Patricia

Have you planned to use a guest blogging strategy in your content marketing plan? No, now is the time to think about it. Over the years, we have listened to the speculations about the death of guest blogging. However, you will be surprised to know that this tactic remains among the most effective ways to promote yourself and your business. Yes it is true about the issue with guest blogging. It isn’t a magic trick for growth, but it also doesn’t have to be that way. When we say guest blogging, we are referring to a writing a piece of content for someone else’s blog as a part of an inbound marketing strategy. Some of the primary goals of guest blogging comprises bringing traffic back to website, building back-links and creating relationships with other bloggers and companies.

Before going further, let see how the goals could be achieved with Guest blogging. So, you are a business and you want guests to contribute high-quality content, but if you are a bit skeptical if you should do it or not, we are here to help you. Because content is key to achieve lead generation, search engine optimization, and industry thought leadership, guest blogging plays a major role in success of a website. Let’s see how:

1. Generating leads: Diving deeper into how-to topics and writing evergreen topics can get you more leads. You can also entice the visitors with your ideas to continue learning through links to more educational resources on your website.

2. SEO of website: If your website is properly optimized, you are able to gain more visitors on it. This can be done with properly written content that is optimized with keywords.

3. Thought leadership: With informative and effective content written on your website, you can build trust with your audience and establish credibility in your space.

In this article, we’re going to talk about how to create a successful guest blogging strategy to gain more visibility for your business and brand and improve lead generation.

Ready? Let’s dive in!

Step “0”: Planning

This is same as your most of the projects in business. Moving a prospering guest blogging campaign needs a full-proof plan with goals and tasks mentioned clearly for you before you start. So, prepare a project plan with this information:

Define goals: Underline the goals which you wish to accomplish with the launch of this project. What are looking for? Do you want to rank in the top spot or do you want to get more referral traffic for your business? Define your goals first and then strategize and plan ahead accordingly.

Timeline: Timeline is important for any project to be successful. Be sure when exactly you want to begin and end your campaign.

Targets: Be clear on your targets. Set weekly or monthly targets for the emails that you’ll send and the guest posts that you’ll write.

This entire process will help you achieve your goals in streamlined manner.

Step “1”: Know Your Goals

For any successful marketing strategy, it requires you to be clear on your goals. Same with the blogging, an effective strategy starts with knowing our goals and ways to get there.

The goals for a guest blogging strategy comprises:

• Driving traffic on website to get more and sales
• Spreading awareness of products, brand, and services
• Attracting inbound links to improving SEO
• Increase in number of email subscribers or social media visitors

Before going ahead with anything, it is important to set a goal in mind. This will help you to frame the bio correctly and ensure that the resource people see the same when you deliver what you promise.

Step “2”: Sourcing opportunities

Writing a guest post is not enough, before writing one should find a site that accepts guest authors and is actively looking for content. While looking for them, keep in mind different people do it differently. However, the most effective way is to come up with a list of content topics, before you do your outreach. Once you’re done, the easiest way to source guest post opportunities is via email. Create a template and use merge tags to dynamically insert your prospects’ first name, company name, etc. into your emails when you send them out in bulk.

Make sure to contribute to the sites which aren’t waste of time. You know most of the time, the blogs that you could contribute aren’t worth your time because they don’t have an engaged audience.

Find blogs worth contributing to by asking few questions such as:

• Do they share their own content?
• Does our ideal audience adjust with this blog?
• Do they give writers credit & a link to their blog?
• Do they have the potential to drive traffic?
• Do they have an engaged audience?
• Do they reply to the comments?

Initially, you may need to contribute to smaller blogs because it takes some samples of posts you’ve written for other sites to post on larger blogs.

Step “3”: Get ready with your guest post

Now that you have planned what you are going to write and have a list of websites that accept guest posts, it is time to get your posts ready. Now it is time to pick up the websites that are worth writing for. Start with smaller blogs because those are more likely to be accepted as your guest post. With some published by your side, you can level up.

Publish guest post on websites which:

• Have an access to the authoritative link profile
• Are in your forte and can align with your customers
• Post qualitative content
• Can bring traffic to the website
• Won’t bury link
• Have a high significance on social media followers

Now it’s time to…

Warm up Your Targets: Now that you want to guest post on a site, you have to get on that site’s radar screen. Here is how you can do it:

1. Sharing on Social Media: If you want to get your brand etched, share the stuff on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
2. Comments on Blog: Take some time from your busy schedule to leave insightful and helpful comments.
3. Emailing: Email the owner of the website a week or two before. This email will tell them how a specific piece of content could helped you.

