Living in an age of information and advanced technology, the only way for businesses to win over the market’s heart is by providing them with real value. Long gone are the days when pretty pictures, celebrities, and other surface-level campaigns poured the dollars in. 

While all those Marketing tactics still work to some extent, there’s also a new breed of consumers who look for substance beyond the form. And as an online entrepreneur, it’s your job to make sure that your business caters to all types of audiences.

Case in point, the best way to win over modern-day consumers is to give them what they want: real value. Information-driven campaigns tend to perform better with these types of customers, and you’ll see better business conversions long-term if you focus on strategies that will boost your credibility and authority as a valuable information resource online.

While many companies are still stuck in the past and pouring all their efforts (and money) into creating eye-candy campaigns, you can get ahead of the game by focusing your attention on giving the market what it really wants and promoting your business in the process.

We’re talking about guest Posting and let us tell you how it works.

What Is Guest Posting?

Guest posting is a marketing strategy where one website submits or offers to post value content to another website to help boost its credibility and authority in the market. To better understand this, you first need to understand how the internet works.

The Internet is not referred to as the World Wide Web for no reason. If you zoom in and really understand the inner workings of this very intricate network, you’ll realize that everything that comprises the internet literally looks like an actual web interlaced and interconnected to each other. Every website is connected to another website to some degree whether it’s because they use another company’s service or they’re featuring another company’s content.

And the point at which these intangible web strands connect is what we refer to as links. They basically become the gateway for users to jump from one website to another whenever they’re surfing the internet. Without links, users would have a difficult time navigating the web and it wouldn’t have been as widely accepted or popular since its introduction if not for the convenience of having links.

What’s the relevance of links to current marketing strategies?

Links, whether inbound or outbound, help business owners create a virtual network for their website. They create paths for online users to find certain websites more easily, giving businesses more visibility and exposure to their target market. The process of creating this network is called link building and one of the best ways to achieve this and create more interweb connections is through guest posting.

Guest posting takes full advantage of this link building strategy by incorporating commercial links in blog content and distributing them to other websites for publishing. This opens up opportunities for businesses to showcase their brand to the publishing website’s immediate audience. 

Now, imagine doing this a hundred or a thousand times over; creating guest posts with inbound links that redirect to your online business and posting them to partner websites across the internet. You will end up creating a vast network for your brand which can lead to innumerable opportunities to find new customers. On top of being able to tap into new audiences and reach fresh new eyes, link building through guest posting also has a more technical benefit: it also helps increase your website’s authority. 

Search engines like Google and Bing are always on the lookout for the latest and the greatest in the world wide web. They run “crawlers” through websites to help them sort through and categorize content and match them to their appropriate search category. Your website’s authority pretty much determines how high you rank for certain keyword searches. Thus, higher online authority gives you a huge advantage over search engine algorithms.

The more pages link to your website or content, the more search engines regard your website as relevant. It basically tells the algorithm that your site has something people want to see. This boosts your business’s online standing and gets you up the ranks for search results you’re categorically relevant to. So if you fully intend to reach a wider audience, get more eyes on your website, and top search engine results for your business category, then guest posting is for you.

But before you jump the gun and start throwing random content around or hail mary your way through your newly discovered guest posting strategy, you have to understand that not all guest posts will positively impact your business. Moreover, online publications that are worth sending guest posts to have quality standards that you have to meet. In order to fully take advantage of this type of strategy, you’ve got to learn how to do it right. 

5 Things You Need To Remember When Creating A Guest Post

Create To Spread Value

Even though guest posting, at the end of the day, is a marketing strategy, you should also keep in mind that there is more to it than just that. If you treat guest posting as merely a way to get your website link out there, you are only setting your campaign up for failure. As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, modern-day consumers are not oblivious to how marketing works. They would know if someone is trying to push a brand or a product to their face and it’s the fastest way to lose them.

So while you can’t completely drop the idea of marketing your product as that is what your main objective is, you can make your approach more subtle and let the hard marketing spiels take a backseat. Instead, work on delivering value. Captivate your audience with content that they would find helpful and relevant. Modern-day consumers are more likely to buy from businesses that focus more on what they can give rather than what they can take and providing value content is a way that you can give back to your audience. 

Submit To Websites That Are Relevant To Your Industry

Not all websites are going to boost your authority; some of them might even actually drag you down. Websites that have relatively low traffic, have been flagged for violations previously (e.g. buying links, copyright issues, etc.), or have acquired unexplainable traffic in a very short amount of time are all websites you should steer clear from.

As much as possible, you should submit guest posts only to websites or online publications that are:

1. Well-established and have been around for a considerable amount of time
2. Receives high traffic and has a legitimate audience
3. Relevant or highly associated with the product or service that you have

Any other website, especially the sketchy looking ones, should be a hard no. Otherwise, you would only be putting in work for naught. 

Do Not Overpromote

The most important rule in guest posting that a lot of businesses seem to forget is to never oversell or overpromote the business. While you do want to slip in a mention or a call-to-action for readers to take notice of your product or service, you would want to do it in the most nonchalant and subtle way possible.

In other words, don’t talk about your brand every two paragraphs or so. Going back to the first reminder on this list, just focus on providing value and your product or service will speak for itself. If you’re not up to the task, there are premier guest post services that can help you out.

Think About The Audience

Whenever you do a guest post, first think whether the topic you want to write about has any relevance to your brand, and second, think about the audience that you’re writing that guest post. Ask yourself whether it is something that they would want to read about.

After all, in order to maximize the results that you get from a guest posting campaign, you would need people to stay around and read until the end of the article (or at least up to where you place your redirect link). Otherwise, the effort you’re pouring into writing all these posts will not yield commensurate results. 

Stay Timely & Relevant

Another thing to keep in mind if you want to get readers hooked is to write about a topic that is both timely and relevant. This means that your article has an immediate association with what is happening in the real world or within the industry your article is directly related to. Making sure that your articles are timely and relevant can considerably increase the time readers stay on your article and therefore, help it perform better.

Just stick to these five basic rules and you should be able to create guest post content that is both ideal for your marketing and your readers’ interest. 

Interesting Related Article: “How To Use Guest Posting To Improve Your SEO“