Tag Archives: blog

Why Your Business Needs a Blog

I guess this post comes a little late, since I already talked about guest posting techniques for your blog. I should have started out with this post. But oh well! Better late than never.

One of the ways that SEO works is that your website will be more optimized with unique content. Having something new to post regularly will refresh your website and keep it relevant. It will also help you in terms of keywords. The more you write about topics relevant to your business, the more you will show up when those keywords are searched for on Google. It also has the added bonus of making you appear to be an expert in your field. If you share your blog posts on social media, you can drive more traffic to your home page, resulting in more exposure and more sales.

So, what should you write about? Really, this depends on your business. If you have a local business, write about your area. Absolutely write about anything that pertains to your products. You can also write about businesses in general, like how to make your office greener or anything relating to being an employee. If you find something interesting and think your audience might too, go ahead and write about it. Writing about social media is also a great idea.

Let’s create an example. We’ll make up a hypothetical beauty salon located in Denver, Colorado. If this beauty salon had a blog, they would want to write about Denver, Colorado; beauty products; being a freelance beautician; beauty school; beauty salons; different beauty treatments; keeping your body healthy; being an employee; advertising, especially on social media; celebrities and their beauty treatments; budgeting; and more. When it comes down to it, don’t limit yourself. You’ll do better to keep it relevant most of the time, but it’s more important to have fun with it and be creative.

Guest Posting for SEO

Many bloggers today use guest posting to promote their blog. This is a great strategy because both the original blog owner and the guest poster are sharing their audiences with each other.

This is also great for SEO purposes. Having more links to your blog will help get you to the top of Google’s search results. But how do you even begin a guest post strategy?

If you don’t already interact with other blogs, start now. If you have favorite blogs, definitely comment on them often (but be honest and sincere – not a spammer with constant comments!). If you find blogs that are similar to yours, especially in the topics, also establish a relationship with them.

If your friends have blogs, arrange some post trading. While re-blogging content is okay, it’s better for both of you if you share original content.

Once you have established relationships with other bloggers, first ask them to be a guest poster on your blog. Send them a quick email or comment. You can tell them that you really liked their thoughts on a certain topic, and ask them to write a post for you expounding on that original post. Or maybe they could write a similar post, but from a different angle. For example, if one person has some really good thoughts on fishing, ask them to write about fishing specifically in your area. If someone writes about living on an extreme budget, ask them how they plan birthday parties with very few expenses. There’s lots of ways they can repurpose content for you. Or, they could write something completely brand new!

After they have successfully written a post for you, tell them that you would love to return the favor sometime. Even if a blogger doesn’t yet want a guest post from you, it is important to maintain any good relationships you’ve created. Remember how hard it was to get to this point?

When you’ve finally been asked to write a guest post to publish on someone else’s blog, make sure you do your best work. You definitely don’t want this debut to be a throwaway piece. Try to write about something similar to the topics you’ve written about before. This will not only give new reader’s a taste of what your blog is generally like, but will also create tons of backlink opportunities for you. Not know what “backlinking” is? Check out this very post. I’ve already inserted 3 different backlinks into the text. Can you find them? Look at the hyperlinks – the words underlined and turned blue. Now click on them. Did they take you to another website? If you mention another blog post in your guest post, make sure to include a hyperlink to it. This will increase traffic to your website, as well as help your SEO rankings.

If you don’t want to use your relationships to create guest posting opportunities, try a few different websites that will allow you to post your guest post to a directory. Then blog owners will be able to find your post and publish it to their website. This will draw in random viewers that would not normally be able to obtain. One such website isĀ http://myblogguest.com/, but there are many others!

So good luck with your guest posting strategy!