With so much of your modern day marketing efforts revolving around content, one of the most pressing challenges that you’re probably facing can be summed up in one simple-yet-frustrating word: time.
There simply aren’t enough hours in a day to create all the content you need. Luckily, you don’t actually have to. Guest posting as a marketing technique has really grown in prominence over the last few years, and with good reason – it brings with it a wide range of different benefits to the table that you’d be hard-pressed to replicate in any other way.
The power of guest posting
Guest posting itself is an important part of influencer marketing – something that is certainly taking the world by storm right now. According to one recent study, a full 70% of the millennial buying audience say that they trust influencer recommendations just as much as they do people they actually know – if not more.
The same survey also revealed that a full 30% of people say that they’re more likely to buy a product if it is recommended to them by a non-celebrity blogger (read: someone relevant to the industry that you’re operating in).
Part of this comes down to the fact that you’re using someone’s persona as a trustworthy individual to your advantage, all while leveraging their own built-in audience at the same time. So you get a high-quality piece of content written by someone that people in your audience actually care about, while at the same time that person’s own audience gets exposed to your brand – potentially bringing new customers into the fold as well.
When you put it like that, it’s easy to see why this is one technique that you should absolutely be trying to do more of.
Guest posting best practices
As you can see, guest posting is a powerful tool when it comes to everything from building brand awareness to generating new leads – but having said that, not all efforts to this end are created equally. Guest posting itself is not necessarily the silver bullet you’ve been after. If you really want to make sure that everything goes off without a hitch, there are a few key things you’ll want to keep in mind.
In an interview with the appropriately-named GuestPost.com, Google SEO wizard Matt Cutts had a few important pieces of advice to share. Chief among them is the idea that you should always pay close attention to who, specifically, you’re getting to author your guest posts (assuming that you’re pulling someone into the fold to post content on your own site).
From a literal perspective, the name on the post will have no influence on how high the page itself ranks, for example. However, as a rule of thumb, a more reputable guest normally equate to a higher quality piece of content, which will definitely impact the finished post in a variety of ways.
Likewise, you’ll want to pay close attention to the length of the guest post. According to Cutts, posts that come in at around 200 to 400 words generally send up red flags in that they’re usually lower quality pieces of content – something that works against your goal instead of for it. Cutts said that in his own experience, posts between 1200 and 2000 words work the best for most industries.
Finally, just because you’re working with a guest post doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to work around certain techniques that are high on Google’s list of things that will get you penalized. Content that isn’t 100% wholly original (meaning that your guest took an existing post that they already wrote, “spun” it into something “new” and tried to sell it a second time) will absolutely get you penalized. As will posts that don’t have much to offer, are positively stuffed with keywords and more.
In the end, guest posting is a powerful cornerstone of your modern day marketing efforts – but as always, it is but one small part of a much larger story. Absolutely nobody is saying that you should put 100% of your attention into guest posting from here on out. It’s just one technique of many that will get you where you need to be.
You should still use a tool like Visme (which I founded) to create flyers, surveys and other types of stunning visual collateral. You should still use a service like Uscreen to create, distribute and monetize all of those videos that you’re making. But when used properly, a guest post can be a perfect opportunity to inject your marketing efforts with that strategic boost of adrenaline you need when you need it the most.
