There are all kinds of ways to promote a website these days. Many of them involve paying for services like PPC (pay-per-click) advertising. In fact, it’s fair to say that a large part of any marketing budget involves online advertising costs.
But, what if there was a way you could increase brand awareness for little to no cost? You might be thinking that I’m talking about spamming or some kind of “black hat” SEO techniques. No, you’d be quite wrong! What I am talking about is guest posting. Let me explain what it is and why it’s something you should do for your business:
PixabayWhat is guest posting?
There are more than one billion live websites online as I write this. A few million of those sites are blogs, just like this one! What many blog owners do is allow “guests” to publish content on their site.
They allow guest posts from people that have something interesting (and relevant) to say. For example, an automotive blog owner might publish a guest post from someone in the industry. Some blog owners allow people to publish content on their sites for free. Others charge a small fee that gets used towards hosting and editorial costs.
Why is guest posting a good idea for my business?
The reason to guest post is to increase your brand awareness. With a guest post, blog owners allow authors to add a link to their own website.
Guest posting isn’t just about increasing the popularity of one’s website. It’s also about building a loyal following and becoming an authority figure online. Your business will no doubt specialize in something. Guest posting allows you to tell the Internet that you’re an expert. The fact that you have published content on reputable blogs only strengthens that fact.
Where can I publish guest posts?
As I mentioned earlier, there are millions of blogs online these days! I can guarantee that you’ll find a blog in your niche in just a few seconds. Of course, it’s crucial that you only publish to popular, high-quality blogs.
There’s no point publishing to a blog that only has ten visitors a week. And it’s also a fruitless exercise posting on what is essentially a spammy blog!
The good news is some people have compiled lists of “good” blogs you could approach. This list of guest blogging sites from GuestPostTracker.com is a good start. Doing a quick and simple Google search will help you seek out other blogs.
What type of content should I write about?
It might be tempting to write a guest post about a product or service that you sell. But, it’s likely that won’t get accepted by blog owners. Why? Because it’s obvious you’re just trying to sell something!
Instead, you should consider writing about topics related to your industry. Using the automotive industry example from earlier, you could write about driverless cars. Or cool features that motorists can’t live without today.
You might even wish to open up a discussion about a trending topic that’s relevant to the blog. There are plenty of ideas that you could use for your guest posts.
Thanks for reading today’s article!
I have to agree, guest posting is something I think people gave up on way too quickly. Even if there was no SEO benefit, which there is, it is still a great advertising medium. If you guest post on the right websites you can get amazing targeted traffic to your website for free.