Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on linkedin

Guest Blogging: Is It A Good Idea For Startups?

Guest Blogging is dead! – declared Matt Cuts on his blog back in 2014. Now years later, the question: Is guest blogging actually dead? Well, NO! Not, when thousands of people still use this magical technique to establish a brand name.

I call it magical because it generates unbelievable results. (Yes, quite contrary to Cuts prophecy!)

Why Guest Blogging is a Good Idea for Startups!

When talking about marketing a new business or a startup, we often get the feeling that guest blogging is passing by quietly without being noticed by the target audience. However, in reality, guest posting on recognized platforms and publications helps you get your name and brand out and fuel social media shares that further boost traffic and engagement.

As a startup you have a limited audience – thus why not leverage from the existing audience of a renowned blog of your industry?

There are many people who kick-started their journey as an entrepreneur by blogging on other people’s blog. For example, Danny Iny – The Freddy Krueger of Blogging – He landed his first guest post on Copyblogger. Infact, when Buffer first came into existence, Leo Widrich, the co-founder of Buffer wrote about 150 guest posts and managed to grow the customer base from 0 to 100 k just within 9 months!

Join Our Small Business Community

Get the latest news, resources and tips to help you and your small business succeed.

The List of Advantages is Endless

There are many advantages of including Guest blogging in your content marketing strategy. It gives you a rough idea of how your own business can gain from writing articles for other blogs. In the beginning, when your audience is small, the golden opportunity to get yourself and your content in front of an established audience is an excellent reason to start guest blogging.

To be honest: it is difficult to get attention from an influential person through comments, emails or tweets. The best way to step into the spotlight is a bio that says you are an author of at least one great guest post published on a renowned platform. This will establish you as an authoritative voice in the industry and the audience will listen to you more convincingly.

Guest blogging or posting is a great and un-intrusive way of starting to build relationships with more authoritative people from your niche. Now when your crafted piece of content covers a relevant topic in your industry, it incites engagement on your post and gives you an opportunity to discuss your startup. Furthermore, the mechanism to grow your list, even more, is similar to mentioning your social accounts in your guest author bio.

Since you are just rising in the world of entrepreneurship, your own blog might not have enough readers. Thus, a few mistakes in your own blog posts can be dodged. But, when you are sending a guest post to a blog with hundreds of readers every hour, you need to be extra careful and run an extra round on optimizing and rewriting. You certainly can’t afford to come off as irresponsible, especially when you are just at the initiation phase of your brainchild.

How to Engage in Guest Blogging Pitch

You must have some prior knowledge of the site you are eyeing to pitch. Figure out the site’s writing style, the topics already covered by them, their target audience and other specifics.

If you think that this site will prove to be a great pick for guest blogging, then it’s time for some gameplay. Here’s how you can do it: comment on the most-talked-about posts, share your opinions, start a conversation, add value to the post or mention something that the writer missed out on the post but holds significant importance in the topic discussed. There is a greater possibility of success if the blog operator has some image of your existence and participation in the website.

I understand being a busy business owner, you usually don’t find much time to engage yourself in guest blogging. However, you can always outsource the task to some professional white label guest blogging services who know the task and experts in this field.

Craft Exclusive Content on Relevant Topics

There is no point of guest blogging if you can’t deliver high-quality, targeted posts. It’s essential for you to remember that when you are guest blogging, you’re actually writing for someone else’s targeted as well as the normal audience, and not your own.

Keep certain points in mind while you are drafting the post: who they are, what they like to read, if they want photos or charts, etc. Read the older posts on the site, the feedback section on those particular posts to get a detailed insight of what is appreciated/criticized on the portal. This article lists some tips to create useful and engaging content for boring industries.

Pitch Without Being Annoying

According to a research by PointVisble, majority of editors receive 10 pitches per day and 9 out of those are so bad that editors don’t even mind reading it. If you don’t want to end up in the same pool, be very wise with your pitch. Keep it short and to-the-point.

Almost everyone can get carried away describing their own ideas in detail. If you cannot summarize your post in two to three lines, then probably that article is not a good guest post topic.

Final Verdict:

Let me repeat, what I said in the introduction: Guest Blogging is magical (for both startups and established organizations!)

Join Our Small Business Community

Get the latest news, resources and tips to help you and your small business succeed.

RECENT POST