Passive Marketing

Category: Tips

  • One Extremely Overlooked Way To Find Guest Blogging Targets

    One Extremely Overlooked Way To Find Guest Blogging Targets

    As one of my bigger sites continue to grow month after month (even without working on it!), I have finally gotten enough time in my schedule to sit down and focus on some quality outreach. I will not bore you with ranting and raving about why guest blogging is great, or why you should be doing it. You have probably heard this from every other internet marketing blog on the internet over the past few years.

    Instead, I want to focus on a technique I have just started using that people seem to forget about and not use. This technique has gotten me a 53% response rate and I have already landed a few links without much work at all which is what I am all about here at Passive Marketing.

    What You Will Need

    The Basic Concept

    target

    There are a ton of ways to utilize tools you have in search of blogs that accept guest posts. One of my absolute favorites has been twitter. All you would need to do is search for your niche + guest post, used Twitter advance search to limit the search date range, and you were presented with tons of targets!

    The one glaring issue here is that if you have such easy access to sites that are accepting guest posts, so do your competitors. On top of this, coming up with this list of outreach targets took TIME, and a lot of it. There has to be a better way right?

    Well, there is! The entire method for this to work, is to accept guest posts yourself.

    Hear me out for a second here. Let’s step back to around 4 months ago where I found myself with a growing site in a lucrative niche, but paying for mass amounts of content each day was getting costly. “Why am I paying for all this writing”, I thought. Maybe I should be leveraging other people to get fresh content up on my site.

    I immediately set up a “write for us” page on my site, and ran some paid ads on Twitter as I outline in my starting a blog guide here to my page asking if they would like to write for me. I managed to snag a few writers and everything was right in the world.

    The real magic hit me months later. I had structured my “write for us” page in such a way that:

    1. The page was getting traffic organically by using the right keywords
    2. I asked potential guest posters to contact me via a web form and give 5 examples of previously published posts

    Just like that, I had people contacting me to guest post on my site. Even if I did not want to accept their guest post at that moment, they were doing the hard work for me! These people were literally handing me some of the best outreach targets that I would have never found via twitter!

    If you have 5 people contacting you a day to guest post, and each one is giving you 5 previous guest posts they have done, these add up quickly and before you know it, you will need to hire someone to outreach for you while you work on other things.

    If you would like to get other quick tips like this one, make sure to hop on my email list below.

    Enter Your Name and Email Below and Click

    One Quick Note

    Before we get into how to structure your “Write for Us” page, you need to understand the search modifiers that people typically use to search for guest posting opportunities. Luckily for you (and me), Brian Dean from Backlinko has done the majority of the work for us. For ease of writing this, I will paste the search modifiers below.

    • Your Keyword “guest post”
    • Your Keyword “write for us”
    • Your Keyword “guest article”
    • Your Keyword “guest post opportunities”
    • Your Keyword “this is a guest post by”
    • Your Keyword “contributing writer”
    • Your Keyword “want to write for”
    • Your Keyword “submit blog post”
    • Your Keyword “contribute to our site”
    • Your Keyword “guest column”
    • Your Keyword “submit content”
    • Your Keyword “submit your content”
    • Your Keyword “submit post”
    • Your Keyword “This post was written by”
    • Your Keyword “guest post courtesy of ”
    • Your Keyword “guest posting guidelines”
    • Your Keyword “suggest a post”
    • Your Keyword “submit an article”
    • Your Keyword “contributor guidelines”
    • Your Keyword “contributing writer”
    • Your Keyword “submit news”
    • Your Keyword “become a guest blogger”
    • Your Keyword “guest blogger”
    • Your Keyword “guest posts wanted”
    • Your Keyword “looking for guest posts”
    • Your Keyword “guest posts wanted”
    • Your Keyword “guest poster wanted”
    • Your Keyword “accepting guest posts”
    • Your Keyword “writers wanted”
    • Your Keyword “articles wanted”
    • Your Keyword “become an author”
    • Your Keyword “become guest writer”
    • Your Keyword “become a contributor”
    • Your Keyword “submit guest post”
    • Your Keyword “submit an article”
    • Your Keyword “submit article”
    • Your Keyword “guest author”
    • Your Keyword “send a tip”
    • Your Keyword inurl: “guest blogger”
    • Your Keyword inurl: “guest post”
    • allintitle: Your Keyword + guest post

    write for us pageFormatting The “Write For Us” Page

    The first thing you need to do to ensure that this works, is find out which one of the modifiers people are searching for in your niche. Simple head over to the Google Keyword Planner and enter in the phrases above. Rank them by how many searches a month they get, and save the top 5 to 10. We will use this while building out our page. When you are writing the text that I outline below, make sure to include these these top 5 or 10 terms somewhere within the paragraphs. Make it look natural and do not stuff them in there so it reads poorly.

