SEO News

Posted by MackenzieFogelson

Guest blogging isn’t just a link building tactic (that has been spammed and abused). It’s an excellent way to build your credibility, your community, and your customer base.

But you have to be strategic about it and put some quality effort into it.

When you guest blog, you’ve been provided the opportunity to leverage someone else’s audience, someone else’s brand, and someone else’s established forum.

That means, if you’re doing it right, guest blogging should be some of your best work. Think of it as a speaking engagement. You wouldn’t get up in front of a group of people unprepared. You would take the time to carefully craft your message in order to make the biggest impact on your audience.

And when you’re putting in all of that hard work, you don’t just want to guest blog anywhere. You want to strategically put your effort into blogs that are a match for your values, philosophies, and company. Because ultimately, you’re using guest blogging as a tactic to attract customers to your business.

Finding a guest-blogging match


So let’s say you want to use guest blogging as a tactic for your business development and community building efforts. How would you find those opportunities?

How about these five simple steps:

[1] Determine goals and key performance indicators (KPIs)

Success in anything, but especially in guest blogging, starts with identifying goals. What are you trying to accomplish? What are you expecting to gain from it? And, also very significant: How will you measure success?

Let’s say I’m looking for blogging opportunities. There are three things that I would like to accomplish:

1. Become part of new communities and build relationships with people outside of SEO. (Not that there’s anything wrong with SEOs. It’s just an example, folks. Carry on).

2. Attract business that is a match for Mack Web’s culture and values.

3. Find new information sources (blogs) where I can learn, teach the team, and better serve our clients.



I would measure success in connections made, qualified leads generated, and new quality blogs to read.

[2] Define your audience by developing personas


In order to determine the right guest-blogging opportunities, you’ve got to identify your target audience. One way to do that is to develop personas. This will help you define the specific people you want to attract to your community and your company through your guest-blogging efforts.

For example, if I’m looking to attract people who are curious about social media marketing, possibly community building, and how that can help them build their business, one of my personas may look like this:

Name: Joanna

Title: CMO

Company: A small SaaS startup

Desires: Rapid growth, increased revenue generation

Goals: Drive ROI through social and community building



Having an understanding of who you’re targeting will assist you in filtering guest-blogging prospects later.

[3] Find some targets in your niche 


Now that you’ve figured out who in general you want to target, you’ll want to actually find the specific people that you want to reach out to for guest-blogging opportunities. You can start by looking for influential people and then determining whether they have blogs to which you could contribute.

Using myself as an example, I would go to Followerwonk and do some searching. I’m going to start with the phrase “social media marketing” and then sort the results by Social Authority.

After sifting through just the first page of results, I recognize Jeff Bullas as a possible guest blogging target. He’s not the CMO I’m looking to attract, but I’d be willing to bet there are CMOs that read his blog. So let’s work with him as a possible target in the social media marketing niche.

[4] Qualify the source


Once you’ve found some possible targets in your niche, you’ll want to do a little legwork to make sure they’re the right fit. You may want to keep track of this stuff in a spreadsheet so that you can organize and filter your results later.

There may be bunch of things that you investigate with these opportunities, but if you’re trying to do this quickly, try some of these:

1. Check for a blog

Clearly you cannot guest blog for someone who does not in fact have a blog, so that’s step number one.

On Jeff Bullas’s blog, I can conduct a simple search for [guest post]:

By clicking on these results, it’s clear that he allows guest submissions (and, in fact, that he allows them quite frequently). So if this ends up being a good fit for me, I may have a greater chance of getting a spot.

2. Check for domain authority and link profile


You’ll want to make sure that you’re putting all of the hard work of your quality content on a blog that has strong credibility.

You can type the URL of the blog into Open Site Explorer to check their domain authority and link profile. You will certainly be earning a link from this blog, so even if it is nofollow, you want to ensure that you’re being associated with a quality site. Not that a low DA is always an indication of a poor blog; some are just new and haven’t yet built their authority. You just want to make sure you’re building trust and not hurting your reputation, your brand, or your own link profile. In addition to DA, then, you’ll want to check their profile:

At a quick glance, Jeff Bullas’s link profile looks pretty swell; he’s earned links from some reputable places. I would say he passes the domain authority and link profile check.

Just make sure when you’re qualifying blogs that are not as established or well known that you’re picky about this stuff so that you don’t pay for it later. You want to be associated with high quality, so that’s what you’re looking for.



3. Check for engagement

You also want to make sure you’ve qualified this guest-blogging opportunity on the social side. What kind of engagement does the blog get? What does its community look like? What is its reach?

Looking at both Jeff Bullas’s posts, and especially at his guest authors’ posts, you can see that there’s quite a bit of engagement. Not only do they get shared, but they even elicit comments:

Another way to look for engagement is to search for the URL of the guest blog post in Twitter. This will allow you to investigate the people who have actually tweeted this guest blogger’s post:

Chances are many of the same people who read and tweet these posts are the same ones that may read or share mine (if I were given the opportunity, of course). Based on who is tweeting these posts, I can determine whether that audience is a match for the persona I’ve defined.

