Guest blogging is a great way to promote your business.
And that includes your e-commerce business if you have one.
When you’re starting out (or even if you’re company is mature in some cases) you need traffic. You need an audience.
The simplest way to get an audience is to go where your target audience is.
Other websites, blogs and podcasts have audiences. In exchange for good content that you provide you get access to the people in those audiences.
It’s how things work in the music industry. The person with the audience is the established artist or the superstar. The “guest poster” is the opening act that is new and needs to build an audience. The opening act gets the audience warned up and ready for the headliner. And in exchange the opening act gets a chance to win over the audience.
It works in a lot of industries and in the online world it can work well for you.
So let’s go through the steps to building your guest blogging strategy.
1. Try Different Types Of Blogs And Websites
Guest posting is about balancing niche websites with broad websites.
Niche websites can offer a very targeted audience, but it could be very little traffic. And the people at that site might already know about your brand (unless you’re a startup).
Broad websites have large audiences, but not everyone will be interested in your brand.
The best approach is to go after a mixture of specific niche blogs and broad blogs. Over time you can track the results from each and get a feeling for what might be better for your brand.
But even then I would still mix blogs that you write for because you hedge your traffic bets. You get both the niche traffic that is very targeted and the broad traffic.
One note on the broad websites is that you have to be careful about what you’re blogging about. It has to relate to the industry that you’re in and what your target customers are interested in as it relates to your industry.
This will limit the traffic to the article and to your site, but will keep the traffic targeted to your specific target client.
So let’s say you sell auto parts. You can blog about all things cars. Maybe a few times go outside of that with articles about garages and workshops or something.
A broad site, for example, might be a site for men (or site for women). Keep the article about something related to cars, though. Not all the readers might be interested, but chances are that some or many will be.
2. Look At Their Top Articles
The next step is to find websites that have your target audience both niche and broad sites.
Then look at the top articles on the site. You can often get this information by looking at the archives and seeing what posts have the most social shares.
You’ll be able to see what topics are most popular. Try to find the most popular articles in your industry if they have articles like that.
Also pay attention to the type of posts that do well. Usually list posts like top ten lists or larger lists do the best, but not always. How-to posts are another good type of post.
Find the top articles and from that you’ll formulate your titles.
3. Pitch Titles First
The best success I’ve had with guest posting is to include 3-5 titles in the email sent to the site owner.
You’ll create titles from the research in the previous step. Always look to say something in a title and in a post that hasn’t been said yet, but that is on a topic you know the readers on the site are interested in.
Usually a site owner will see the titles and get interested in at least one of the titles. They envision the title on their site.
Only after you hear back do you want to start writing it. This way you put effort in on the titles, but not on the article ahead of time.
You’ll struggle if you write posts first and then try to find homes for them on blogs.
When you know a site wants a title you can write the post, link to other posts on that same blog, etc.
4. Delegate The Writing If You Are Busy
As an e-commerce business owner or manager you’re probably busy doing a million things. But you know that guest posting efforts can have great payoff in the long-term.
Don’t let the opportunity get away. Delegate the writing to someone in house or hire a blogger or writer that can handle the work.
You can look for a freelance writer with experience in your industry (or even one that is good at research and writing that can learn the industry). They can focus on this strategy for you. You can review the posts and help with input while doing the other work you’re required to do.
5. Commit To An Ongoing Strategy
Guest posting isn’t a one-time thing or even a short-term thing. You can get ongoing traffic from one or two guest posts, but if you want incremental traffic you’ll want to make this a regular effort.
Even if that includes sending out 5 emails and doing 1 guest post a month it can pay off over time. That’s 12 posts in a year that can bring traffic to you forever and if you do it over 3-5 years you can start to see the referral traffic really come in.
But it has to be an ongoing strategy.
6. Track The Results
Finally, make sure to track the results. This is as simple as two things:
1. The referral traffic sources in your analytics software.
2. Asking customers how they found you.
The first gives you the traffic obviously. You can track the best sources of the most traffic, but also try to see where the visitors from each source goes on your site and track if they’re buying if you can or signing up for emails and things like that.
The second is a little more difficult with e-commerce, but every once in a while survey your customers, perhaps new customers and first time buyers and ask how they found you. After you do some guest posting some should say that they found you, “From a blog post you did on XYZ Blog.”
Conclusion
Guest posting is a great strategy for B2B businesses, but also for e-commerce businesses. In fact, the payoff could be even greater for e-commerce businesses. You can target some big time websites with lots of readers that will send a lot of traffic to your site.
A good mix of specific sites and broad sites is the best strategy. Over time you’ll see that any one site might not send the majority of your referral traffic, but pay attention to the collective of all the traffic you get from all your guest posts. That should turn into a good chunk of your referral traffic and that’s what the payoff is for a guest posting strategy.
