more people see your posts, they will follow you and find your blog and website. It’s not an instantaneous process, but over time you should see your traffic increase.
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