Step “4”: Connect before you pitch

It is necessary for the Blog editors to get number of pitches from people whom they don’t know. Yes, it can be a true fact that your pitch could be the best in the world, however, it’s not a guarantee that it will get you the guest posting opportunity. A great pitch definitely helps to land in the opportunity you are waiting for. People are more likely to react in a positive way to the people whom they recognize. And, this could be as simple as:

• Replying on statuses of social media
• Commenting on blog posts
• Replying to email newsletters
• Sharing content
• Tagging the blogger

It is not always that you have to tell them to do something, or pitch them. You just have to engage them in a conversation. Also, connecting for a pitch is definitely a good idea because it encourages you to get to know the blogger better whom you’ll eventually pitch.

Step “6”: Write a great guest post

Guest posts are only of value when it provides value to the readers. A guest post should be comprehensive, well-written, data-driven, and interesting. One can add information about your business and a link of website in the author bio and a few other things, but a guest post should never considered as an advertisement. The editors generally allow one or two links in the article body, but always keep in mind that you shouldn’t try to sell. Link only to additional resources valuable to the readers. Coming on writing a blog post, it must be written keeping the audience in mind. Confirm few things, before writing a blog i.e. does your audience use a formal language? Will they understand jargon? Or are they willing to adapt your voice. Always ask the blog editor for details before writing a blog.

Setting guidelines for guest post:

Guidelines are for those, who will be accepting the blog. Setting clear and defined rules will help you attract writers. It will also ensure that you are treating guest posting seriously. Below mentioned are some of the suggestions, which could be included in guidelines:

• 100% original content will be considered.
• Submitted posts cannot be published anywhere else.
• Make sure to not cover the same topic that has been already covered unless you are presenting a unique angle.
• We reserve the right to edit, adapt and update your guest blog content.
• We reserve the right to reject contributions.
• Consider including photos, graphics, and screenshots in post.
• Posts must be well-researched and fully supported.
• Words must range from between 1,000 to 3,000.
• Post must be well-written and without any spelling mistakes.
• Posts should include no more than one link to your company’s website.

Step “7”: Following Up

Our work doesn’t end by just submitting the blog post. We must take follow up for every guest post that we send to the editors.

1. Respond to comments actively: Don’t just post and run. Take your time and respond to comments on other people’s post as they roll in.
2. Promote the post on Social media: Social media is one great platform which is effective and is a win-win. It will drive traffic to the guest post you submitted and gives you an opportunity to share blog post with your community.
3. Thank you note: We are just not posting for once. So, a little thank you note really helps you stand out.

Wrapping up

Guest blogging is one real big deal. A key for successful guest blogging is contributing them only to blogs which are a match with your industry. In this article, we have written proven strategy for your know how to approach guest blogging. A guest blog should be built on the right foundation with a clever strategy. Guest blogging takes determination, time, hard work and a lot of patience and it does takes some failures to ensure the next one is a success. Also, for the blog owners too, we have mentioned the criteria to accept only high-quality articles that meet your requirements and audience expectation. Guest bogging is all about making your audience happy.

So, what is your technique of successful blog post? Share with us!

A Number of Easy Ways to Increase Traffic to your Website

Traffic to your website is the most vital factor that determines the fate of your business and the nett results of the performance of your marketing strategies. Driving the desirable number of visitors to your website is not only your problem, it is the problem of majority of content marketers.

Most of the content professionals are still struggling to know what exactly is most important to their specific audience. Content professionals are still not very clear about the goal of the audience, at a particular stage of the journey of the customers and the steps taken in the customer’s journey by the website visitors, in visiting your website and ultimately converting into sales for you.

What is google local SEO that to be known before going to start your website SEO for local ranking. SEO has some tricks that doing properly brings google search results in top pages.  I think 30 days results will be with a great strategy.

Let us discuss on this topic now. How to get more traffic to your website?

Creation of Contents

You can create contents that attract the right people to your company, through blogging.

It is important for you to know your buyer persona. It will help you to create contents that will attract the right visitors to your website. You will be able to create contents that will attract your audience to your website, is by knowing your audience well.

These steps will help you to write a good blog post:-

• You have to identify your buyer persona, by finding out more from the job titles and points of pain, about your audience.
• You need to do an extensive SEO research by learning what your audience is searching for on the search engines. Then you will be able to provide them the right contents.
• Start by writing a draft first and post it for answering the questions asked by your audience.
• You have to publish your posts regularly on your blog, then.
• This should be followed by promoting your blog post in social media and e mail newsletters, by you. It will help in generating higher traffic, which will make it rank high in search engines.

