Lesson 4: Shameless GuestBlogging Hacks

I think by now you’ve noticed that in this email course I’m not offering you any “general advice“. All my tactics are very practical and result-oriented. And this lesson is no exception.

So let’s start the lesson on GuestBlogging with determining the goals that you wish to achieve with it.

1. You want traffic
Yes, this course is all about growing the traffic to your blog. And guestposts is a perfect way to attract some very targeted traffic.

2. You want subscribers/followers
What’s the point of referring a few hundreds of people from a guestpost to your blog if no one of them will eventually stay? You have to turn your visitors into subscribers if you want your blog to grow.

3. You want authority & trust
You want people to remember your name. You want to build that connection with them. This way they are more likely to follow your own blog and perhaps even buy from you or hire you.

In essence, these are the three things that you should aim for with your guestblogging efforts.

And now onto the tactics, that will help you to actually achieve these goals.

Tell Stories

Who told you people want to read your post anyways?

• Thousands of new posts are published daily around internet, so people have to make a choice what to read;
• Reading blogs is not the only thing people do in their lives, so they might as well prefer to do something else;
• Even if they started reading your article, they might easily get distracted by something and forget about it.

The science of writing engaging articles that people can’t stand reading is called copywriting.

And one of the tricks that copywriters known for ages is “storytelling”.

As Don Hewitt (popular television producer) once said in his interview:

Even the people who wrote Bible were smart enough to know: tell them a story. The issue was “evil” – the story was Noah.

So let’s see what are the benefits of storytelling.

Engagement
Like I’ve just said, people don’t really want to read your post. But you can try telling them a good story to suck them into reading it.

Personal Brand
It’s great when you have some relevant story to open your post and get people interested, but it’s even better if the story is actually about yourself.

Compare these examples:

You’ve just finished reading a post called “10 Tips To Grow Your Business“. Would you be interested in who the author is? Would you check his author bio? Click the link to his website? Follow him on twitter? I don’t think so. Most likely you just don’t care.

What about the post that’s called “10 Rules I Follow In Growing My Own Business“? There’s some very specific guy behind the post, sharing his own experience with his own business. I bet it’s hard to resist checking his profile.

And besides, it’s a well-known fact that when people learn certain things from your biography, they no longer consider you a stranger. So by sharing stories about yourself you can easily form the necessary opinion and benefit from it.

(Some people use this trick to do bad things. So be careful.)

Links
Some blogs don’t allow any links in guestposts. But what if you can’t remove the link, because it’s part of your story?

Example: Quite often I’m telling a story of my very first guestpost that surprisingly turned to be an overwhelming success.

The post was about Facebook Marketing and it was published at a very respected SEO and Marketing blog – SEOmoz (see this legendary post here).

I spent about a month collecting information and creating a neat article out of it. And when the post was published it got a huge support from the community with tons of comments, tweets and likes.

I really didn’t expect a success like that.

See? Without a link to the actual post, my story might be considered fake, so the link just belongs there.

You’re probably thinking: “But I don’t have any stories to tell? What should I do?“. Well, you can tell a story about how you struggle to come up with a story.

But better go do something and tell the story about it.

Reference Posts From Your Blog

Actually we’ve just covered this one. Referencing your own articles is what brings visitors from your guestpost to your blog.

A guestpost that has no links back to your own blog is almost useless.

Moreover, your job is to mix these references into the post the way people just can’t resist clicking them.

And the very best way to do that is by creating a sense of scarcity.

Example: “Shameless GuestBlogging Hacks” is just one of the 5 powerful lessons in the Free Email Course that can be found on my blog – BloggerJet.

By reading this sentence a person discovers that a cool lesson that he’s up to right now is actually a part of a series of lessons that he didn’t yet read. And since he already learned one of them, he will feel invested and his subconscious mind will ask for the whole thing.

There are many other methods to intrigue people and have them click your links, but in my opinion this one is the most effective: “Share a bit of information and link to the whole thing“.

The Cloning Method

This one is my favorite.

Imagine this. You’ve just published a nice guestpost with a cool story and blended a few links to your posts into it.

What next? Do you have to come up with a brand new idea for a guestpost?

Hell No!

You can easily write a few more guestposts based on exactly the same idea and submit them to other blogs.

It may feel a bit spammy, but if you look closer – there’s nothing wrong about this method.

Thousands of news sites write about exactly the same stuff every day. That’s because they know that their audiences don’t overlap that much. Same applies to blogs in any niche.

So next time you’ll be writing a guestpost, make sure to rewrite it a few times and submit to different blogs.

Please note: by no means I’m inviting you to submit the same article to a bunch of different blogs. You should rewrite the piece to make it original, and maybe even change your angle slightly so that each post could have something new and fresh for those readers who happen to follow all of these blogs.

Author Bio is your Lead Magnet

If a person is reading your author bio – this can only mean that he is interested in you and wants more from you.

It would be a huge mistake to tell him that you love to eat sushi and invite him to follow you on Twitter.

You have to turn him into your email subscriber right here, right now!

Remember in my second lesson I preached on the power of Email Courses in turning your visitors into email subscribers? Well, your author bio is a perfect place to pitch your Email Course to your readers:

Tim Soulo is a blogging experimenter and conversion junkie. He is passionate about discovering new marketing strategies that really work and sharing them with his readers. Right now he’s probably up to something new and meanwhile you can take his free email course on doubling your blog traffic.

Here’s my advice to you. Don’t write any guestposts till you have an email course to pitch in your author bio. Otherwise you’ll just waste a ton of traffic that won’t stick.

Make a List

Here’s an amazing idea for a guestpost: make a list of things, where you can add yourself as an item.

Example: Let’s say you’re running a web design blog, and you have a few cool photoshop tutorials there. You can do a list like this – “20 Best Photoshop Tutorials From All Over The Web”, add a few of your own tutorials to this list and submit it as a guestpost.

The beauty of this type of guestpost is that the article by itself is useless for readers. They will have to click the links to the tutorials that you’ve selected for them in order to get to the value. And since your own tutorials are high in the list – you’re going to get some nice traffic.

Now multiply this by The Cloning Method and you can easily create 3-5 awesome guestposts in no time.

Need another example to get your brains working? No problem.

Example: Let’s say you’ve published a killer article on “getting up early“. You can easily come up with all sorts of lists that may include a link to this article:

10 Habits of Successful People
10 Steps To A Perfectly Healthy Body
10 Essential Productivity Hacks

Each of these articles will only benefit from a link to your “getting up early” post.

Did you notice that these kinds of lists are perfect for referencing your articles with the “scarcity trick“?

Take Action

0. Before you start submitting guestposts, make sure you have a solid email course on your blog, that converts visitors into subscribers.

1. Go through your old articles and think if you can blend them in some cool story or make a list of things where this article can be referenced.

2. After writing your guestpost, think if you can apply The Cloning Method to it.

3. Make sure your author bio is engaging enough and has the link to your email course or whatever you use to convert visitors into subscribers.

4. Become Guestblogging Ninja

I’ve shared some of my favorite tips and tactics, but there are many-many more!

In case you’re serious about blogging and ready to invest some money into your education, I recommend you to take an outstanding GuestBlogging Course by John Morrow.

I’ve actually purchased it myself about a year abo and never regretted a dime spent on it.

I was also using some materials from the course to train a few dozens of newbie copywriters and explain them the fundamentals.

And besides, John Morrow is not some random “guru” who came out of nowhere. He happens to be the Associate Editor of Copyblogger – which is a world famous blog on copywriting. So you can be sure his course is worthy.