If one of your goals for 2017 is to see exponential growth from your business, you aren’t alone. No matter what stage your business resides in as the year begins, new customers and community recognition can always help push it to the next level.
If you’re one of the many businesses using content marketing to reach out to new customers, you’re likely looking for something new. This could be the year that guest blogging is just the approach you need. Here are a few ways you can put guest blogging to work to quickly scale your business.
Guest Posting Steps
Step One: Find the Right Venue
To be effective, your guest posting strategy needs to include websites that have reach. Those can be the blogs of individual influencers or informative online publications with large readerships. You should put time into researching each outlet to determine if it’s the right fit, measuring its audience to determine if they’re likely to purchase from you. One way to make that determination is to learn as much as possible about your current customers. Identify the publications and social media accounts they’re likely to follow and target that type of publication to reach consumers who don’t already know about you. Once you’ve honed in on the blogs your current customers might read, you can approach those sites with an offer to guest post.
Step Two: Write Valuable Content
Once you’ve been approved to write a guest post, it’s important to create high-quality, useful content for your host. Not only will it more likely they’ll refer you to others, it also increases the chances your post will be read and shared. If you lack the skills necessary to write a blog post that captures attention, you can outsource it using one of the many platforms set up to connect businesses with writers. In addition to writing the pieces for you, you may find you can find a writer who will help you come up with topic ideas to pitch to blog hosts. Often, though, the best asset you bring to your guest blogging efforts is your own expertise, which can easily be supplemented by a grammar-checking tool.
Step Three: Promote Your Content
On the day your content goes live, it’s important to promote it as much as possible. Post about it on each of your professional social media platforms and tag your blog host. You’ll likely find your host shares the information, expanding the number of people who might see the post and learn about your brand. Promote it within your existing network, as well, sending an email to your network to encourage them to read the post and share it. Don’t forget to write up an introduction to the guest post on your own blog and add a link to send people over. The more people you send to the blog post, the more likely you are to impress the guest host with your ability to engage readers with your content.
Step Four: Measure the Results
Since your guest post is on someone else’s site, it can be difficult to track results. If you’re aware of your own site statistics, though, you may be able to look at the difference in traffic on the days surrounding your guest post. There are several metrics to monitor with guest posts, with lead generation being only one of them. If the host site links to you as a result of the guest post, you should also see a bump in search engine ranking. Google’s algorithms reward sites with links, seeing them as an authority on a certain topics, so as you increase your guest post placements, you’ll probably see improved visibility when customers are searching for terms specific to your niche. You should also pay close attention to the social insights connected to your account. Did your updates about your guest post get a great number of likes, shares, and new followers? If so, you may have accomplished your goal even if it didn’t directly lead to sales.
By putting a multi-step process in place, you can find, publish, and promote guest blog posts that get results. Over time, you can refine your strategy to get better results from each new guest post you accept.
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This article, “4 Guest Posting Steps to Grow Your Business Quickly” was first published on Small Business Trends