Do you ever read an article or post relevant to your business and wonder who the author is? Are they talking about something you know? Do you know more than they do?
Lots of the articles you read in trade publications or industry blogs come from guest authors with expertise in a particular space. So who are these guest authors?
Turns out, it could (and should) be you, because it’s a valuable piece of any traffic generation strategy.
Guest authorship as an amplifier
At its most basic level, guest authorship is an amplifier that puts messages you’ve created in front of a powerful audience. That power comes in a few different forms that depend on the audience you target:
- Width – If you want to get the biggest possible audience for something you wrote, you’re best off targeting a bigger publication that boasts a large, diverse audience—think Industry Today, for example. But for that to be successful, you need to speak in general terms about broad topics. This isn’t the place for nitty gritty details. It’s about sheer numbers, and if you do get something published, there’s the potential for a serious number of eyeballs pointed at your content.
- Depth – More specific or technically difficult content is best targeted in industry- or process-specific settings. You’re not trying to go viral here. Rather, you’re targeting a considerably smaller but more knowledgeable and invested audience. For example, Industrial Heating doesn’t earn near the traffic that Industry Today does. But if you’re an industrial heating professional, the leads you get thanks to guest authorship in the former are far better than the ones you’ll get from the latter.
Guest authorship is a critical component of the industrial marketing programs we build with our clients. See an example in action here. We also do it for ourselves, as this example illustrates.
Generate referral traffic
Guest authorship is also an opportunity to direct the audience you’ve reached to your website. If something you’ve written is chosen for publication, a link to your site is almost always included. That puts your URL in the eyesight of an important audience, and if someone in that audience clicks that link, Google takes note.
That’s why it’s important to think beyond the guest article. Guest authorship led someone to your site—good for you. Now what? To make the most of the exposure you’ve earned, you’ll need to make sure your site includes abundant additional resources that are informative and accessible. Don’t overlook this: It’s a serious turnoff to follow a link and then find there’s nothing there to see.
We help our clients produce websites that maximize this opportunity every day.
Build backlinks
Being chosen to contribute as a guest author means someone with authority in your space thinks you have some authority, too. Congratulations—it may earn you some additional traffic. But what if you convinced the algorithmic brains of the internet of the same thing?
Include a link or two to pages or posts on your site in a guest article you hope to publish. Search engines know that trade publications are trusted sources of information. When that trusted source of information links to something on your site, it’s like a digital reference letter telling the search engine that your site also has authority. And because search engines want to provide relevant information to searchers, they make your backlinked content easier to find in search results.
Learn more about backlinks here.
Get maximum return by building backlinks on .gov, .org or .edu sites. Search engines give a lot of credence to government, educational and non-profit institutions.
What good guest articles look like
You can’t just bang out 500 words about something you know and expect acceptance to every publication you pitch to. Even the best articles have acceptance rates that more closely resemble mediocre batting averages than stellar test scores.
Your content needs to rock because it’s competing with hundreds —even thousands— of other submissions from authors who want the same thing you do: Exposure. Audience. Referrals. Backlinks.
Prove to the editor that your content is worth the space. Answer questions you know people in your space are asking. Provide insights or information no one else has. Solve problems no one else is solving.
And for the love of Mike, don’t write a sales pitch. That never flies, and editors have good memories. Just as they’re more receptive to pitches from folks they’ve published before, they’re lightning fast on the delete button if you make a habit of pitching content that’s never any good.
Guest authorship with Gorilla 76
This is all easier said than done. That’s why we make guest authorship an integral part of our Industrial Growth Solution. Over a decade of experience in the inbound marketing world has helped us establish relationships with dozens of publications and editors across the industrial spectrum.
Simply put, we know how to target who you need to reach. We make it work for our clients every day because it’s critical to industrial lead generation as a whole. Download the guide below to learn more.
