Guest blogging—very few people talk about it and fewer people actually do it. It’s basically the practice of writing and publishing your content for other websites. It’s that simple. This classic content marketing strategy can help you expand your reach, get more brand awareness, and make people interested in your business.
Honestly, it’s probably one of the simplest things you can do to drive traffic to your website because it’s not just a one-time traffic-generation method. Guest blogging is a consistent, long- term tactic to generate a stream of traffic to your site.
So, how do you do it? Let me walk you through this process. First, you write an article of value.
An important thing to remember about a quality guest post is that you’re not writing about your business; your article should be an excellent source of information, not an advertisement.
You can share valuable information that engages readers and educates them, or you can share your experiences as an authoritative expert with in-depth knowledge about your industry. You teach people something they didn’t know before reading your article.
Make sure to follow any guest blogging guidelines before sending a personalized email to the blog owner. Some blog owners want guest posters to pitch an idea, while others prefer to receive a fully completed post. You could take a look at other existing guest posts to get an idea of what to write for blogs within your industry and see the best blogging format.
And then, at the very bottom of the article, there’s this short paragraph called an author bio. Now, this is where you tell people all about yourself and what you do in just a few sentences. It’s a great opportunity to let readers know more about you, and you can even add a link that people can click to get a special offer.
Let’s talk about what exactly you should put in your author bio, because many people don’t use it effectively. Your bio is probably the most important part of your guest post, since it’s the only place where you can promote your website, product, service, or anything else.
Think of it as your own memorable 30-second elevator pitch. Okay, so here’s how you can craft an amazing author bio for your guest post. In the first line, you can simply tell people the most important information about yourself, whether you’re a CEO, a founder, a best-selling published author, or anything else.
Then, you can add an element of validation that makes the readers see you as a highly trustworthy and credible source. Provide links to your social media channels where people can easily connect with you. And, of course, you can include a link back to your own website, such as your homepage or another page, if the blog owner allows it. It’s an excellent way to drive traffic and create inbound links to your site.
Keep your author bio short, sweet, and direct to the point, preferably no more than 100 words or around three to five sentences.
Here’s the last piece to make your author bio really entice people to click on that link. The trick is to offer something valuable that you’re willing to give away for free. It can be anything, really. You can offer a report, a checklist, a video, or even an ebook at no cost at all to make people click on your link.
Everybody loves to get something for free. I can assure you it’s going to make people visit your link. So go ahead and gift them. Get them to actually visit your website. Then, of course, capture their names and email addresses, and get them on your list. That’s the whole point—to drive traffic to your list.
Now, all this traffic should be coming to a page where you can collect the names and email addresses of prospects. And, in ex- change, you’re going to give them something they find incredibly interesting for free.
So, we have two things right now. We’ve got this well-thought- out article, and we’ve got an amazing author bio. What’s our next step? Well, we need to find guest blogging opportunities to publish our article.
It’s all about distribution. I say that marketing is nothing more than finding various methods to distribute your content and ultimately get people to visit your website. So, where do we do this? Where do we distribute our guest post? There are many places to find guest blogging opportunities, but there’s one place that I just think is an amazing resource and it’s called guestposttracker.com.
If you go to guestposttracker.com, you’ll find “Our Services” on the upper-right side of the homepage. When you click on that, you can find thousands of potential guest blogging sites upon selecting “Guest Posting List.” So, you can actually buy the list—yes, you have to make a purchase—and it’s all worth it. Just go there and see it for yourself.
It’s not through an affiliate link or anything like that. You can simply visit that site and access an extensive list of guest blogging sites. You can find more than 1,500 blogs for only $99. It’s absolutely timesaving. That site has a lot of different categories, including 100+ business, 40+ education, 65+ fashion, 120+ finance, and 130+ health guest blogging websites. You can easily keep track of the sites where you sent a submission and discover new blogs every day.
You get easy, instant access to all these blogs, who to contact, and how to reach them. And then you send a personalized message and present your article. It’s that simple. Again, as I said earlier, there are guest posting guidelines to follow, so make sure to know the rules.
Another useful site for guest posting is outreachmama.com. This website provides valuable resources about creating a guest post and also offers guest posting services if you want the entire process conveniently done for you. If you just do a quick Google search, you’ll find a ton of places where you can submit your guest post.
Once you’ve sent a pitch, a blog idea, or a fully completed article to reputable blogs within your industry, what happens is that some of those sites accept your article. We don’t know exactly how much traffic they’re getting, but the great news is that your article reaches a whole new audience. This means you significant- ly increase your chances of getting exposure to new prospects.
Why do I like this kind of traffic generation for long-term business building? Well, once your article gets published on a website, it’s basically there forever. You might get traffic today, tomorrow, next month, and so on. It’s a long-term content strategy that you’d have working for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
And it’s very simple to do. This long-term content strategy will drive traffic to your website and increase brand awareness not only today but for many years to come, all because you contributed something of value to blogs within your industry. Try it and see where it takes you.
