Guest Blogging: 3 Tips For Success

Guest blogging requires a commitment of your time – and dedication to producing some of your best content. If you’re going to put yourself in front of someone else’s audience, this is a prerequisite for success.

Guest blogs on Social-Hire are now typically generating 200 – 500 social shares each. The most popular posts have been read 40,000+ times. So we wanted to write a post that would help our guest blog authors – and indeed any guest blog author – figure out how to get the maximum ROI from their time investment.

Guest Blogging ROI - 3 Tips For Success

Looking at our top performing posts, below we share 3 tips for emulating the success those authors have achieved and maximizing the ROI you get from guest blogging on Social-Hire (and guest blogging more generally):

  1. Writing to get huge volumes of social shares
  2. Writing to generate long-term search engine traffic
  3. Taking responsibility for the success of your guest blog posts


If you follow these steps each time you write a guest blog post, you’re maximizing your chances of getting the results you desire from guest blogging.
 

Guest Blogging ROI Tip 1 – Writing to get huge volumes of social shares

Our experience shows that the majority of social shares are generated not by people clicking share buttons on your website, but rather from re-sharing or retweeting something they have seen in their social media feeds.

Armed with that knowledge, you should be eager to write a guest blog that is going to look as seductive as possible when it appears on social media. It goes without saying that the better the quality of your content, the more likely people are to share it. But over and above that, be sure to:

BuzzSumo

Securing social shares increases the ROI of your guest blogging activities

 

Guest Blogging ROI Tip 2 – Writing to generate long-term search engine traffic

What is very interesting when we look at top performing posts on our site is that several of these are recently published posts that have been able to generate mass social sharing and so pulled in a surge of short-term interest. But many others are posts that were published prior to that (even years and years prior) – and that are now pulling in significant search engine traffic in addition to the social sharing they achieved at the time of publication. Since this could generate interest in your content and your profile for many many years to come, it’s clearly something worthwhile trying to incorporate in your guest blog posts.

Many of you will have blogs or websites that aren’t ranked particularly highly – and so writing for search engines isn’t something you’ve had to factor in when writing for your own site. But once you are writing for a website with a high pagerank, you can start to aspire to achieving page 1 listings for your articles.

Here are some pointers on how to write a guest blog that will generate long-term search engine traffic:

 

Guest Blogging ROI Tip 3 – Taking responsibility for the success of your guest blog posts

Without question, the guest blog authors who have consistently performed the strongest on Social-Hire have been very active themselves in helping to promote their new posts. This is critical for a number of reasons:


So there you have it, 3 tips for maximizing your ROI from guest blogging. As bonus 4th and 5th tips, we’d also add the importance of being a good storyteller and letting your personality shine through in some of your posts plus making sure your post ends with an "About the Author" section that entices the reader into taking the course of action you'd desire from them. But that’ll be the topic of an entirely new article!