    Now lets take a look at a sample page that you could put up on your site to get the same results that I was able to get.

    Example Page

    Title: Use the most searched modifier in the niche for your title. For sake or argument, lets assume it is “write for us”

    Intro: This is where you are going to signal to Google that your page is relevant to guest posts in your niche. Keep it short and sweet, but make sure to add in a few keywords in a sentence or two. If you were running a financial blog about stocks, you could say something along the lines of: “If you are an expert stock trader, or a beginner who has purchased a few mutual funds in the past and has some experiences they would like to share with a large audience, we want to hear from you!”

    Heading 1 What We Are Looking For: You can use this heading first, or another variation. I do not want to waste peoples time, and right off the bat, I want to give them an idea of what the site is looking for so they know if their background is inline with what the site posts about.

    Paragraph: Here again, I like to use this space to reinforce what the site is about so far, and that we are looking for people excited in the topic. To go along with the financial blog example from above, you could simply state: “Website.com was launched in 2008 to share our experiences and expertise in the financial and securities trade with a wide audience. We are looking for experts of enthusiasts to write about:” See what we did there, we added a few more LSI keywords to the page that will give your page relevant to other guest blogging keywords so people will find your page from the SERPs.

    Bullet points: Since we left off the last paragraph about what types of articles we are looking for, we need to expand that.

    • Keyword 1: LSI Keyword 1, LSI Keyword 2, LSI Keyword 3
    • Keyword 2: LSI Keyword 1, LSI Keyword 2, LSI Keyword 3
    • Keyword 3: LSI Keyword 1, LSI Keyword 2, LSI Keyword 3
    • Keyword 4: LSI Keyword 1, LSI Keyword 2, LSI Keyword 3
    • Keyword 5: LSI Keyword 1, LSI Keyword 2, LSI Keyword 3

    This section is where you can pack in a bunch of topics you are interested in, but also topics that you want to guest post on other peoples websites. This works because someone will see that you are looking for Stock tips guest posts, and end up providing you examples in an email (we will get to that later), of where they have guest posted their own stock tips.

    Heading 2 Why Write For Website.com?: This is the section where I show off the amount of visitors the site gets, explain how and where you will link (even if you do not want to accept guest posts, you need to make people think that you do), and that they will build brand awareness. Show off the positives of guest posting. You should already know what these are!

    Rules: Since I originally put up this post to actually get people to guest post on my site, I wanted to make sure that I was getting quality content. I laid out in this section that I was not looking for commercial content, that I wanted original content, that links needed to provide value to readers, and that I wanted articles that went into depth and did not want readers to be left thinking “What about X..?”.

    Remember, a good page on why people should guest post for you can actually bring in some simply amazing content. The best part? It will be FREE!

    Heading 3 FAQs: Even after reading everything else you have written, you need to answer some common questions that you may run across. Here are a few ideas!

    • Will the guest poster be paid?
    • What should the guest poster write about (direct them above and take this paragraph to possibly enter some other keywords you are looking for).
    • Can the guest poster post their article on their own site after it is published on yours (Absolutely not! That being said, encourage them to share on social media and drive traffic!).
    • How often can/should the guest poster write. This is my absolute favorite section. I was interested in guest posters bringing in fresh content monthly for me, not just a one and done deal. You can use this section to explain that you are looking for weekly, biweekly, or monthly guest posts if you want. Like I keep mentioning, this entire method involves around FINDING guest posting targets, but you can actually pick up some great content and long term free writers. It really can add up.

    Heading 4: Get Started!: This is the end of your “Write for us” page. Now you need to provide a way for people to contact you EASILY. I cannot stress this enough. If you have a form where they need to fill a captcha or just an email where they should send the info, you might be passed over.

    Grab a nice contact form for your site. I prefer to use Contact Form 7. Set that up and add the shortcut to the bottom of your post and hit post. Below are the lines that I set up within that plugin.

