It’s no secret that guest blogging on high-traffic sites helps you make a name for yourself.
But do you publish guest writers on your own blog? Or should you?
Yeah, you should! Publishing irresistible posts from other subject matter experts in your field is an underused key to content marketing that pays off.
Together with your own expert content, guest posts show your audience that you’re an anchor for extensive, insightful information. They also bring you more traffic and save you time.
For these reasons, this is exactly what I did as senior copywriter at CPI. Here’s how.
The Problem
When it came to doing a job I loved, I had loads on my plate. I…
The list goes on, and if you live in the 21st century, you know exactly what I’m talkin’ ’bout. Most of us have… what? Four times as much work as time? More?
The Solution
While I was struggling with time, Heath Copps, our online marketing manager, wanted to start publishing in-depth contributions from other influencers in our space.
So together with our own internal subject matter experts, we collaborated with other influencers on topics like school bullying prevention, classroom management strategies, passive-aggressive behavior, and solutions to loads of issues in our space.
As we expected, we quickly found ourselves:
- Ranking high for even more keywords
- Saving time since I researched less (though edited and coached more)
- Cementing CPI as more of a thought leader than ever
- checkGetting more traffic from influencers’ followers
- checkPulling in more leads with content upgrades
- checkNurturing more leads to hand over to Sales
Since this proved that collaboration pays off, we developed a page to draw in guest bloggers for the CPI Blog.
Using enticing data and numbers from Heath, I wrote the copy to sell the benefits of guest blogging for us, and worked with two more rockstar colleagues on the build for the page. (Read more about magical front-end developer Terrence Foulk and marvelous web designer Jon Beres in my Outcomes Hub post.)
The Results
You’ll find a screenshot of our guest blogger sales page below. It persuades subject matter experts to guest blog for mutual advantage—and it helped cement CPI as a go-to authority on their topics.
With it, I worked with dozens upon dozens of guest bloggers, helping them create rich, authoritative content that propelled both their platforms and ours. It also saved me time as chief writer, enabling me to focus my own writing less on quantity and more on strategic long-form pieces.
Here’s how we got the word out about guest blogging for CPI. We:
- Linked to this page on our high-traffic* blog
- Tweeted the page to subject matter experts we wanted to work with
- Linked to it in our newsletters to customers and prospects (all our peeps are SMEs)
- checkGot organic traffic—because people search for how to guest blog for CPI
- checkPMed the link to customers in our Yammer community who touched on topics I wanted to publish about on our blog
With SMEs flooding in, I sent them the writing guidelines I developed, accepted or rejected their pitches, scheduled accepted posts, and ruthlessly edited the content to meet the quality standards I set.
Here’s the screenshot:
Tips to make this work for you
- Publish quality. Google is wicked smart now, and your potential visitors are ultra discerning. So your own content and your guest content has got to be good. Your headlines, metadata, post quality, and intrigue need to be high in order to get the clicks, likes, and shares that signal to Google—and to visitors—that your stuff is definitive.
- Make it helpful. What are your visitors’ questions? What are their pains? Answer and alleviate in a friendly way. Be helpful, be funny where you can, and be real. Write your own compelling posts that establish you/your company as a trusted advisor in your space. And publish irresistible, original posts from others that bolster your site as the go-to authority on your topic.
- Grow your list. Be sure to create helpful lead magnets and enticing landing pages to get people itching for your quality and subscribed to your list.
- checkWorried you can’t attract influencers? First, make sure you’re publishing high-quality content of your own. Be an authority yourself by posting helpful, engaging content that people love to learn from. Then build a guest blogger sales page similar to the one I shared with you above. People will bang down your door—some to write for you, and, ultimately, others to buy from you.
- check* Don’t have a high-traffic blog? Then you should definitely post guest articles from experts in your space. When they share their guest posts on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook…they bring you traffic. And when you nurture that traffic right, your next step is sales copy.
- checkDon’t have time? Couldn’t edit to save your life? Get in touch with me below. I book up fast, but I do write, ghostwrite, recruit subject matter experts, manage blogs, and as I said above, I edit ruthlessly—with a golden pen.
Top image by Bonnie Kittle on Unsplash
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