If you are reading this article, it is clear that you are a strategic thinker, especially when it comes to digital marketing. You are now thinking about exploiting Guest Blogging as an opportunity for marketing your own website.

We have put together the best tips to ensure that you craft a winning Guest Blogging Strategy.

Define your strategic objective

Too often bloggers / website owners/ small business owners jump at the opportunity to be a guest poster on well known blogs without thinking about what they want to get out of it. Just like any other strategy roadmap, the starting point is to define your objectives clearly.

Some common objectives could be:

• Establishing yourself as a subject matter expert to get more work opportunities for yourself
• Generating more awareness for your website / blog
• Getting email ids for a subscriber mailing list

There may be others as well, but it helps to define your strategy by defining your objective sharply.

Assess the guest posting opportunities

Once you have identified the websites/blogs where you want or need to be seen as a guest poster, assess them for the right fit to your strategy. A simple search of the host website URL on Moz or SEMRush will give you an idea of the keywords and topics associated with it. It will also give you the domain authority index for the particular website. Weed out the websites which are suspicious or low on domain authority. See the areas that the websites are associated with and then choose the ones that complement your own domain. Are you a small business into artisanal health foods? Assess your guest posting opportunities and weed out websites that are into mass-produced or highly processed foods. Choose wisely, perhaps a sports and nutrition website would be a better fit for your guest post. Here is one good site you can read about men’s wallets.

Apply your content strategy rules to the guest post, too

Write your guest post as you would write your own. The same rules apply for guest post content. Reeling in with a great headline, optimizing the post for SEO, using infographics, making visually appealing content, all the great things you would do for posts on your own website, make sure to apply the same rules to your guest post.

In addition, heed the advice of Matej Markovic, owner of Neevee. He advises, “Write for human readers. After all, they are the ones who have the credit cards in their wallets.”

Exploit your author profile to the hilt

At the end of the guest post is the precious space of all, the space for author profile or bio-data. This is the space to achieve your objective. If it is to establish your authority as an expert or to gain backlinks to your website or get email subscribers to your newsletter, this is the space to achieve that objective.

Are you a small car interior business guest posting on a home & lifestyle blog to try and get a new set of clientele to try out your business with a promo offer? Then this is what your bio could look like.

“Adam (Eve), is nuts about cars and dreams of crazy ways to pimp your ride interiors.   As (s)he is on a giveaway spree, (s)he is throwing 5 free interior upgrades to lucky subscribers. Try your luck here.”

Use the guest post as the beginning of a relationship

The guest post doesn’t end there. It is the beginning of a relationship with the host website / blog and the new audience that just read your content. Continue to interact with the new audience in the comments section. Drop links back to your website/blog in the ensuing conversation in the comments section. Give a shout out to the host website/ blog on your own blog in return for the opportunity they offered you. This may be the beginning of a regular opportunity for you do more guest posts with them in the future.

Try our easy tips and you cannot go wrong with your guest blogging strategy. Rock your own blog through a great guest blogging game.

 

Author Bio: Deborah Tayloe is a contributing writer for Neevee, an international digital marketing agency. She loves to share her knowledge of digital marketing to help small business owners grow! Deborah is a Pennsylvania native who now resides in North Carolina, USA.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash