Guest Blogging: The Best Inbound Marketing Strategy; Part 1

Hello and welcome to my series on how you can build your brand and gain on your target audience through inbound marketing, over the next few posts I’ll be dropping tips on how you can create use the power of guest blogging gain widespread attention and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

In first part of this series I am going to talk about how you can get guest blogging opportunities, but first things first.

What is guest blogging?

Guest blogging in simple context is when you write posts on other blogs. Writing for sites that you don’t own in the past was limited to article directories, but now blogs and websites regularly accept guest post submissions.

I quote Neil Patel when I say guest blogging is the best inbound marketing strategy, hold up a minute, not only am I quoting one of the best internet entrepreneurs on this, I am standing by that quote because I can testify to it.

The power guest blogging holds in brand exposure is of inestimable value, plus, it’s cheap too. A large number of blogs need content and are looking to accept from anyone who’s willing to share, “as long as the content is of high quality and fits their target audience”.

Writing for other blogs in your niche can be a source of quality traffic and leads that can be converted to buyers. In this post I am going to take you through how you can get and maximize guest blogging opportunities.

Here we go

Have a Goal

This is the first thing to take care of. Defining your goals for guest blogging is important as it helps you identify the right blogs that should host your guest post.

Your aim could be to establish yourself as an authority, expose your brand and expand your fan base or to simply build backlinks to boost your rankings. With the right content all these could be achieved individually or as a single unit.

It is important to choose sites with an engaged and interactive audience and domain authority.

Develop a strategy

A content marketing strategy is what you need and guest posting is the best tactic there is. Guest blogging is a direct tactic for getting attention.

While running a guest blogging campaign, you could decide to take it slow and focus on one or two big blogs monthly. The type of blogs you would want to pay attention to here are ones that are usually hard to get a writing gig for, writing for big sites like MakeUseOf or HowStuffWorks will bring huge returns for your brand and get you conversions.

Another way to go is the aggressive and fast way, using this method you’d have to accept any offer guest blogging anywhere and write as much as you can. The best way to promote this approach is by making an announcement on your blog or reaching out to blogs you’re interested in.

How to find guest posting opportunities

Google

The easiest way to get blogs that accept guest posts is just by searching on Google using Google hacks, your search terms should be like these

• Your keyword/niche + guest post

• Guest post by + Your keyword/niche

• Your keyword/niche + Submit a Guest post

• Your keyword/niche + Guest posting submission

Develop a relationship with prolific guest bloggers

Take a look around blogs that you want to write for and look for bloggers who have remarkable history guest posting for them, form a relationship with these bloggers and get them to introduce you to the owners of the blogs.

You could also search for these guest bloggers on Google using the search query “guest post by + bloggers name” to see their guest posting history. This would help you highlight a list of possible blogs where you could drop a guest post.

Social Searches

I’d recommend Twitter for this, since it has an easy search interface. Bloggers share their guest posts on social networks to get traffic and keep their followers updated.

You could use this as an opportunity to know which blogs are accepting guest posts in your niche, just run a twitter search for keyword ”guest post ” to get the latest tweets about guest posts.

MyBlogGuest

MyBlogGuest is a community of guest bloggers where you can easily find guest blogging opportunities. You can also post your own information so blog owners can find you.

Here we are, I have covered how you can find guest posting opportunities by

• Searching on Google

• Making friends with other guest posters

• Searching for guest post updates on social networks

• Using MyBlogQuest

In the next post of this series I will be showing you the right way to approach a blog you are interested in writing for and how you can write a well structured guest post that will meet your goals. Till then Ciao…