If you’re seeking ways to demonstrate thought leadership while also improving SEO, guest posting is an excellent tactic. It should have a place in your content strategy because of all you stand to gain. The benefits of guest posting support your brand in many ways.
With so many opportunities for guest posting, you should prioritize it. In this post, we’ll provide some best practices for getting your content on other websites and detail its benefits.
Guest Posting Basics
Guest blogging can happen in several ways on different types of domains. The most prevalent are:
- Industry publications or associations
- Partner websites
- Third-party content hubs (i.e., Medium)
- LinkedIn posts (anyone with an account can publish content)
- Resource hubs (i.e., G2)
- Bylines on high domain authority websites (i.e., Forbes Council)
Apart from LinkedIn and Medium, websites will have parameters for guest posting and require a pitch. These parameters often include not mentioning your product or being salesy. In general, guest posts should be educational pieces where your brand shows thought leadership. In most cases, you do receive at least one backlink. The author also gets a byline with their bio, which delivers more brand recognition.
Why Pursue Guest Posting? The Benefits Are Worth the Investment
If you’re on the fence about guest posting or need to convince leadership it’s a worthy pursuit, these benefits will add context and clarity.
To prove the ROI (return on investment) of guest posting, let’s look at some data.
Guest Posting ROI
Guest posting is common. If you’re not doing it, your competition probably is, as 60 percent of blogs write one to five guest posts each month.
Some more interesting data points came from an analysis of 379 guest posts and interviews with 20 authors. Here are some things the author of the post determined about the tactic’s ROI:
- Guest posting has long-term ROI; it won’t happen overnight.
- Posts on other websites are a great lead generator.
- 65 percent of the authors interviewed said guest posting helped them reach their goals.
- The majority of authors (53 percent) said guest posting was very valuable.
- The top results of guest posting were brand building, increased traffic, and more customers.
Image: Luca Tagliaferro
Data-backed ROI is a good reason to try a strategy. Next, we’ll talk in-depth about the benefits.
5 Benefits of Guest Posting
Building Backlinks
Backlinks are essential for any SEO strategy. They are a signal to search engines that the content with the link offers value. It’s a “technical” endorsement. The higher the domain authority of referring sites, the better. In most cases, the sites that you’ll be pitching have high domain authority.
This type of link building is natural, as it makes sense that the content written by your brand would link back to it. High quality links can boost your ranking on search engines, which is something every content team wants.
Boosting Referral Traffic
Referral traffic is critical for any website. You can’t expect that people will always find you through a keyword search or by directly typing in your URL. Within your content analytics, you can see your main referrers. So, this is a way to test out the value of guest posting.
When buyers find your brand through a third-party, it’s also a “warm” introduction. They probably trust the website they are on, and that contributes to credibility for your brand.
Greater Reach and Exposure
Guest posting can dramatically expand your reach. You may be trying to hook buyers you already market to or a completely new segment. Either way, you’ll get much more exposure on an industry publication than you would from your blog alone.
People on these sites are likely to learn and research options for their problems. If they find content that tells a great story with a problem-solution model, they may be more likely to click on your link and check out your solution. This is all trackable, as well, in your analytics dashboard.
Establishing Thought Leadership
Beyond the benefits of SEO and website traffic, thought leadership is at the top of the list. Being a thought leader in your space helps you develop trust with an audience. If they trust you and recognize your expertise, they’ll be more likely to engage with your company to remedy their challenges. There’s really no better way to build credibility in your space than with thought leadership.
Strengthening Partnerships
Most companies have partners that have synergies that help a mutual audience succeed. These partnerships often include referrals back and forth. While you likely do some co-branding with each other, having a reciprocal blogging relationship makes the relationship stronger.
Work out a plan to do a series of guest posts for each other. This will help everyone in winning more business and serving customers.
Crafting a Guest Posting Strategy
All tactics start with your content strategy. If you have goals that align with guest posting—thought leadership, SEO, etc., you should develop a plan. Building a strategy includes these steps:
- Research opportunities: Look for any guest posting options that correlate with where your audience searches for information. You can also investigate platforms that have high authority, such as Forbes.
- Gather requirements: Develop your plan by collecting data from these websites, including their parameters.
- Connect with publications: Next, you’ll probably need to pitch your idea. Create a template that follows their requests and positions the topic as valuable to their readership.
- Create a workflow: Once you actually score the opportunity, you should put the project on your content calendar and design workflows to get the project from idea to submission.
Ready to Experience the Benefits of Guest Posting?
There is tremendous value in guest posting. From boosting SEO to setting your brand up as an expert, it can deliver worthwhile benefits. Now, you just need to set your course and execute!
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