Only a few weeks back we hit a major milestone and celebrated 6 months since the launch of our startup. As a team of two we reflected a bit on what contributed to our success for sign-ups. Guestposting amongst other things emerged as one of the biggest drivers.
I believe guestposting is especially helpful if you have very little connections to leverage at the start. In short, if you need to build traffic nearly from scratch.
Where can I start guestposting?
There are two places I have leveraged heavily at the beginning. The first and foremost place to find guestposting spots for me in the past was a site called MyBlogguest.
It is a portal bringing together bloggers looking for guestposts and others wanting to write them. What is amazing about the site are the filtering functions. You can narrow down the search for your particular area and only get the most relevant spots.
Another place to look for posts is BloggerLinkUp.
It is a weekly newsletter telling you about bloggers asking for guestposts in certain topic areas. What is good about this service is that it is very fresh. So you can just hit reply to one of the email addresses and suggest to do a write up. Which type of write-up?
3 different types of guestposts you can write
Guestposting was the most important technique that helped to kick start traffic for our site.
What is great about guestposting is this: Not only do you get the links back pointing to your site, but most importantly, you build a relationship with the blog owner. This can proof very beneficial in the future. Here are three types of guestposts I have written in the past:
1.) Write up reviews of your own product
Agreed, it may appear sneaky at first. Yet at the end of the day, small blog owners are happy for content about a thoroughly reviewed product they can post. It is therefore key to market it as a review post coming from a blogger (you) and not as a marketing effort to praise your work. Exchange value for value! I have done about 60 review posts about our own product.
2.)Write round-up tool posts where one product is yours. This is a great way to target bigger blogs and most don’t mind if you put yours in if it fits the space. In my case that was “10 Twitter Tools to Boost Productivity” kind of posts.
3.)Write posts that promote the space your product is in. Now, oftentimes you can’t market your own product. So write about the problems your product solves. This is also great as you make yourself a name as an expert for the niche area. In my case that was posts like How To Build Your Twitter Tribe.
The long-term benefits of guestposting
The amazing thing about guestposting really is the amount of people you will meet through it. This means either in the comments of your posts or simply the relationship with the person owning the blog.
It will allow you to hit these people up more easily with exclusive product updates in the future to feature your service. Or you get referred to other, bigger blogs where you are able to do a new write-up.
So I think it is best to see it really as trying to go out and make new friends and connections through these posts. In my case it is actually a lot of fun.
Ok, I hope this helps to get you hooked on guestposting. Are there any more things you would suggest when starting out with guestblogging? I would love to hear your thoughts on this.