What’s the first step to achieving bigger marketing goals? Catching your audience’s atte nation, i.e. Reach. While marketers have several formats to fall back on to gain their audience’s attention, but blogs have emerged as one of the stronger formats of the lot. In addition, just as influencer marketing and UGC add credibility to your social media content, guest blogs, among the various blogging approaches, bring the same effect to your blog strategy.
Let’s Begin With The Power Of Blogs In Brand Marketing:
Blogs have become an integral part of content marketing strategies, with numerous benefits for brands. Research suggests that companies with a blog strategy receive 97% more links to their websites and generate 55% more website visitors compared to those that don't. Blogs provide a platform to share industry insights, thought leadership, and informative content, enabling brands to establish expertise, engage with their target audience, and build brand loyalty. Guest blogging takes this a step further by tapping into established blog audiences and expanding the brand’s reach.
So, How To Leverage Guest Blogging For Reach And Exposure:
From a brand’s perspective, Guest Blogging refers to collaborating with established bloggers, thought leaders, or industry experts to create content on and for your brand. It allows you to capture your guest’s experience, knowledge, and audience, adding more value to your content and exposing your brand to a wider audience. According to digital marketing expert Neil Patel, guest blogging can help grow one’s blog's traffic by 203%. Through guest blogging, brands can hence tap into the existing readership of established blogs, attracting targeted traffic, and expanding their reach beyond their own platforms.
Here's How To Identify The Right Blogs For Guest Blogging:
To ensure a successful guest blogging strategy, it's crucial to identify and partner with the right bloggers that align with your brand's values, target audience, and industry niche. Shared below is what more your guest blogging strategy needs:
Research and Analyse: Conduct thorough research to identify influential bloggers in your industry. Look for blogs with an engaged audience, high-quality content, and a reputation for thought leadership. Tools like BuzzSumo and Ahrefs can help identify popular blogs and analyse their performance.
Evaluate Relevance: Assess the relevance of the guest’s blogs to your brand and target audience. Ensure that their blog's content aligns with your brand’s expertise and values, as this will help establish credibility and resonate with your readers.
Audience Demographics: Analyse the demographics and characteristics of the guest blogger's audience. Consider factors such as age, location, interests, and engagement levels to determine if the guest author’s readership matches your target audience.
Guest Post Guidelines: Draft a guideline for your guest authors to ensure that the content they create for you aligns with your brand’s content guidelines. It should entail a brand guideline, steps and rules for content submission, and offers a fair opportunity for exposure and backlinks to the author.
Steps For Building Relationships and Pitching Guest Posts:
Once you have identified potential blogs for guest blogging, it's essential to build relationships with blog owners and pitch your guest post ideas effectively. Check out the steps to follow:
Engage with the Blog: Once you’ve zeroed down on the blogger/s you wish to collaborate with, start by engaging with the blog's content through comments, social media, and sharing their posts. This helps build rapport and familiarity with the blog owner and your brand’s community.
Personalised Outreach: Craft personalised pitches that highlight your brand’s details and expertise, explain how your content will benefit their audience and yours, and showcase your previous guest blogging samples, if any.
Unique and Valuable Content: Encourage your guest bloggers to create fresh, high-quality, original content that provides value to your readers. Focus on addressing their pain points, offering actionable insights, and positioning them as a trusted resource.
Follow-Up and Maintain Relationships: Follow up on your pitches and maintain relationships with the guest authors. Collaborate on future content opportunities and leverage these relationships for continued exposure and brand growth.
Guest blogging enables you to leverage the reach and authority of your brand, positioning you as an industry leader, driving targeted traffic, enhancing SEO efforts, building relationships, and expanding your brand visibility. By collaborating with established authors in your industry you give your audience a wider scope for learning from a credible source. On the other hand, when an authoritative figure in the industry contributes to your content strategy, it puts you in the spotlight as a trusted brand for external creators and thought leaders of the industry. With a well-planned guest blogging strategy, you can maximise your brand's potential, strengthen industry relationships, and ultimately drive significant marketing results. Looking for innovative blog strategies? Connect with us.
Psst! This blog was made with 💛, lots of teamwork and edited by a human with some help from Generative AI. We’re not ones to steal credit. #PuttingItOutThere