Blogging is a terrific inbound marketing strategy for ecommerce businesses. In fact, almost 80% of businesses use blogging as a marketing tool. If you’re anything like other businesses, you probably already produce blogs for your site. But are you using guest blogging? This is a different strategy that assists your content strategy in unique ways. If your current strategy isn’t working the way you want it to, you should consider utilizing it. But, implementing it will be different than a regular blogging strategy, so you need to be prepared. In this post, we’ll discuss the benefits of guest blogging for business and offer tips to help you develop a successful strategy.
Basics
Before doing anything, you should understand the fundamentals of guest posting as a concept. Essentially, a guest post is a blog that your business writes but that gets posted to someone else’s website. So, if your site specializes in women’s clothing, you could write a blog about the latest winter fashion trends. Instead of having it on your site, though, you’ll find a somewhat related site and post it there. Depending on how familiar that audience will be with fashion trends, you may need to tweak your content to be appropriate. When guest blogging, the most important thing is to include links back to your site.
Frequency
Businesses should post guest blogs to relevant websites in a similar niche. It is recommended that the website has a higher domain authority to help your site build credibility. Approximately 60% of blogs will write between one to five guest posts per month.
Technical Logistics
Of course, you can’t just start guest blogging and put it onto other sites. You’ll need to get permission from the other site to publish your content. Start the process by scouting for posting opportunities, typically from blog-centric sites that are semi-related to your industry. A blog focused primarily on fashion will be great for a clothing site. Often, these sites will have guidelines for what content they’ll accept. Contact the blog owner with a pitch that meets their criteria, and ideally, they’ll accept it. Then you can write quality blog content (hiring professional writers wouldn’t hurt) and send it in. The blog will officially post it once it’s been approved.
Why Give Websites Free Content?
A common question asked about guest blogging is why you should go to all the effort to give other sites what is essentially free content. You aren’t making guest posts for the benefit of other sites. You’re making them to benefit your site. When done effectively, it can be one of the most powerful SEO tools at your disposal.
The Benefits
There are numerous benefits you get from guest blogging, including the following:
Big Return on Investment
The biggest benefit of guest posts is that the return on investment (ROI) for them is huge. Why? Because it brings a larger audience to your site. If people are reading posts on your site, they likely already know about it or your products. If people are reading posts on another site, there’s a chance they’ll be discovering your business for the first time. That will get you more potential customers and sales than if you were simply advertising to people already aware of your store.
Build Your Reputation
The next benefit of guest blogging is that you can increase your brand’s reputation. This is because having your content approved by other sites will give the impression that those sites respect you. Thus, consumers will believe that you have something to offer. Anyone can put information on their own site, but that doesn’t mean the post or their products are worth anything. Having your posts on other sites will show that your site is worth something. Reputation is huge among many internet shoppers, especially as social media rates continue to surge. Ensuring that your brand is one people can trust will get you the most success.
Boost Domain Authority
Another benefit of guest blogging is that it will boost your site’s domain authority. Essentially, domain authority refers to how frequently other sites link to your site. The more others link to it, the higher authority your site gains. With that authority comes better results within internet indexing and ranking, a key factor to improving your SEO efforts. When Google crawls through many sites and sees that your site gets linked to frequently, it will think your site is important, and thus have better rankings within search results. When your site is the one appearing at the top of Google’s suggestions, you can get more visitors than before.
Other Search Index Benefits
Google isn’t the only platform that you benefit from with guest blogging. It will also boost your performance with other search query platforms as well. The most prominent example is the Amazon Echo or Alexa. With a good campaign, it is possible to increase your Alexa Rank by 600,000. More and more people are using voice smart platforms to look for products. Getting ahead of the curve can do wonders for your site’s performance in the future.
Raise Brand Awareness
If you embark on guest blogging campaigns for sites that are outside the typical realm of your site, you can reach a whole new audience. This can be a huge draw for your site, as you need to constantly think about bringing in new customers to keep business performance up. Remember. People gradually drop off your site. You can’t keep them forever. If you don’t find new market niches to get new customers then you can slowly lose more and more profits. Plus, there may be a particular market that will love your products that you simply haven’t discovered yet. Now’s the time to get a brand new set of people in love with your products.