    • Full Name
    • Email
    • What Subject Would You Like To Write About
    • Include Author Profile Text Below
    • Enter in 5 Published Writing Samples Below (Boom! Free outreach targets straight to your email)
    • Send Button

    Wrapping It Up

    There you have it. If you have done this correctly and used the correct search modifiers sprinkled throughout your post and included keywords that are related to your sites niche, your page accepting guest bloggers should begin to rank and you will slowly start to see that people contact you. You can either accept the good writers for 100% free content, or you can be a bit more devious and take advantage of the 5 guest posts that they did in the past that they just emailed you by doing your own outreach.

    If you try this out, let me know how it is working in your niche down in the comments below!

  • 5 Reasons Social Media May Hinder Your Marketing Efforts And What To Do About Them

    5 Reasons Social Media May Hinder Your Marketing Efforts And What To Do About Them

    You might want to sit down, because what I’m about to tell you could be shocking.

    Ready?

    I don’t use Facebook.

    not on facebook

    That’s not all––I don’t use Twitter, either. Or Instagram. Or Snapchat.

    In fact, I only use two social media networks: LinkedIn and Reddit. It’s especially strange since I’m a content marketer, and there’s a lot of overlap between content marketing and social media marketing. At first, it sounds like it could hinder me, but it’s one of my professional secrets. Selectively using social media networks (SMNs) improves my productivity, enhances my knowledge, and generates more leads for me.

    I know how counter cultural this idea is, but if you’re willing to pull the plug on SMNs, you and your business will be better for it. In this article, I’ll tell you why most SMNs are useless and how selective SMN usage is one of the best things you can do for your work.

    The SMN Lie

    SMNs are addictive by nature. You know you’ve had days when you tweet 70 times. Maybe you even check Facebook first thing in the morning.

    And even from a business standpoint, SMNs can be just as addictive. Many business owners and marketers focus a large chunk of their efforts on SMNs. That’s because SMNs are hugely popular, so on the surface, they seem like a good place to market. After all, everyone’s on SMNs, and you need to go to where your customers are, right?

    The problem here is that SMNs don’t provide a significant ROI. There are 4 main problems that SMNs present for marketers:

    1) Poor conversion rates.

    User interaction seems to be at its highest on social media, but many of those users are dead leads. People often like Facebook pages even though they don’t plan on buying a single thing. SMN activity has become such a second nature to people that it’s nearly a brainless activity, which makes for users who don’t convert.

    I will admit that SMNs can be a good source of traffic and leads, but it requires a sizable investment to give a positive ROI. Even if you automate your activity, SMNs still suck time and money from you that you could be using elsewhere. While SMNs can be effective, there are much more powerful marketing channels you can use to get a bigger return, more user engagement, and increased conversions.

    2) A personal environment.

    Since people use SMNs to chronicle their life and talk to friends, they aren’t in a buying mood when they’re logged on. Of course, there are some exceptions (perhaps Pinterest), but in most cases, SMNs are personal. That means people will be mainly focusing on posting status updates and sharing tweets. Many people will scroll past a news feed ad without a second thought.

    3) A colossal audience.

    This doesn’t sound like a negative at first, since more people equal more potential customers. That’s true, but with such a wide and varied audience, SMNs can easily overwhelm marketers. It can be difficult to find a niche audience in an endless sea of users. And even if you find your niche, you still have problem #4…

    4) Lots of noise.

    Unless you’re in a niche vacuum, you’ll be going up against others who have been in your niche for a long time. And if your niche has a lot of competitors, it could be nearly impossible to make yourself seen. All your competitors are running Facebook ads, too. At that point, it almost becomes a game of luck.

    5) Time suck.

    We all know that people find themselves sucked into their SMNs, and it’s just as easy (if not easier) for marketers to do that. You can spend forever fine-tuning your ad campaign, researching your demographic, looking up competitors’ strategies––the list goes on.

    Despite all of those problems, I do think SMNs can benefit marketers. The trick is to selectively use certain SMNs to achieve a specific aim. Thankfully, narrowing your focus and setting those defined goals is a fairly painless process.

    The Selective SMN Process

    Finding relevant SMNs and approaching them with a fixed goal is perhaps the best social media marketing strategy you can use. It not only saves you time and money, but also gives you a much better ROI. It also exposes your product or service to people who will find the most value in it.

    There are 3 important questions to ask yourself in this process:

    1) Where is your audience?

    You need to answer this question specifically and narrowly. It’s not enough to find your demographic on every site and then call it a day.

    Instead, find communities that are based around your niche. Then analyze the SMN that has the greatest activity within that niche community. That’s going to be your focus SMN.

