Small businesses are the change agents. Hence, they need to ditch the grumpy ole methods of customer acquisition and look for something new. Blogging as a marketing tool has been around for a long time now, but only a handful of small businesses have used it for customer acquisition, business development, and customer relationship management.
Blogging when done with patience and with optimum utilization of SEO tools can create amazing results. A lot of entrepreneurs and webmasters consider blogging to be the tool that drives business whereas blogging is just a way of acquiring traffic. Entrepreneurs need to work on the targeted traffic coming to their website in order to register growth and make sales happen!
If acquiring traffic was good enough to make a business successful then scammers would have been the richest people on the web, but that is not the case. Making your small business success with the help of blogging needs a plan, a business development strategy, loads of patience and support from peers.
As we say, support from peers is important; we acknowledge the power of Guest Blogging and we also appreciate participation in varied blog forums and blogging communities. You can always find individuals who have a huge audience and is willing to help you grow your business. Collaborate with them, publish guest posts on each other’s blog and drive traffic to your site.
Guest Blogging has acquired popularity since Google rolled its Panda update. Till 2012, everyone was busy publishing content and never bothered about guest posts or link exchange. Guest blogging helps your small business in a lot of ways; it allows you to discover a new set of audience, and it also helps you establish a reputation online.
The amazing thing about guest posting really is the amount of people you will meet through it. This means either in the comments of your posts or simply the relationship with the person owning the blog.
Here we delve deeper and have an intricate look into the varied benefits of Guest Blogging for small businesses:
1. It helps you Prepare a ground
We have always iterated the idea of starting a blog way before starting your small business; if you cannot start an independent blog then seek opportunities to write for others. Get into touch with people who have influential blogs and request them for an author account. Publish quality posts under your name and leave an update about your upcoming small business in Author Bio. Talk about how you are planning to start a business and how it will solve problems persisting in the contemporary world.
Prepare a ground for your upcoming business and ensure a grand launch.
2. Promotes Domain and Search Engine Authority
As we discussed the importance of link-building post-Google’s Panda effect, we would also like to explain, how it impacts the Domain and Search Engine Authority. Guest Blogging puts the growth of your blog on automatic mood. If you are into collaboration with someone, who is popular and is known for his quality posts then links from his website to your blog or website will increase the page rank of your site and the increased page rank will improve your Domain Authority and SEO.
Page Rank ultimately is the most important measure of good SEO Practices, the better the page rank; the better website does on search engines.
In a nutshell, we can say Guest Blogging brings free traffic, free reputation and also free links.
3. It helps you build a long and worthy Email List
Emails have always helped small businesses with branding and business development. The sheer power that allows you to reach the intricately managed inbox can be life changing. Use email marketing efficiently and you can see your small business growing out of leaps and bounds. But don't SPAM.
Building email list can be a tricky thing; not everyone who visits your site signs up for the newsletter or shares their email ids. When you are new on the block, and you are looking forward to building an email list, opting for Guest Blogging can be a growth catalyst. Collaborate with reputed bloggers, use their platform for reaching out to the larger audience and make them share their email id.
Making people believe that signing up for your mailing list will help them grow and learn new things is very important. You need to work on the varied nuances of the post and ensure that it is an exquisite mixture of information, future prospect, sales pitch and call to action.
The other way of building an email list is to request established bloggers to share his or her sorted email list, but it is not as easy as it sounds. You need to provide them with something that helps them grow. A well-written blog post or a smartly done infographic can be of great help.
4. Increases Exposure and Creates Brand Awareness
Let's understand how guest blogging increases exposure and creates brand awareness with the help of an example: Let's assume that you got an incredible opportunity to publish a blog post on a website with 50,000 visitors and 5,000 visitors ended up reading your post. The probability of getting redirected traffic from this post to your blog or website is very less, but you will still have your and your businesses’ name recognized. Visitors will come to know about your small business, and if someone is in need of your service or product, then they will access your website and sales will happen.
Now the question here is, how to increase the probability of getting redirected traffic?
Acquiring traffic from guest posts needs following:
- Targeted Keyword and targeted audience: if you are publishing a post just because you like the topic then the probability of redirected traffic will only go down. You need to target a keyword and target the loyal audience of the blog.
- Educational content: Talk about the latest trends and its impact on the contemporary life will make you sound like an expert and you will be able to coax the reader into visiting your site.
- Call to action: What is the benefit of spending hours for creating quality content and not even getting an email in return? Ensure that there’s a call to action at the end of every post. Either makes people read articles on your blog, make them signup for the free newsletter or urge them to leave a comment. Add hangers to the post, make people come back and read these articles.
5. Improves the Social Media presence
Varied businesses have diverse nature, and the different revenue models accordingly; while entrepreneurs are smart enough to create different revenue models for an online shop but they forget to develop multiple customer acquisition models for diverse businesses.
Distinct customer acquisition model is a myth but undoubtedly the need of the hour. For example, people can always Google and find the store that serves them with the best apparel, but Facebook and Twitter can be a great place for enticing people to order a cake and enjoy it. Yes! Facebook and Twitter are social networking sites with the maximum influencing potential; people see their friends doing a particular thing, and they do it! Do you smell an opportunity there?
Guest Blogging can be of great help in increasing social media presence. People may be lazy enough to spend time and signup for the newsletter, but just one click and they are subscribed to all your feeds on Facebook and Twitter.
Facebook and Twitter are game changers; any small business targeting these will grow by leaps and bounds and will remain no more small business.
Guest Blogging is the key that opens doors to opportunities, customer acquisition, and brand development.
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Pro tip: Join blogging communities and forums today, look for influencers who are willing to help and support new small businesses. Research, curate the best possible content with a call to action and see how your small business grows automatically.
Tell us your experience about guest blogging in the comment section.