How to Leverage the Power of Guest Blogging to Win Big

Guest blogging gives a person the ability to build their credibility, links pointing to their website and social profiles, social following, community, industry relationships, visibility, increased traffic and more. It’s one of the many ways to make a name for yourself in a industry, promote your business, and build a community.

Explains Brian Honigman (@BrianHonigman), a guest blogging guru and tech writer for tier one blogs, including Mashable, Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, Forbes, and the Next Web. You can find his portfolio of guest blog posts here.

Brian Honigman is a writer, marketer and a social media strategist with experience in building relationships between brands, startups and their customers. Brian is a frequent speaker and contributor to top publications in digital and print, often recognized for his innovating thinking in the digital space like in this interview with the New York Times.

Learn expert guest blogging tips and tricks from Brian to get on the front pages of tier one blogs and multimedia magazines in our series of Insider Q&A with SearchDecoder.

What are the guest blogging best practices?

When it comes to guest blogging it’s important to build relationships with other bloggers and editors. Once you’re pitching and contributing to another website, you want to create content that’s of value to your audience and the audience that typically reads the content on the website you’re contributing to. It’s important to match the style and guidelines of the blog you’re contributing to whether that means they prefer articles on a certain subject, of a certain word count etc.

SearchDecoder Pro Tip: Use SocialCrawlytics to analyze the best performing content of the blog you want to write for. Identify the most shared blog posts and refer to them in your outreach to its editor, pitching to write a similar content.

In the end, create quality content that includes a bio about yourself with links to your relevant properties whether that’s your own blog, social accounts, a link to your new book or a link to your upcoming webinar. Always ask yourself, is this post of value to who i’m trying to reach? Lastly, you aren’t going to find success with three articles you’ve contributed to other websites. It’s a long-term commitment that won’t start to drive results for yourself until you’ve gotten a large quantity of quality articles out there. Start with three and continue to 30 guest blogs, and then continue from there.

How to land guest blogging gigs on sites like Mashable, Forbes and Huffington Post?

You need to continually write content on your own website, as well as guest blog on lesser known websites in your industry. Once you’ve written a number of quality posts on your properties as well as on other third party websites you can start to pitch bigger, more popular and exclusive publications. When I first started guest blogging I contributed to websites like AllFacebook and Social Times, which are high traffic websites with less popularity then some of the larger more well-known blogs. They were a great way to get my name out there and continue to drive value for others in our industry.

In your pitch, share what topics you’d like to cover, as well as examples of your content on other websites in the industry whether that’s the blog of another blogger or on a smaller publication. This gives you more credibility when you’re trying to pitch a larger website like Mashable or Forbes.

Matt Cutts from Google recently proclaimed the decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO. What’s changed?

Basically, Google is cracking down on spammy practices. What you need to do is continue to provide quality content on your own website and on the websites you’re contributing to to reap the full benefits of guest blogging without being penalized by the search engines. For more information, see this blog post I wrote on the subject for Positionly: http://positionly.com/blog/seo/guest-blogging

What are the three learnings from your most successful guest posts?

From content that’s been the most successful, I’ve learned what topics are most interesting to readers that follow business, tech and marketing. For instance, many of my articles about location based marketing are the most successful in terms of views and social engagement since it’s apparently a subject of great interest to many readers like this article or this one. The lesson learned from this is to constantly experiment with new topics within your expertise when it comes to writing to see what subjects are of interest to your audience or not.

SearchDecoder Pro Tip: New to blogging? Check out this blog post: How to become a rockstar blogger and monetize your passion.

By consistently covering certain subjects overtime, you’ll be considered an expert on those topics. I’ve also learned more about what headlines resonate the best with readers across different blogs and publications. I found this interesting tool from Portent’s Idea Generator helpful in directing how I structure a headline for an article, which has helped match them more effectively with the interests of my audience and make them more engaging to click on in the search engines and across social media.

Source: http://moz.com/blog/the-real-benefits-of-guest-blogging

Lastly, I’ve learned that making the most of a guest blogging opportunity doesn’t end when the article is published but continues in how the post is distributed, how relationships are built overtime and how you continue to foster a community. For instance, answering comments on your articles will help continue to drive conversations about your articles overtime since readers know you’re there to having ongoing dialogue whether its in the comments of an article or on Twitter.

Brian’s three favorite guest blog posts: