Guest posting is one of the best ways to build backlinks. It also requires the biggest investment compared to other forms of link building. While the cost might be high, we also can’t deny that guest posting offers more than just backlinks. It also increases brand awareness, drives traffic to your website, and enables you to reach out to a new audience.
With so many benefits, it doesn’t hurt as much to spend money on it. You can also get more benefits if you know what you are doing. It doesn’t have to stop at just three benefits. You can ensure that every reader is a potential customer and your brand gets the maximum exposure.
Guest posting is not just about putting a link in a random article and publishing it on any domain other than yours. It requires extensive planning and strategic execution if you really want to make the most out of your investment. Here you will learn how you can get the worth of your money through guest posting.
Create Audience Personas First
It’s one of the most underestimated parts of any digital marketing campaign. You should always start by doing extensive research about your potential customers and creating accurate audience personas.
An audience persona is basically a form with all attributes of people who are likely to buy your products or services. This includes details like age, gender, location, income, and interests. This allows you to understand who you are targeting with your guest posts.
Source: BoagWorld
You would know where you can find these people and what you need to tell them. Without audience personas, you would be wasting money reaching out to even people who are never going to buy what you are offering.
Even if you reach the right people, you might not deliver the right message. There is a chance that your audience might not comprise just one persona. It’s alright to create multiple personas to efficiently describe your potential customers.
Pick Sites with the Same Audience
Once you have a good understanding of your prospects, it would be easier to know where you can find them. Choosing the right websites is an important part of guest posting. Your posts won’t get you any results if you publish them on websites that are entirely irrelevant to your business.
Many digital marketers would emphasize that you should pick niche-relevant websites. They are not wrong, but you don’t have to limit yourself to just that. You should look for websites that have your target audience as your visitors.
For example, if you are providing IT services, you don’t have to look for websites in the tech niche. Instead, you should look for sites that are visited by your prospects, which in this case would be business managers. So, any website that offers insights and value to businessmen would be relevant for your guest posts.
Hire a Professional Guest Posting Company
Once you start with guest posting, you will realize that it’s not exactly an easy task. It requires you to
- Search and shortlist the most relevant websites
- Reach out to website managers
- Convince them to publish your guest posts
- Make a deal for the right price
- Write research-based valuable articles
- Ensure they are published according to requirements
It would not be a problem if you had to publish only one post and there was no time constraint. However, each campaign comprises dozens of posts that have to be published in a short time to benefit the entire link-building campaign.
This is where you will have to hire help. There are many businesses providing this service, but you should take time to find a guest posting service provider that is renowned in the industry. An unreliable service would not benefit your digital marketing and you won’t get a good ROI.
Don’t Be Promotional
A guest post is not a sales pitch. Your main goal should be to provide value to your readers. This would only be possible if you actually focus on what they want. They will not trust any insights you provided in the article if they feel like you are just trying to sell something.
People don’t take salesmen seriously. They have an image as someone who would say anything, even lie, just to get a sale.
If you want to win their trust and just provide them value. Leave it up to them if they should visit your website to conduct further business. You trying to force a sale would only scare away many potential customers.
Digital marketing experts call them linkable assets. You need to create assets that people would share without having to ask them. It’s important to get shares because you get a free backlink with each share and it also increases brand awareness.
You need to create guest posts that provide so much value to readers that they would share them on their blogs and social media channels. It will not only increase the authority of the page where you published that article but also to pages that it linked. More people will get to read or view your piece of content and the mention of your brand.
Decide Goals of Each Post before Writing
Before you start to write a guest post, you should know why you are writing it. One main goal would be to provide value to readers, but there should also be some other business goals.
For example, a guest post can help repair a bad image. You can use it to get more visitors to your website. It can also increase brand awareness and help you build a personal brand.
You don’t have to choose just one goal. You can pick more, but there would be one primary and several secondary goals. A writer is able to create better content when he knows his audience and goals. Each paragraph and sentence transitions to another in a manner that slowly promotes those goals.