[5] Check yes or no

Once you’ve worked through each of the steps above, you’re probably ready to make a decision about the guest-blogging opportunity that’s in front of you. But before you check “yes” or “no” (and ask for the opportunity), I’d highly recommend asking yourself one final question:

Is this guest blogging opportunity a culture and value fit for your business?

Ultimately, if your guest blogging is a success, you will attract customers from this blog to your website and blog. So, most importantly, you’ve got to make sure the people who are part of this community are in alignment with your brand.

Go read the entries on the blog. Is the content of good quality? Do the posts resonate with your philosophies? Are the other contributors to this blog reputable? Would you hang out with them? If you were to guest on this blog, would it speak well of your brand?

 Are you going to want any of their readers as your customers? Would you spend time with their community?

Just some important things to think about before you spend a whole lot of time on guest blogging. Make sure it’s a match for your business.

Time well spent

Guest blogging is a really powerful way to connect with people, build relationships, and find qualified leads for your business. If you take the time to strategically seek and qualify the right opportunities, it will be time well spent.

Have you had success in finding quality guest blogging opportunities? Share your successes and techniques in the comments below.

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The emergence of new platforms, multi-screen viewing, real-time advertising and big data (just to mention a few) have profoundly changed the way advertising is seen and consumed.  

Media fragmentation has resulted in complex customer journeys and vast quantities of customer data.   

The importance of reporting

The key to solving the agile marketing challenge lies in accurate reporting. This assumption was reflected in a recent survey of hundreds of marketers to find out what strategies and techniques they were using to deliver ROI.  

41% of marketers surveyed said accurate reporting on all marketing activity was their primary challenge, followed closely by mastering the operational management of marketing systems.

Incidentally, 49% of respondents also stated they were not sure how they currently reward marketing partners such as technology vendors, email service providers and publishers. 

The lack of clarity of advertising ROI by channel is a major barrier stopping many marketers from becoming agile.  

If it’s not easy to measure a channel’s effectiveness across your entire marketing mix then how can you respond quickly and appropriately?

Tech solutions 

Technology solutions that increase transparency into channel activity and enable marketers to easily test and learn create an agile environment.  

When asked if they were concerned about Google’s dominance in PPC advertising?’ 39% of marketers answered ‘yes’.

The view is echoed by Sir Martin Sorrell, who in the past has referred to Google as a ‘frenemy’ or ‘froe’.  This kind of concern can stem from the inability to determine where the sale should be attributed.

Search generally benefits from the most widely used last-click attribution model. Increased transparency into channel performance will give marketers better insights and the impetus to react faster to counteract any existing channel inflation.

Email, which may have lost some if its lustre as a marketing channel in recent years (according to some at least), was picked by marketers as the single most effective channel for delivering sales.

This view is echoed in Econsultancy’s Email Marketing Industry Census 2013, in which 66% of respondents stated that email delivers an ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ ROI.

Q: How do you rate the following channels in terms of return on investment?

Boden, which describes its customers as “channel agnostic” says email is still an established channel for the brand. It de-dupes some of the click overlap with affiliates by setting rules to pay commission only where email did not appear in the conversion path or appeared after the affiliate click.

According to Boden’s online acquisition manager Oliver Elliott:

 It wasn’t really about saving money, it was about optimising spend and performance along paths to conversion.

Big data

A dashboard that enables the easy manipulation of data to show which channel delivers that all important sale or conversion event is one example.

Air New Zealand and Vodafone use a marketing data platform (MDP) which uses  customers’ conversion data to link together non-linear customer journeys as well as re-allocate investment to those areas previously undervalued.  

MDP works with an advertiser’s existing systems, such as its CRM database, bid-management and order fulfilment systems and allows easy and effective data manipulation. As Chris Allison, Air New Zealand’s online sales manager says, “big data is only valuable if used and executed in the right way”. 

Collaborative technology creates agility 

Another way in which marketing agility can be achieved is through collaboration between technology solutions. This not only reduces the number of systems marketers have to learn to use but also enables more accurate data gathering and manipulation.  

For example, the integration of a tag management system with social media buying technology helps brands to understand a user’s path-to-purchase and allows marketers to follow customer journeys across any social platform to sale.  

I use social as an example here because of the importance marketers are now placing on this channel.

The importance of understanding the channel’s value was also shown in our survey with 43% of marketers saying they did not think their social media investments were delivering revenue while 32% said they were not sure.  

This shows that, while social can provide marketers with an abundance of customer data and a rich opportunity for effective ad targeting, the reality of acting on this data is not yet being achieved.  

Not because the channel cannot provide it, but because of a lack of accurate tracking and reporting.

Agility is not just about finding the right technology

If modern marketers are to optimise their digital spend then they must have the confidence to employ an agile mentality and embrace the technologies which enable them to do so.  

Only through this approach can marketers transform into the agile professionals who truly understand the value of their channels and react quickly.

You can read the full report here: Marketing Agility: Win the fight against wasted digital spend.