A blog can be an excellent addition to most websites. Blogs can help drive customers to your website so that you can promote your products or your services. If your blog is particularly well-done, you can even make money as an affiliate blogger.
Starting a blog isn’t just as simple as writing a few posts and expecting people to start visiting. To maximize traffic on your blog, you’ll need to be SEO optimized. But if you’re not optimized yet, you might be wondering how you can direct people to your blog.
This is where guest blogging is necessary. As a guest blogger, you reach out to others within your industry and offer to write content for their site. Most sites will give you credit as the writer and let you link back to your own site.
How Does Guest Blogging Help My Business?
The idea of writing for other blogs while you’re still trying to establish your own might sound absurd. After all, isn’t that content you could use on your own site?
The reason guest blogging is beneficial to your business is that it helps establish yourself as an expert within your industry, allows you to meet others within your industry, and exposes you to new audiences. Once that audience realizes that you’re knowledgeable within your industry, they’ll be more likely to visit your website.
With the right type of content on the right blogs, you’ll soon have traffic on your own blog.
How Do I Begin Guest Blogging?
If you want to make the most out of your experience as a guest blogger, don’t just settle for any site. You don’t want to end up writing for a site that is full of spam or that isn’t a leader within your industry.
You’ll want to look for sites within your industry that already have an active following. You’ll also want them to have a strong social media presence because they’re more likely to share your guest post on their Facebook or Twitter, which will further increase your audience.
Finding the right sites will take some time and research. Start by googling “your industry + guest post” to see what the market looks like. If you’re currently partnering with another company, you could also see if they’d be willing to let you write guest posts for their blog.
Once you find a potential blog, make sure to check out the type of content they’re writing to see if it aligns with your interests and make sure they have an active following. Check out the other guest posts on the site. Make sure that the site is allowing guest bloggers to link back to their own site.
If you think you have a good fit, it is time to submit a proposal. If the site has guidelines about guest blogging, read them carefully. Then, reach out to the owner of the site with a personalized email about why you’re interested in writing for them, provide some writing samples, and propose some suggested topics.
How Do I Write a Good Guest Post?
If you manage to find the right blog and they’re interested in your content, great! Now it is time to write a great guest post that they won’t have any problems publishing on their site.
Remember that this is for their site, not your own site. So you may need to adapt your usual posting style. Look through other posts on their site and see how others are formatting and styling their writing. You’ll want your own post to match the other posts on the website.
You’ll also want to keep in mind that you’re writing to inform their audience, not to advertise your own site. While increasing traffic to your blog might be a goal, you still need to be writing great quality content that helps establish you as an expert in the industry. Don’t simply tell them to visit your blog. Keep them engaged and make them want to click over to your own blog.
Finish your post with a call to action and ask readers to leave comments. When they do comment, write back to them. This can help bring further traffic to the post. Also, remember to share your guest post on your social media sites.
Conclusion
Establishing a blog can take time, but if you’re looking to grow an audience quickly, you’ll want to focus on optimizing your blog and on writing guest posts for established blogs. Once you begin increasing traffic on your blog, you might even want to consider allowing others to write guest posts for you.