This is Sid from Thinkific and today we're going to be talking about
guest posting and why it's important. So first, before we get into the meat of
this,what is guest posting? You'll notice that I used guest posting, guest blogging
guest blog posting, gets both blogging interchangeably,
all it means is that I'm going to someone else's site someone else's site , someone else's blog
as a guest author and I'm writing some content for them so I'm not posting on my
own blog and I'm posting on someone else's site. Pretty simple concept and you might
be wondering, well if it's so simple, why is it so important? First up, we know that
content marketing is really important it's it's a way to get yourself out
there, promote yourself your brand and your online course but when you're just
starting out, you don't have much of an audience.
So you post a blog post on your own website and it gets lost amongst the
millions of blog posts out there. How do you get exposure really quick? Guest
posting. There are other sites out there that have been around for years, right?
They have a lot of traffic coming to them, they have people subscribe to those
blog posts, people reading it every single day and so if you can find
yourself on one of those sites and post a blog post there, then all those people
will find out about you.
The first benefit, massive exposure and exposure to a new audience. An audience
that you don't already have. The second benefit is the brand building aspect of
it. The most sites you go and put yourself out on the larger your brand is so
you go and you get on unsafe forbes or entrepreneur come and there are hundreds
of thousands of people seeing youm seing your picture and your bio and even if
they don't come over to your site, they still are now acquainted with your brand
and next time they see you,
it's going to trigger their memory again. Thirdly, the SEO on traffic aspect now
some of them will click on your links in your bio and come back your website so
you're getting that constant traffic source from these other blogs, this is
like SEO benefit if you get your blog post up on
repeatable sites and of course the there's a lot of traffic that comes in
from the heavy traffic sites as well
Finally and this is actually a very important benefit a lot of people forget
about this aspect of guest blogging but you're building relationships with other
blog owners, right? These are people who have been around in the business for a
while. They've built up your their own personal brands, they've build a following, a lot of
influence and now that you're building a relationship with them they're willing
to help you out in your business as well so that's actually kinda invaluable and
when you start building relationships with the influences, there's a whole
world of influence of marketing that opens up to you and partnerships and
joint ventures. In fact we actually have a blog post on the Thinkific blog about
joint venture partnerships and how you can promote your courses on that. Once
you start doing this guest blogging stuff, read that blog post and expand
your marketing efforts. So hopefully I have sold you on why it's important to put
yourself out there and post blogs on other websites but how do you find these
websites, I mean of course it's easy to find websites that are millions of them
out there, how do you find the best ones to get on so I'm going to take an
example and let's talk about hula-hooping. Let's say your hula hooping instructor.
You have courses about hula-hooping like we actually do on Thinkific. There are
obviously some blogs that are dedicated just to hula hooping, maybe a handful of
them but you want to try and think kind of broader because if you know just
putting yourself out there on five blogs not going to get enough take a step, take
a step back, take a little broader think about who you're targeting with your
courses as a hula-hooping instructor, I'm talking people who like to dance, right?
People who like the active lifestyle. There are two huge communities of people then.
The dancing community and there's tons of blogs and websites about dancing
which I can get myself on and then there's this whole active lifestyle
fitness community again which I can get myself on. Now your world of potential
websites to post blogs on have dramatically increased. For any
course topic that may sound really really niche, you kind of want to broaden
it a bit and expand the number
of guest blog that you can target. What I suggest is creating an Excel
spreadsheet just compiling a full list of all these websites and then
prioritizing them so what I mean by that is you don't want to get on websites
that don't have any traffic at all because it's not doing you a lot of good,
you're putting in a lot of effort to write a really good blog post and if
nothing comes back from it, then you wasted a lot of time. Prioritize this
list of websites that you have by using what I'd like to use is something called
the Alexa Traffic rank. It gives you a ranking of the website that you're on
and the higher the ranking, the more traffic this website gets according to alexa. So
that's a good way to sort of prioritize which sites you want to, guest
post on based on how much traffic they get. Another way to quickly find
out how popular blog is is to look at the social media following
so it's likely that they have you know Twitter account, Facebook page,
instagram account, check out those social media profiles and then you know tally
up the numbers see how big the reach is and pick the ones that have the
biggest reach. So in the next episode I'm going to show you, how to actually
pitched the sites that you have in your Excel spreadsheet i'm going to show an
example of a good pitch one that I use personally to get close to a hundred
percent response rate and then I'm going to show you an example of a really
really bad pitch that I've received. Hopefully it will make you laugh a bit and
finally I'm going to show you exactly what you need to do to write an epic
blog post that attracts a ton of traffic to your website. Go create a list right
now, find the blogs that you want to be guest posting on and then come back and
watch that episode. I'll see you soon
yeah