Guest Blogging: 5 Tips to Expand Your Business

Guest blogging is a curious practice: when done right, it can bring you a huge amount of highly targeted (and, therefore, valuable) traffic while building up useful relationships with the people in your industry along the way. At the same time, with poor realization it can sometimes bring more harm than good. In other words, if you want to try it out, you should be serious about it: do your homework, invest sufficient resources, look for the ways to get better. This article will cover the most important tips to get you started.

1. Don’t be selfish

Most people make their posts all about themselves and their businesses. All they care about when they write their posts is how much traffic they will get, what kind of exposure the post means and so on. According to Alexa Blog, 79 percent of editors say that the biggest problems they encounter when dealing with offers of posts is their overly promotional content.

It is, however, quite easy to turn your post from yet another bland promotional piece into content that will bring benefits to everyone concerned. For example, you can write a post about an interview with an authority in your industry. This way:

• The host website will get a unique post that will be interesting for its readers;
• The interviewee will get traffic and authority associated with being featured on two industry-related resources;
• You get the same advantages;
• You build long-lasting relationships with useful people.

If you put due effort into it, such a post can bring you much more than a dozen “How awesome we are” posts.

2. Hire professionals

Guest blogging is a fascinating, challenging and rewarding area of work – so much so that achieving real success in it often requires one to work on it full-time. As a business owner, you obviously cannot afford it – and small businesses rarely have an opportunity to hire a dedicated specialist to write posts and pitch them to host sites. If, however, you want to reap all the advantages associated with it, you can check out LuckyPosting, a well-reputed guest post service – this way you will be able to use all the advantages of this strategy without spending much time on it.

3. Create unique landing pages

People are impressed when they get special treatment, and there are many subtle ways to do it. Consider a tactic sometimes called Catcher’s Mitt. In practice, it means that you create a special landing page for the links leading from your posts published on each specific host website. That is, when a reader follows a link from Site A, he is greeted not by a generic landing page, but a page that is tailored for the audience of this website. It may start with a greeted addressed at them (“Hello, readers of Site A!”) and contain a giveaway that is relevant for this audience.

4. Do your homework

After you find a resource you want to work with, don’t write to its editor with an offer of a post right away. It is just the tip of an iceberg that should be preceded by a long and detailed research. Don’t just read the posting guidelines: spend a few weeks reading current and older posts, leave comments, participate in discussions. Do it meaningfully, not just to make yourself visible. Get to know the editor, learn the typical style of posts – and only after you are fully comfortable with this format, pitch your post.

5. Go for quality over quantity

Guest posting is an area where quantity never trumps quality. It is by far more useful to spend 30 or more hours doing research and writing up for a single in-depth, unique post that will knock an editor out than to spend the same amount of time writing 30 generic and yawn-inducing posts that can be found anywhere on the Internet. So get deep into your target topic, do all the possible research, get in touch with industry specialists and provide content that isn’t available anywhere else. If you pick a resource and its audience correctly, each such post will be still bringing your traffic for years to come.

Nobody becomes good at this type of promotion in a flash. The first post is always the hardest. But the best thing you can do about it is just get started – and the best time to do so is now.