Guest blogging has been talked about quite a lot in recent years, but opinions are somewhat divided regarding its usefulness or how this type of promotion is perceived. Sometimes used as spam, it is extremely useful if the entire process is thought out and implemented correctly.

But what exactly is guest blogging? A practice that appeared several years ago but became known by this name around 2011. It involves publishing a quality article on a blog in the same field as yours, in the same niche and style, without being an advertorial in the classic sense of the word.

This marketing method is very beneficial for the blog, but especially for the business in general. It matters a lot what you aim to achieve by publishing a guest article, but the results will be on multiple levels and for a long period of time. In other words, this practice can bring you authority in the field, traffic, leads, and last but not least, sales. And much more.

However, to have the desired effect, this tactic must be applied following a thorough study of the market and the blog where you intend to publish.

But what does this study involve and what exactly should we check before publishing an article there?

Just as the products or services we offer are not addressed to everyone, likewise our articles are not for everyone. We target a certain category of audience, both on our own blog and when we do guest blogging.

The market study must start from four simple questions: who forms my target audience, what do they want, where do they spend their time online, and what answers are they looking for.

Demographic data helps identify the audience and their status. Thus, from this point of view, what interests us is: age, gender, education level, location, income, marital status, housing status, to which other, more subtle, nuanced aspects can be added. For these aspects, one can use statistics from Facebook (for one’s own site/blog), for example, but especially from specialized sites like Alexa. To do this check, you must decide on those blogs that are in your area of action and interest, and then compare the audiences. If they overlap, then that target is very good for your article.

Data such as traffic on that blog, domain authority, page authority, and community engagement with what is published there also matter a lot.

Once this stage is completed, you must clearly and objectively establish your goal. Maybe you want to increase traffic to the site, say up to 1000 people in a week, grow the number of followers on social media pages, double the newsletter subscription list, or simply increase domain authority. For each of these objectives, you must adopt a different strategy, a different type of content, and different calls to action.

The third stage here is to actually identify the blog on which we will write. We can start from the topic we want to address. The topic must be of maximum interest to attract readers, but at the same time it must fit both our blog and the one where the article will appear.

To find the most suitable blog, we use Google searches and enter our topic. The first 5-6 results – unpaid – are the ones that interest us.

After evaluating their quality and degree of affinity with ours, we can move on to step two, checking them in terms of traffic and community engagement.

To be continued… in the next article!