What Makes a Great Guest Post?
Guest posts provide a great opportunity to reach new potential customers, demonstrate your skills and expertise, along with add value to your current audience, among other things. All of the benefits aim to promote your brand, which might be yourself or your business.
For new businesses or individuals looking to blog and provide content to their audience, then starting a blog might become pretty frustrating. There are so many blogs and competitors following the same actions, that it is difficult to stand out. You and your dedicated followers, which is most likely friends, family and existing business contacts, may know your unique point of view, but everyone else does not. It takes time to build a sustained blog and see blog readers convert into business deals.
Luckily, there is one main way to stand out and rise above the crowd. Provide quality information. As an added benefit, focusing on quality helps your brand, both on and off the internet.
What does quality content mean?
- Address the common needs of your audience.
- Be relevant to the subject and title of the post.
For example, the NEAG community focuses on connecting talent to opportunity. There are two main groups, those in transition and those seeking to develop business leads. A sales leader that wants to transition from middle management to an executive role could write a post like “7 Ways to Scale Sales as Your Business Grows” because the content articulates the sales leader has the knowledge to lead a sales team. The post is relevant for B2B members because most people are interested in ways to grow sales.
It is perfectly fine that the post does not address everyone that is attracted to NEAG. Not every article in the local newspaper impacts all readers, but the critical aspect is the content relates to the headline. Guest posts should avoid “clickbait” or headlines that seem interesting, but the content does not relate to the title.
One of the major reasons that guest blogs are so helpful to develop your brand is expanding your audience. A guest blog is published on another web site, which means you have the opportunity to find new potential customers, pending they find your information useful. Additionally, guest blogs are rising in popularity because it helps with your search ranking. In particular, Google wants to provide relevant and quality information to searchers. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is its own field, but one way to increase your Google ranking for specific keywords remains the same. Provide relevant content and link the article to your main site. For example, Forbes has many “contributors” that provide articles on specific topics. In the about the author section, then the author links to their individual activities creating a link from a high power site to their business.
For some further guidance, then here is well-respected marketing guru, Neil Patel on how to craft a guest blog (also discussing Forbes).
Instead, find a topic that you think will do well on the blog you are guest-posting on, but angle it towards your target reader.
For example, if I were writing a guest post on Forbes (which I regularly do), I wouldn’t write a general article on the current state of the economy. Although it might become popular, I would rather write a slightly less popular article about how the recent economy problems affect your business’ marketing plan, or something along those lines.
For more information from Neil, then check out his tips on guest blogging, including the following references.
- Guest-Posting on Steroids: A 4-Step Blueprint That the Top Guest Posters Use
- 7 Lessons Learned from Publishing 300 Guest Posts
- Advanced Guest Posting Strategies
In addition to the topic and quality content, then there are some other things to consider when guest posting. As noted above, then posts should target specific keywords. By including popular keywords (which are simply popular search terms), then posts will move up the search engines (provided they are high quality) as more people click on the links. (There are some simple tools to research the correct keywords, which we can discuss in future posts.)
For example, we chose What Makes a Great Guest Post over What Makes a Great Guest Blog because the search term “guest post” was less competitive than “guest blog.” In the crowded market, then finding a less competitive term aids in improving the search results. Also, in the references provided, then note how guest post is incorporated into the titles as well.
Hopefully, this provides some additional information into how to write a guest post and share with the NEAG community. If there are specific questions, then please contact us or add to the comments.
NEAG has a great community that looks to pay it forward, guest posts can amplify that attitude through sharing knowledge with the community and elevating the NEAG reputation as well.
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