Better Industry Relationships
The benefits of guest blogging aren’t limited to your customer base. It can also be a wonder for your relationships within the industry. The more you communicate with other sites and produce content for them, then the better your relationship with them will be. That can open up many new opportunities as those companies may seek you out for future projects or let you in on some other developments that you can take advantage of. You can’t find amazing business success on your own. You need to be a part of the appropriate ecosystem. Guest blogging can be your ticket into it.
More Leads
Your marketing strategy should be a consistent hunt for new leads and how to attract customers through those leads. With guest posts, you have an additional tactic through which to identify the different leads out there. Keep an eye on the customers that are drawn to your guest posts and how they may differ from your typical customers. These kinds of organic leads have a sizable conversion rate of 14.6%.
How to Develop a Successful Guest Blogging Strategy
Now that we’ve gone over the benefits of guest blogging, we can discuss how to optimize your strategy.
1. Set Attainable And Measurable Goals
You don’t want to start out your strategy by trying to put out tons of posts for different sites all at once. That’s unsustainable and leaves you at risk of huge burnout. Start with some simple goalposts that you know you’ll be able to reach. And take each step at a time. Skipping steps may get you faster results, but you won’t have a foolproof strategy.
2. Choose Topics That Benefit Your Business
Your guest blogging topics should be relevant to your business to some degree. You have some flexibility since these posts won’t be going on your site, but they shouldn’t be so far out of left field that linking to your site would raise some eyebrows. An easy approach is writing a to-do guide that will reference some gear or product that will help them which offers a natural point to link back to your site. People will logically follow the link to easily get the gear if they don’t already have it, making this an easy conversion point.
3. Find Relevant, High-Authority Sites
Relevance, like with the guest blogging posts themselves, is flexible, but you should put emphasis on the high-authority part. Part of your guest post quest is building the authority of your own site. You do that by linking with sites that have already established authority. If you put out content for a low authority site, people will think the same about your business. Do your research and look at some reviews to know what other sites in the industry customers trust.
4. Conduct Guest Posting Outreach
Once you’ve settled on what sites you want to host your content, you need to start with your guest blogging outreach. This is a pretty simple task. A majority of sites have contact pages where you can easily get in touch with the owners. Be polite and pitch an idea that will abide by their content standards. If you want to increase your chances, you can butter them up by saying how much you respect their site. Ideally, they will get back to you soon and allow you to post on their site. If not, there are still plenty of other sites you can work with.
6. Produce Quality Content
This is the part of guest blogging that really matters. Your content can’t be phoned in just to get some links back to your site, it needs to be good so it can attract readers. For one thing, it should be on a topic that people will actually want to read about. If it’s too niche or uninteresting you won’t end up attracting many people to your site. Next, the content should be well researched so the reader gets the impression the writer and your company really know what they’re talking about. Lastly, the writing needs to be engaging. People shouldn’t be bored to death reading through an article. Your guest blogging needs to be interesting and easy for readers to follow along.
7. Link Back to Your Site
The next most important thing is of course linking. Links are what bring people and Google in from the article to your site. But it’s not as simple as slapping links everywhere you possibly can. Links need to have relevant anchor text and should be employed with purpose. Typically, the best results will be a link every hundred words or so. But not all the links in your guest blogging should be back to your site. Give some to the host site or to valid information sources so the content doesn’t come across as disingenuous.
8. Promote the Content
Link to the specific content you want to promote with the same standards we outlined above. We can’t understate the importance of relevance enough. People won’t click a link that comes across as manufactured. It needs to be natural and make sense.
9. Track the Results
Through Google Analytics or other platforms, you can directly track the results of your guest blogging strategy. If your results aren’t what you hoped, look back at your foundations. Were your goals attainable? Was the topic well chosen and on a relevant site? How were your linking practices? It may take some trial and error, but you will see results if you follow these steps.
Wrap-Up
Group of people sitting in front of a wall with “blog” written on itGuest blogging is a valuable tool that can greatly boost your SEO efforts. While producing quality content for other websites may seem counterproductive, it is a necessary investment in business growth and can bring in a much larger audience to your site. It also helps with your site’s authority and Google ranking, making it vital for SEO strategies. If it seems too challenging to tackle on your own, don’t worry. You can enlist the services of an SEO content marketing agency to help. Or, if you need more info, check out the other helpful articles here. At BestSEO, we have everything to improve your SEO campaign.