Blogging is a great way to increase traffic to your site.
The stats show it.
Companies that blog have 80% new visits.
But what about guest blogging?
That to is a great way to grow your business.
It can bring direct traffic to your website. It increases your profile in the industry. There might be a little SEO benefit, but I wouldn’t focus on that. Guest blogging has been abused for SEO purposes. Google is looking at it.
But even without SEO benefit there is value in guest blogging.
If you’re doing both blogging and guest blogging there are a few things to keep in mind.
1. What Does The Audience Want?
What content to publish on your site vs. another site?
The answer comes from a different question:
What does the audience want?
The audience you want is one that will buy your product or service. You want a good focus of a specific audience on the blog on your website.
On other sites and blogs, though, you don’t have as much control. But those other sites have their own audiences. There is probably some crossover and that’s a reason why you want to guest blog.
With each audience you want to write about what they want to read.
Sometimes they’ll tell you. Other times you’ll have to do a little more digging.
Let’s say you sell software to dentists. You write blog posts on your own blog aimed at dentists.
Now you want to guest post for a site that caters to all areas of medicine professionals. Doctor offices, chiropractors, dentists, etc.
The post you write for that site will have to cater to a broader audience.
Maybe on your blog you write:
10 Ways To Get More Patients For Your Dental Practice
For the guest post you write:
7 Critical Changes For The Medical Industry This Year
Let the audience drive your brainstorming.
2. How To Brainstorm Ideas
Speaking of brainstorming. Let’s get into a few good ways to figure out what to write about.
Let’s focus on your own blog first.
You have your list of clients or customers. Maybe you have 10. Maybe you have 10,000.
However many you have you can go to them directly for content ideas. If you have 10 clients just call them or email them. Ask them what they’re struggling with. Ask them what they’re concerned with this year. Ask about challenges. Ask what they’re curious about.
See if you can figure out what they’re reading. Go to those sites or magazines or whatever and see what the popular articles are. Look at the popular topics and see if any area has been ignored.
If you have 10,000 customers then ask the same questions with a survey.
Look for the questions your customers are asking and build your post ideas from there.
You want the same question/answer approach with guest posting.
A good place to start is to look through the site’s archives. See what the most popular posts are. Look at shares on social media or views if they post them or comments. Usually there is a way to tell what is popular.
Or ask the site or blog owner or editor for a list. They’ll have access to their analytics.
From that information you can see what topics their readers care about most. And from that you can look for areas within those topics that haven’t been covered.
This way you know that the readers care about the topic, but your post will be fresh and new because it hasn’t been covered on the site yet.
Let’s focus on the medical site again. Maybe they have a lot of popular posts covering software. Their readers care about medical practice software. But within that topic there have been no posts on marketing software. Software that helps medical practices to get more patients.
That’s your in.
3. What’s The Right Frequency?
Neil Patel guest posts a lot.
But he posts on his own blogs even more.
I don’t know if the right mix is 10 posts on your own blog to every one on another blog (guest post). Maybe it’s 100 to 1. Maybe it’s 1,000 to 1.
A good general rule, though, seems to be that you want to post more on your own site.
The key is consistency. Whatever you decide to do you want to be consistent.
You control that entirely on your own blog.
Aim for at least weekly and probably more.
Blogging 16-20 times a month earns twice the traffic.
Consistency is important with guest posting too. But you can’t necessarily control the publish date. You do control the outreach and writing.
Let’s say that over time you find that for every 20 times you outreach to a blog you get 10 published posts.
2 to 1. Not bad. And that’s pretty common depending on how you approach guest blogging outreach.
If you want five published guest posts a month you’ll need to send 10 outreach emails or calls or whatever each month. Focus on what you control.
Final Thoughts
Blogging and guest blogging are great online marketing strategies. I recommend both. But if you’re struggling with how they relate or with what content belongs with what strategy hopefully the tips above will provide some clarity. These have worked pretty well for me and for many others.