We are very pleased to share this exceptional guest post from Greg Rollett of Rock Star Lifestyle Design and Internet Marketing.
Greg is behind the new Rock Star Business Series 2.0. Read more about Greg Rollett and follow him at Twitter: (Greg Rollett).
photo by Mexicanwave
There has been lots of talk of blogger alliances and blogger outreach recently. I think this comes from the realization that we can all grow faster together than by going at it alone. I know for a fact that leverage in online marketing can be the difference between hoping for some sales to come in and seeing sales come in.
For bloggers looking to use leverage the most important thing you can do is guest post. It may seem crazy in the early days of developing your own site as you may be having trouble coming up with content for your own blog, however reaching out to others is valuable for a number of reasons.
Leverage Their Audience
By writing this guest post I am leveraging the Grow Map audience and exposing my writing to everyone that sees this post. Most of the readers are not subscribers of my site and are unfamiliar with my work. If people like the post there is a good chance that they might click over to my site, add me on Twitter or ReTweet the post exposing it to even more people.
When people leave comments it opens you up to continue that conversation and build relationships with the readers of the site for which you guest post. This adds value for the site and their readers as well. It’s a win-win for all parties.
The real value comes when you can leverage a very large site. I love looking for sites with 100k+ readers and writing guest posts for extreme leverage. The best real world results of that came from a guest post I wrote for Mashable a few months back. That resulted in over 500 ReTweets, over 1,000 new Twitter followers and 100 RSS readers. Now bad for a few hours writing a post. If I wanted to do that on my own site, with no leverage, it would take weeks or months.
Leverage Their SEO Power
Gail recently wrote about the impact of leveraging a site like Murray Newlands blog to increase her rankings in the search engines. This is one of the unknown secrets of guest posting. If you can write a post with strong anchor text that relates to your products, services or writing it increases your Google juice through incoming links.
Google eats this stuff up because links are what keeps Google’s spiders flowing throughout the Internet. The more links it finds for your site with specific anchor text, the higher your site will rise in the rankings.
Again when I wrote the Mashable post, I leverage their site which has a Page Rank of 7 to instantly begin ranking for terms related to my sites. The ripple effect is that the Mashable posts ranks high for the search term, as does my own post, so I receive extra listings that point people back in my direction.
You can gauge the Page Rank and other characteristics of a page by using the Search Status Firefox Plug in or the SEO Moz Tool Bar. These are all free tools and very helpful for SEO and looking at how you can maximize your rankings.
Leverage Their Promotional Tools
When you guest post, you know that the blog owner is going to promote your post too right? They want traffic, don’t they? By guest posting you know that you are going to receive a mention on their Twitter feed, their Facebook Feed and maybe even Digg, StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites.
The key here is that you reciprocate and promote your buns off to help drive traffic. If the site gets a good number of impressions, there is a good chance you will be asked to write again, opening the door up to more people seeing your work.
Create Relationships
The key to effective guest posting is to really create a relationship with the other site. It’s great to get all the benefits listed above, but really its better to know that you have a new friend in the online world that is going to help you down the road, and that you are going to help them. Relationships are reciprocal in the online world for those that are really looking to grow and be the best they can be.
I know that some of the best relationships I have in the online world were as the result of an outreach to that person or from someone beneficial. If you are creating great value and are looking to share that value with the world, good things will come.
And with that said, I’d like to thank Gail and GrowMap for letting me hang out in this guest post and I look forward to talking to you in the comments. If you want to learn more about me here is the info you need!
This guest post was written by Greg Rollett. Greg writes about Lifestyle Design and Internet Marketing and can be found on Twitter chatting about all sorts of things. He is also releasing a course for young entrepreneurs called the Rock Star Business Series.
GUEST BLOGGING:
- Jonathan Volk: Utilizing Guest Posts: A Basic How-To
- One Cool Site: Blogging Tips: Guest Blogging Arrangements – how to get those guest posts published
- Inconsequential Logic: Why Aren’t You Guest Blogging?