Many experts believe guest posting to be one of the most powerful instruments in the toolset of a modern online marketer. With Google paying ever-greater attention to quality content, its role is only going to grow. This means that these days you do not have any good reason not to make guest posting an integral part of your marketing efforts. However, there is a world of difference between adopting guest posting and doing it right.
Amateurs make the same mistakes over and over again, get disillusioned and opt out of this experiment before achieving any results. You can, however, become an exception – by knowing what to avoid. Here are the worst blunders you can make in your guest posting campaign.
Profit Engine can help you with your guest post outreach.
Sending cookie-cutter offer emails
Owners and webmasters of high-authority blogs often receive dozens of guest post offers every single day, and they have many better things to do than reading and evaluating each of them. Sending the same generic email to fifty blogs hoping that it will click with at least one of them is most likely an exercise in futility. Most recipients will trash your email along with all the others without reading, with more dedicated webmasters blacklisting you for good measure.
In fact, even if you carefully study the blog and write a customized email tailored to it, the result is likely to be the same – the daily flow of email such blogs have to deal with is just too great for the webmaster to differentiate between generic cut-and-paste messages and more customized ones.
The right approach is to make an offer email the final step, not the first one. Visit the blog. Write comments. Participate in discussions. Refer to the blog in your own posts. Get in touch with the author via social media on unrelated issues. Only after you establish some kind of relationship, try writing a pitch letter (you can find a good guide on how to do it right on Luckyposting.com).
Wasting the exposure
Pitching your idea to an influential blog and writing a high-quality original post is a lot of hard work. However, once your post goes live, it is not yet the time to breathe a sigh of relief and pat yourself on the back – doing so means letting most of your effort go to waste. Your goal is not just to get exposure for your brand, but to get the most out of it. This means that you should have a clear plan of how you intend to capitalize on it. Preparations must be done by the time your post goes live, and you should immediately get to work after that. Depending on the purpose of the post, you should route the traffic to the specific landing page. E.g., if you want to get the blog’s audience with your product, put a backlink to your sales page. Mention your post across all your channels: your own blog, social media, subscription lists, etc. Be active in the comments section, not just for the sake of activity but making genuine contributions to the discussion and trying to bring value to the visitors.
Not taking the blog’s audience into account
Ideally, the audiences of your blog and the blog your write for should be identical or similar. However, sometimes you may have to write a guest post for a blog aimed at a different demographic or even dedicated to a different niche. In this situation, you have to balance between retaining the recognizable voice and style of your own brand and being aware of what this particular audience wants, likes and is used to. If you do not consider these factors, you will end up with a post that strikes a discordant note with the rest of the blog’s content. The audience will quickly lose interest in it (if they start reading it at all), and all your hard work will be in vain. Worst-case scenario, the webmaster will refuse to post such a post at all.
To avoid it, make sure you understand the blog’s audience. If necessary, ask the blog owner about his/her audience and what makes it tick.
We hope that knowing these mistakes will help you successfully pitch your next guest post and make the most of it!