Expertise on the Topic

The higher you rank in Google, the more organic traffic it generates to your website. The websites those are topic experts are always favored by Google. These experts know about the subjects they are writing about in the content.

You need to create a pillar page to be seen as an expert on a topic. This pillar page is an extensive blog post that covers every possible detail of the topic. You then write “Cluster Content”. These are supporting blog posts. You can target long tail keywords, which will show that you have covered a topic extensively and exhaustively. You will get a higher rank on search engines by focusing on long term traffic.

This pillar cluster model of blog posts organizes contents on your site around a single topic and search terms, through the internal linking. The search engines can easily crawl and categorize all the contents you have created on a particular topic only. It helps you to rank easily for the search term. It also helps your visitors to navigate your website and move through all the related pages. It boosts traffic for all the pages in your topic cluster.

Paid Advertising

Paid advertising can help you to drive traffic quickly to your website. You can run pay per click or retarget ads with search engines. You can also run display ads or sponsored posts on social media. You have to have a strategy of having different types of advertising.

As per experts, the spending by companies on social media will doubled, in the next five years, especially by the companies, who are making at least 10% of their sales online.

Organic Social Media

This strategy is not new. But it is still an attractive strategy for marketers. You can use posting on Social media platforms, Instagram Stories, live videos etc. You must be one among the firsts to adopt its latest features, to be a success in organic social media.

Facebook is releasing a feature on Messenger. It is known as Automated Lead Generation feature. This will allow your business to open an automated chat box with Messenger, to link the contents offered on your website. It will be a big help in directing traffic to your website.

You should have a diverse strategy for social media to use the right social media platforms for posting your contents. Platforms such as You Tube and Pinterest help in generating lots of traffic to your website.

Be cautious about two things. Never spam your audience and Stay active with community management. People will like you and your brand, when you like them and give prompt replies to their queries.

By Analyzing your Website

Use the platforms that help in analyzing your website’s performance. This will help you in knowing your audience better. These platforms will show you where you are losing your visitors. This again will help in creating the right type of contents to attract high amount of traffic to your website.

By Organizing Contests or Giveaways

This is a great idea to drive traffic to your website. It will reward your visitors and give your website a quick boost. Giveaways can be organized on social media, through your E mails etc. You have to follow the given steps in doing so:-

• You decide first the social media platforms on which you would like to host your giveaways.
• Decide a lucrative prize.
• Decide the criteria for the giveaways.
• Do write an attractive ad copy for the event.
• Make it graphical.
• Make the posting and promote actively.

Try the Influencers

It is the most budget friendly option to drive traffic to your website. You can do wonders by collaborating with You Tube. When your influencers post your discount codes, links, reviews or giveaways, you get into their audiences to drive them to your website.

Word of Mouth is the most convincing factor for your customers, to make them buy from you. You have to make your customers happy and work with your influencers.

By building an E mail List

Try using your current customers and readers to drive traffic to your website. Your posting a new post or blog, promotes it to your followers or subscribers for an immediate boost in the traffic to your website. You have to make your website a content heavy website, which becomes helpful in traffic goals, conversions and generation of sales leads.

• You should generate contents that require your visitors to share their E mail address to receive the content. You can also include Call to Action for your content offers on your website.
• You can include Sign Up forms on your website, from your Home page to your About page. Your visitors will sign up for newsletters, if they are happy with you.
• You should promote your E mail newsletters on social media platforms, through a post or a content giveaway. It will convert your followers into your subscribers.

By Engaging Community

Traffic to your website depends on your brand recognition. You can be active and engaged in your community to achieve brand recognition. You can join a Facebook group in your industry and be involved in the discussions, in answering questions on public forum websites and by interacting with your followers on social media platforms.

By writing Guest Posts

It is again a good way to generate traffic to your website. It makes you active in your community. It also links to your website.

You find a site that is good for your business. You then draft a blog post and write a pitch. You do your research ahead of time and be recognized and applauded by your readers, who will be visiting your website in turn. You can also find the gaps in the existing contents and write pieces that fill in the gap. This will make you highly appreciated writer.

By doing on page SEO

It will make your website to rank high on search engines. This will bring in more traffic. You can use SEO elements such as, Page Title, Header, Meta Descriptions – Step by Step Guide to Flawless On Page SEO

By acquiring Quality back links

Acquiring quality back links will make you an authority in your industry. You will automatically rank high in the search engines and the traffic will be driven to your website. Your website will gain more credibility if a website with high authority links with your website.

Back links work by boosting rankings and driving referral traffic. Back links are vital ranking factor for every major search engine. Back links will improve your SERP and will result in lifting your organic traffic.

By doing Video Marketing

Video marketing is very important in your content marketing strategy. Incorporate video marketing immediately because people click on videos. You can create videos for Instagram or Facebook stories. Live videos can created by you for You Tube, Facebook watch, newsfeed videos etc.

By Repurposing Contents

By repurposing old contents, you can generate traffic to your website. You can take a well performing blog post and repurpose the blog into a video. You can also write a blog post on a good podcast. He well performing contents will help drive traffic to your website.

By using SEO Tools

Learning to use SEO tools will help you to drive traffic to your website no ends. You must know about Google Analytics, Ahrefs or SEMrush, for this. These help you to learn what is working for your site and filter out that is not.

By doing Historical Optimization

Old blog contents are updated to generate more traffic with leads, to your website in the process of Historical Optimization. Historical Optimization is a tactic that is best suited for those blog posts which are around for many years. Since you need to be generating a great amount of organic search traffic to your website and build a good mass of blog subscribers and social media followers and you need a good repository of old blog posts with you, historical optimization is there to help you. 

By Optimizing Voice Search

Voice Search is becoming increasingly important to have a high ranking for your website. Majority of working adults currently speak to their Voice Enabled devices, minimum once daily.

• You need to do research long tail keywords for optimizing voice search because people speak full sentences in using voice search.
• You have to write contents that are focused on answering the visitor’s queries.
• You need to optimize for snippets because of smart speakers such as, Alexa and Google Home look etc. You have to write quick summaries in your posts to make it easy for search engines and smart speakers to find their answers.

By doing Local SEO

Local SEO is very important for your business. It gathers information from local search by search engines. It relies on signals such as local contents, social profile pages, links, and citations to provide most relevant results to the visitor.

For queries related to local searches by the users, the results are generated by using the user’s location. Tools such as Google My Business help businesses to manage their directory listing and citations, to show up during local searches.

You have to careful about:-

• Ensuring your name, address, and phone number to be consistent on Google My Business and on social media pages.
• Using a directory management tool to monitor directories, such as, Yelp etc.
• Researching and using location based search terms on Google Trends. It will analyze popular search terms on different regions.

By doing A/B Testing

A/B testing is a split test that helps you to know the version of a campaign that performs the best. It gives you key information about your audience, to help you to create tailor made contents and offers, to maximize traffic to your website. You can use a good tool to do this.

By doing Internal Linking

Internal links help link the visitors to the other pages on your website. Visitors continuing visiting the other pages on your website are most likely to convert and support your brand.

Pillar and Cluster pages link back and forth that boosts your website’s credibility on major search engines. This increases the possibilities of conversion.

By Doing Technical SEO

Technical SEO focuses on your website’s backend. It sees the ways your pages are organized and technically set up. The factors involved are crawling, page speed, indexing and many more.

You can do technical SEO by:-

• Fixing broken links and redirects.
• Creating X<L sitemap for all your sub domains.
• Setting up language Meta Tags.
• Adding Custom H1 and introducing the topic pages.

By building Community

Community building is great for brand building. The brand enthusiasts help driving traffic to your website. You can build a community on a number of social media platforms, by joining groups from your own industry. It helps in creating value for you and also for linking back to your website.

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Communities take you on the top in your customer’s eyes. It also engages your followers and you can learn more about your audiences.

By Content Offers

Content Offers are lead magnets. Contents drive traffic to your website and generate leads. This varies according to different stages of buyer’s journey and includes various contents.

By doing Media Coverage and Public Relations

Media coverage builds brand awareness for your company and that helps in to driving traffic to your website. Your marketing and public relation team working together can generate a huge amount of traffic to your website. It also helps in creating an excellent amount of word of mouth.

Media Coverage provides excellent third party validation for your company. You can have stories about everything in your business, about your company and products, new offers, company culture or even your industry thought leadership, to circulate among your followers.

By having Social Share buttons

Social Sharing buttons are links for your readers to share your contents on social media. This makes your readers your promoters and the traffic to your site increases.

You can start by:-

• Asking people to share your contents on social media.
• Creating strong contents.
• Including quotable contents.
• Adding multimedia.

By Optimizing CTR

You have to optimize your Click through Rate that measures that clicked on your post and read it against the number of people that viewed the link to your post.

Google Search Console is a great tool to measure your CTR. You have to write compelling Meta Descriptions and Titles. Your description should be interesting to readers.

By posting Academy and Knowledge based posts

Educational contents are great help to drive traffic to your website. You can create academicals and educational contents to help your audience and it will drive good amount of traffic to your website.

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Once you increase the traffic to your website, think about increasing the conversion rate.

Do you want to share any additional information about methods of increasing traffic to websites? Do connect with us.