Guest Blogging: Getting Started
Guest blogging provides a ton of credibility for your brand, builds awareness, and positions you and your company as a thought leader in your industry. Guest blogging drives traffic to your site and gets more readers to your blog (assuming you have one, and if you don’t, you should get one…we can help with that).
Read 5 Guest Blogging Tips That Build Your Brand Successfully for a primer about guest blogging correctly.
Guest Blogging Presents Huge Opportunities in Niche Markets
Our space is extremely competitive when it comes to guest blogging. We play in a space that is all about content marketing…so there’s a lot of posts and sites out there.
The good news for you is that if you’re in a niche market, you have a strong likelihood for guest posting with influential outlets and getting broader reach.
BlogMutt’s Success with Guest Blogging Means Having Fun
We’re big proponents of guest blogging. It’s something that we make an effort of doing at least once a month. Because we inherently like to write and have varied interests, our guest posts aren’t just limited to blogging or blogging best practices.
For instance, our CEO Scott Yates, has written many guest blogs about blogging for HubSpot.
But he’s also guest blogged elsewhere.
For Inc. magazine, Scott provided some context and lessons from the recent GigaOM collapse that took Silicon Valley by surprise: The Important Lesson Behind the GigaOM Collapse
And he’s a huge proponent for keeping Daylight Savings Time year round. So he wrote a guest post for CNN.
The point is, you should guest blog about a topic that interests you and you can make interesting. Have a controversial take. Include funny anecdotes. Even if your post isn’t an exact match to your business industry, like some of the examples above, we always make sure to include a link to BlogMutt in the bio or in the context of the article (if it makes sense).
Strategic Guest Blogging
But we also make sure to guest blog with strategic industry partners. If we want to position ourselves as thought leaders in content marketing and blogging, it’s important that we contribute to the conversation.
Here are a couple guest posts we’ve done with strategic business partners that generated quite a bit of interest.
In an effort to position ourselves as thought leaders in content marketing and copywriting, I wrote this piece for HubSpot: Copywriting Lessons from Companies Doing It Right.
Scott used Amy Adams to make a point about posting blogs you hate for automated marketing company, Marketo.
And today, my guest post for HubSpot just went up: 11 Content Curation Tool Every Marketer Needs.
From our experience, we’ve seen a ton of inbound traffic from these efforts. It also makes securing additional opportunities easier. Getting that first guest post is a huge first step. After you have one under your belt, the next ones get easier.
Guest Blogging: Additional Recommended Reading
How to Find the Best Places to Guest Blog – From Kissmetrics comes a great post with best practices once you have been given the opportunity to guest blog.
Guest Posting Best Practices From Copyblogger’s Guest Post Gatekeeper – Copyblogger is a must-read for anyone doing content marketing. Stefanie Flaxman provides not only the mental approach to guest blogging, but also practical tips to make your guest blogging goals happen.