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How to Supercharge Your Lead Generation Efforts with Guest Blogging

Published: December 19, 2014

Guest blogging is an effective marketing tool that can drive traffic to your business website, grow your brand authority and reputation, and build a loyal audience of readers eager to follow and learn from you. As if that’s not motivation enough to start pounding away at your keyboard, guest blogging can also generate a steady flow of highly targeted leads for your business no matter what industry or niche you operate in. Best of all, if you have the skills and available time to create and market quality articles relevant to your field of interest, you can reap the rewards of guest blogging with little to no out-of-pocket expense.

Just What is Guest Blogging?
Guest blogging is a method of generating increased awareness and recognition of your expertise in a given field by writing posts for publication on a third-party blog. Naturally, you’ll want to focus your efforts on those blogs that are closely related to your industry or niche, and the posts themselves need to be relevant to the theme of the particular blog that you’re writing for.

When one of your guest posts resonates with the audience, they’ll be able to follow the trail back to your own blog and website to read more of what you have to offer. Once you have them at your blog, you have the opportunity to capture their contact information to be able to market to them in the future.

How Guest Blogging Works
A basic prerequisite to successful guest blogging is having a blog of your own, preferably hosted on your main business website. If your blog is hosted on a third-party blogging platform, any SEO benefits gained by your efforts will wind up passing to the blog platform instead of to your business. Just remember that the purpose of guest blogging is to expand your outreach to an audience interested in your niche – focusing on guest blogging solely in the hope of gaining inbound links has a tendency to lead to spammy blogging and that can get you into trouble with Google.

Your blog serves as a testimonial to your ability to create unique and meaningful content. Most blog owners won’t even give you the time of day until they’re convinced of your ability to deliver relevant content that offers genuine value to their readers.

When you identify a third-party blog as a good match for your guest posts, you have two different ways to proceed:

  • You can submit a completed article that matches the targeted blog’s editorial theme once you determine that the blog accepts guest posts.
  • You can query the blog with an offer to create a unique post just for their audience.

I’m Sold! How Do I Get Started Guest Blogging?
Assuming you already have a blog of your own with several high-quality relevant posts, your first step would be to create a list of quality and authoritative blogs that cater to your particular field of interest. A Google search for active blogs in your industry or niche should turn up a number of possibilities.

Examine each relevant blog in terms of the overall quality of the blog as well as the quality and value offered with each post. Once you’ve eliminated the spammy low-quality blogs, dig deep into each of the remaining blogs on your list and confirm that the readers are actively engaging with the blog – look at the number and relevancy of reader comments as well as the amount of social sharing, and be sure to check out the blog’s social media site if it has one.

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