How to Use Guest Posting as Part of Your Content Strategy

Elizabeth Hines

6 years ago

Guest posting can help you build your reputation as a thought leader, grow your online reader base, improve your SEO, and expose your content to new audiences.

At Fronetics Real Estate, we use guest posting as a part of our own — and many of our clients’ — content strategies. Essentially, we partner with a relevant influencer or company, and swap content to post on each other’s blogs. It can be a really effective way to reach new, relevant audiences and provide interesting perspectives and voices to keep your core audience engaged.

What’s so great about guest posting?

Guest posting has all kinds of benefits. If you’ve identified a list of relevant influencers and companies with similar (and ideally wider) audiences, every time you post as a guest, your content and properties are exposed to a whole new segment of your target audience. We talk about this all the time when it comes to content marketing — your biggest asset isn’t your properties, it’s your expertise. Guest posting helps you establish your brand as a thought leader.

In addition to posting with real estate industry influencers and peer brands, guest posting for larger publications can be hugely beneficial, for obvious reasons. Not only are you introducing your brand and content to a broad audience, you’re associating yourself with an established authoritative source.

By the same token, having other brands author guest posts on your own blog is a great idea as well. When key influencers write for your blog, they bring their audience directly to you, allowing you to tap into a new and relevant set of prospects. Not only that, by inviting peers to contribute to your content, you’re forging and strengthening relationships within the industry.

Guest posting is great for SEO

Here’s a fact that’s often overlooked: Guest posting can significantly improve your search engine rankings (We’re always talking about how to improve your SEO.). Search engines use backlinks from other websites, particularly popular ones, as part of their algorithm for how search results are ranked. According to online business expert Sarah Peterson, in a guest article for the Huffington Post, “you can use the opportunity of your guest post to include 1-2 backlinks to strong pieces of content you want to rank for.”

Grow your email list

We all know that email marketing is hugely effective and profitable, if your email list is strong, and effectively segmented. Another often overlooked benefit of guest posting is that it has the potential to strengthen and enrich your email marketing efforts.

Because you’re being exposed to new audiences, both as a guest blogger and when guests write for your blog, you have the opportunity to target and cultivate new leads from relevant sources. Use guest posts as an opportunity to usher prospects to lead generation campaigns on your own website. Says Peterson, “if you’re not using this marketing strategy, you could be leaving a ton of email subscribers on the table.”

Involve your readers

As with any blogging efforts, you won’t get much bang for your buck if you simply author a guest article and do nothing to promote it. “You have to promote the article on your social media and through your own blog,” writes Tyler Zey of Easy Agent Pro. It’s also a good idea to solicit and reply to reader comments on your guest piece.

Are you a real estate professional who has authored a guest blog? Have you invited others to write for your own blog? Tell us about your experiences in the comments!

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