Guest blogging is a great way to promote yourself on the web, increase your visibility, and drive traffic to your own blog or website, at least it is if you do it right. However, unless your strategy is well thought out, your guest posts may well be in vain.
First things first.
Your first challenge will be getting to be a guest blogger in the first place. For this reason this should be your number one strategy point.
You need to decide where you would like to guest blog, taking into account your target audience and subject you are blogging about. What niche or industry do you work in and what is it about you and your experience which will get you accepted as a guest blogger? If you are posting solely to get more traffic to your site then it is just not going to work.
You really have to have a valid reason why you would be a great guest blogger. What’s in it for the blog owner in return? Will you be singing their praises on your blog, is your content appropriate for there blog in the first place? No one will let you post on their blog unless there is a gain for them.
Engage
One trap not to fall into is posting a guest blog on a page which you have little interest in or are not passionate about, regardless of the potential readership. Unless you share the audience’s passion, the post will not be successful, and it is highly unlikely you will get traffic to your own site. Don’t be fooled into thinking that blogging for someone else requires less effort than posting on your own site. It requires more. You already have an audience and followers on your own blog; your goal is to attract new followers. If you are unenthusiastic about the subject matter, this will be reflected in your guest post.
It is important to engage with your audience. This could be by leaving comments on relevant blogs or following people in the relevant community on Twitter etc.
All About You
You normally only have a few sentences for a bio, so make them count. By all means link to your own blog, but do it as a hyperlink to your name. Make your bio interesting and snappy. No one is interested in what school you went to or the grades you achieved, unless it has direct relevance to the subject matter.
Carpe Diem
Seize the day, or in this case ‘capture the moment’. This could be the time when a lot of extra traffic comes to your site. So what is there for new visitors on your site at the moment? Engaging content? A free exclusive offer? Your latest product or ebook? Do all the links to your social media work? People don’t tend to come back and read a blog post twice, they read it once, and if you are lucky they will click on the author bio…once.
Share the Love
If a fellow blogger has been gracious enough to allow you to post on their blog then be grateful and share the love. The least you can do is promote their blog. You can follow their pages on Facebook, Twitter etc or mention them in your guest blog. You could even put a link to them on your website, or allow them to guest blog on your blog if applicable. Cooperation and support for others in any industry is not a new thing. Social media may be a new online concept, but networking has been around for donkeys; and it is a very powerful tool. Use it well.
Will Stone is a dedicated blogger whose niche topic (other than the process of blogging itself) is career progression in all it various forms. If you’d like to read more of his work, head over to http://www.bedschamber.co.uk/.