If you are trying to increase traffic to your site, collaborating with other, more established Internet personalities is an excellent method to try. The simplest way to do this is to offer to contribute guest blogs to other sites.
When you post content on another person’s blog, you will be able to reach an already established audience within your particular niche that is ready to find out what you can offer them.
Utilizing this marketing tool can help you boost your business faster and more effectively than just publishing content on your own site or sending out a couple of tweets.
Guest blogging is a win-win situation because you get to create great content for the blog owner and in return, you get to increase your traffic in less time. When it is done right, a single blog post can help you more than a 15-minute TV interview that no one is going to pay attention to.
Since you have your own skills and experiences, you should be able to write for numerous websites. You might even be able to distribute the same article to different sites, as long as you negotiate a non-exclusive agreement with them.
While many of the sites that you approach will offer financial compensation to their guest bloggers, you might want to consider having them publish more links alongside your author bio, rather than taking the money. This will help to open a door between their entire visitor base and your content.
Advantages of Guest Blogging
There are many advantages for both you and the blog owner where you post your guest blog. First and foremost is that you are building a good relationship with other bloggers in your industry. Building these collaborations will allow you to be linked with them more profoundly.
With time, your content may even start to be shared with their online community without you even having to ask. This can bring even more significant exposure for your business.
Thanks to the extra visibility that guest blogging gives you, your reputation and image will see a boost, along with the traffic to your website. The increased exposure will allow more readers to learn about your work and your professional skills, enabling you to become an authority on the subjects that you write about.
Another advantage of utilizing guest blogging is that it diversifies the source of traffic that you receive to your blog. Your articles as a guest will help you obtain more qualified traffic to your own blog.
Readers will be more likely to go and search for more information about your business when they enjoy the content that you post.
Finding Blogs to Write For
When you decide to try guest blogging, you’ll need to find blogs that are relevant to your niche. While there are several ways to do this, one of the easiest is through a Google Blog Search.
Google Blog Search is a specific tool that Google created to help users search specifically for blogs relevant to their search query. It allows you to facilitate the task of finding blogs that accept visiting authors.
As you look through the list of blogs, you want to not only look for blogs that are open to guest bloggers, but also look for those who have relationships with your niche and target audience.
You can also visit other websites in your niche, to see if they accept guest bloggers. Look for phrases like, “upload your article,” “write for us,” “guest author,” “columnists,” or “join.”
Another way to start guest blogging is to reach out to other bloggers. You want to maintain contact with at least ten other bloggers in your niche. If you don’t already have these kinds of connections, start reaching out and making them.
Some of the best chances to write guest posts is through the relationships that you have with other bloggers. Establish contact with those who are leaders in your market, get to know them, and ask them if they would like you to write some articles.
Selecting the Best Blogs
Once you’ve found a substantial list of possible blogs to approach for a guest blogging assignment, you’ll need to narrow down your list to the most appropriate blogs that will give you the highest exposure to a broader audience. To do this, you need to consider the following.
Traffic
It is important to choose blogs that have a greater traffic outlook than yours. You can find this by looking at the Alexa Rank, which is the number of subscribers or followers they have on Twitter.
You must be very careful when looking at the traffic numbers of other blogs. You want to find ones that have more traffic than your site, but that doesn’t have such a huge difference, because the host may tell you that they aren’t interested, because they need the collaboration to be beneficial for them.
Participation
When it comes to guest blogging, traffic isn’t everything. You also need to look at the participation level of the audience. You want to verify that there are comments for each post that is published on the blog.
It is vital that the blog already has an engaged audience. This is accomplished through the frequency of publication and length of time it has been active. It is not the same to post on an active community, chatting and sharing experiences in a personal blog, then a blog whose sole mission is to spit out the news.
Frequency of Exposure
Some blogs and websites publish content several times a day. This is because they are designed as blogs of multiple authors. With blogs and sites like these, you will only be on the cover for a couple of days. If you managed to create content that stands, great, but, on these kinds of sites your post will soon be forgotten.
Selection of Niches
It is important that you find blogs that publish in your niche or in those that are directly related to yours. Some audiences will not do you any good. The more specific you can be with your selection, the better results you can expect to see from your
efforts. You would never post about your specialty cake design business on a laundry service website, so make sure you choose wisely.
Collaborating with Other Writers
If you are more of a thinker than you are a writer, you may want to employ someone else to write your copy for you or consider inviting other professionals to provide guest blogs for your site in exchange for more significant publicity for them through their article.
Doing this will serve as another way to open your content and website to their established reader base.
The option works great because people have more faith in sources where multiple professional sources are providing their opinions on many related issues, rather than a single source.
Collaborations also serve to provide your site with fresh voices and style. This can help to bolster a dwindling interest in your site in the absence of content from any new writer.