Find the Right Guest Blogging Opportunities – Five Steps
Too many people confuse guest blogging opportunities with link building tactic. Although it is an excellent way to enhance your standing in your community, abusing it has led to some serious problems of credibility.
Guest blogging should be used as a strategic tool to make use of others captive audience to build your own brand equity. It should be something that qualifies as your best work. It is comparable to speaking engagements and talks given by scientists and other public thinkers. You wouldn’t want to blog at all and sundry forums.
You do it on blogs/forums that are in sync with your own philosophies and values. Here are five steps that will help you identify guest blogging opportunities.
First set your goals
Determine why you would want to blog and what is it that you expect to gain from such an activity. Also determine how you are going to measure the success or failure of your efforts. Generally you should guest blog only if you want to establish relationship with communities that are outside your domain. Second, you should look for opportunity to blog on places with whom you share common values and culture. Third, guest blog at places where you can learn as well as teach a few things. The gold standard measure would be an answer to the question: “How many new connections I made and fresh leads I generated?”
Develop your distinct personality
Identify your target audience and develop a suitable virtual personality to attract such audiences. In this way you can attract specific audience to your company/community.
Identify specific targets
After determining your general target audience it is time you identify specific persons whose attention you want to attract. Find out such influential people from your domain or relevant domains and check if they have blogs where you can contribute.
Check their veracity
Once this is done, you can begin verifying if they are suitable candidates for you. Maintain a spreadsheet and follow their blog. Verify their authority on the particular subject matter. This is essential, as you would want to be associated with high quality. The next step would be to monitor the kind of following these blogs get. If you notice that followers of this blog continuously engage and contribute relevant and intelligent comments, it is good blog.
Calibrated approach
If the particular blog satisfies you, approach them for a guest blogging opportunity. However, one final check is necessary to confirm the said blog matches your culture and values. If all seems satisfactory write to them and be in contact till you get your chance to contribute to their blog.