    2) What is the best method of outreach for your focus SMN?

    If your focus SMN is Twitter, this could mean using specific hashtags to drive engagement. If it’s LinkedIn, this could mean publishing posts on LinkedIn Pulse to expose your product or service to thousands of new eyes. This will take some experimentation, but once you’ve found something that works, I recommend sticking with it.

    3) How much time should I spend on this SMN?

    Defeat time suck by blocking out a certain amount of time (say 10 minutes a day) to concentrating on your SMN. If you interact and post with targeted, distinct goals, you won’t have to automate anything, and you won’t waste time.

    By answering those questions, you’ll essentially create a SMN strategy. Write it down, and keep it somewhere nearby until you’ve internalized it.

    The power of this strategy comes from focussing on only one SMN. Once you have that down, you can move on to another SMN, but only if it’s also directly relevant. This is why I only concentrate on two SMNs.

    If you want to have accounts on other SMNs, that’s fine––but either automate them or outsource the work. You need to spend time on your focus SMN. Focussing on the others will give you a poor ROI. There are countless programs to help you manage your SMNs, like Buffer and Swift Social.

    You’ll find that concentrating on one SMN will enhance your productivity, improve your ROI, and give you more downtime. I also recommend not using SMNs for personal use (see problem #5 above). Eliminate the excess and keep only the essentials so you don’t waste a single second or penny.

    –––––––

    Ian Chandler is a content marketer, brand storyteller, and writer based in Ohio. ​He is the author of The No B.S. Guide to Freelance Writing and editor of Nukeblogger. You can read more about content marketing ​​at IanChandlerWriting.com.

  • 5 Signals For Not Pursuing Guest Posts

    5 Signals For Not Pursuing Guest Posts

    If you have read the guest posting guide, then you know that having a strategy for outreach can be an excellent way to increase your SEO efforts and build solid relationships with powerful sites. These relationships will hopefully lead to guest posts which then might generate leads and of course juicy back links. These guest posts might even open up new opportunities to work with other like minded bloggers. However, there are some signs that reaching out to a site and attempting to develop a relationship might be a bad choice. Here are five of those reasons.

    No Social Optimization

    You will want to be developing relationships and guest blogging for sites that will general social links and discussion. The idea is that the more times that the post you have written is shared, you increase your chances of getting a click through on your links. If a site does not have a consistent social media policy, or simply does not include a social toolbar, you may want to consider this site with caution. Also make sure to check if the comment section under posts generates useful comments and discussions regularly. Check if it has spam. If it has spam or does not generate comments, you may want to consider skipping it.

    Lack of Post Frequency

    This is a very important factor that you must look for. There might be some excellent blog posts on a site or it is a niche that is very closely correlated to yours, but if you do not see posts appearing regularly, you might consider finding a better target. Check the content of each page and notice if the webmaster is producing high quality posts of their own or if they are taking lots of very low quality guest posts. The point of guest posting is to get high quality links so do not settle for less.

    Not Indexed by Google

    If you find a target site or a target page that is not indexed by Google, proceed with caution and suspicion. The fact that it is not indexed could be due to several factors such as a new blog or a change in the URL structure of the site. If a webmaster did not take steps to get the site indexed, it may be that the site is not updated very often or that the site is structured poorly. Pages that have no sitemaps or bad HTML headers should probably be skipped in my opinion but it is up to you. If the entire site, or even the homepage is not indexed by Google, this may show that the site is penalized and should not be contacted. If the site is not indexed, the link is not going to help you.

    Complex Guest Posting Rules

    So you are looking for targets for guest posting and found a great site. However, that site might have extremely complicated guest posting rules that will waste your time into fitting those rules instead of delivering great content and hindering the writing process. You must weigh how much time it will take you versus how much value the site can provide. Quantity and quality will always be the question here. I would advocate that you always go for quality as that is what Google seems to be eating up now days. If the site you want to guest post on does not have a large readership or small social value, then it may be worth your time to pursue a site with easier guest posting rules.

    Weak Site Content

    If a site has a lot of guest posts or posts that are spun or “thin” then it should be easy to see. Check for content that has been re-purposed for the site or even posts that have been directly copied and pasted. Pages that deal with content like this, (rehashed, spun, copied) are being phased out by Google. You will want to avoid these links at all cost if you do not want your link to have negative association. This stands true even if the webmaster wants your post.

    Just remember to keep a vigilant eye when you are searching for target sites. A great link is going to be worth way more than a link from a terrible content spun site.