Published by the Marketing Association (New Zealand). Download the full Direct Marketing Best Practice Guidelines.
Good advice here for:
In 2014, Matt Cutts, former head of the Web Spam team at Google, wrote the following:
“Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop.”
Ever since the state of guest blogging has been debated heatedly. Indeed, guest blogs with low-quality content have truly been dead for decades.
On the other hand, high-quality blogging is an effective strategy to create backlinks, and drive traffic to your website. Even Cutts eventually published a correction, and said: “There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.)”
So, the question is, how can we create quality guest blogs every time?
Here, we have outlined three easy and effective strategies to create guest posts that are sure to attract links, and bring in traffic:
The Robin Hood technique, as suggested by SEO Gold Coast, is a quick and effective way to write guest posts with good quality content. This technique involves recreating great content from popular blogs and offering them to platforms with a low ranking, and less credibility and traffic.
Keep in mind, however, that this does not mean plagiarizing the content – instead, you must only take inspiration from the blog to recreate ideas for your own post.
The following steps can be undertaken for this technique:
Ahref’s Content Explorer Tool contains one billion pages and can be used to find blogs you can write a guest post for
Source: ahrefs
Note the importance of Domain Rating (DR) that showcases the popularity level of a backlink, based on a scale of 1-100.
While it is tempting to only work with high DR blogs, low DR blogs are also worth investing your time and energy in, as they usually have a niche following and are bound to grow.
What’s more, low DR blogs usually receive fewer pitches and have less strict editorial standards – thereby making it easier to get featured or published.
Finally, you can move on to step 4:
4. Read the content of your chosen blog piece, and recreate it by adding a unique spin to it – conclude by pitching it to low or high DR blogs through email outreach
Another effective way of guest posting is by splintering or breaking existing blogs into shorter, but authoritative posts.
The point of splintering content is to dive deep into a topic that you have already researched before, as it is easier to recreate, revise, or rewrite.
After writing detailed individual posts, you can then pitch the pieces to online magazines and platforms that would publish it as guest posts, whilst still re-directing the reader to your original blog post – thereby creating quality backlinks.
A small change in perspective can lead to a completely new, and unique piece of writing.
The trick here is to use a previously written blog post and turn it into multiple guest posts by simply tweaking your overall perspective.
For instance, if your previous blog post was on the “The Future of Link Building” – you can now write on a variety of topics by changing your viewpoint, such as:
The techniques outlined here are a good way to get you started. Keep in mind, however, that once you start pitching your guest posts, you may be faced with some problems.
For instance, editors and bloggers may routinely reject your pitch, negotiations may take months, or the link to your article may be taken down suddenly and without prior notice.
To address this concern here is what you can do:
In short, by following the techniques outlined above, you can defy Matt Cutt’s claim that guest posts are dead. Indeed, guest posts are thriving and can be used to generate traffic and brand awareness for your business in the long run.
What’s a typical response rate for highly personalised B2B direct mail? What provider would you work with? I’ve heard of Enthusem and Pebblepost.
It’s a well designed card with their logo, name or website on it.Logo for Enthusem
Lastly, both the services you suggest seem good, I’ve not used them. But a competent Direct Marketing Agency (like Creative Agency Secrets) will do a similar job of customised direct mail pieces as these businesses. Which may be much cheaper. It depends on how big your database is as to which is a good / cheap option.
We use our 8 Step New Business Development process and each has a category – this blog post is related to Step 2 – Marketing Communications and Step 3 – New Business Pipeline
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