In our last section, we explained where the saying "Content Is King" comes from Bill Gates, and began looking at different content types you can use to market your business using content. We talked about blogging, and using WordPress, because it's simply the best blogging platform out there. Let's continue our discussion today by asking the question...
What If I Don't Want To Host My Own Blog?
We recommend hosting a WordPress blog on your own domain name for a number of reasons, one of the main ones being that you are then building an "asset" that you fully own and control, instead of building an asset for someone else.
If you can't think of an example, just look at Facebook. People create business pages on Facebook and then spend time adding lots of great content about their business on their Facebook pages.
Do you own Facebook? Maybe you own a share or two, but I sincerely doubt that you own or control it. Every piece of content that you publish on Facebook helps to build someone else's asset. If Facebook decides to change the rules, block your account or delete your content tomorrow, there is nothing you can do about it, because you don't control the asset, Mark Zuckerberg does!
Remember how in our last post we mentioned that with an expertly-configured WordPress site you can instantly announce, publicize and distribute your content automatically to search engines, social media sites, RSS feed directories, bookmarking sites and other types of traffic-generating web properties as soon as you publish new content?
Well ... this means that you can publish content on a WordPress site hosted on your own domain (your asset), and your content will then be announced and shared on Facebook, driving people from someone else's asset (Facebook), back to your own asset (your WordPress site), building up the value of your virtual real estate (your own domain).
Getting the same content published on lots of different sites is a lot smarter than giving away all of your great content to just one site, don't you think? And hosting your own blog is not expensive at all.
Now ... what if you still don't want to host your own blog? What can you do?
One strategy, as we've just seen, is to set up accounts on other web properties and post there. You can set up a company page on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, lots of other places ... even WordPress offers a free hosted version (visit our blog or contact us if you're interested in learning more about this)!
The other strategy is to do guest blog posting.
*** Guest Blog Posting ***
If you aren't interested in hosting your own blog, you can still create content that gets published on other blogs.
The main benefit of posting on other blogs as a guest blogger, is to tap into a source of established traffic with a targeted audience.
This also means that there is very little point guest blog posting on sites that get no traffic or a general audience.
You will need to do some research, therefore, to identify blogs that are aligned with your brand, and that already have an engaged and active following that you can tap into. You will also need to convince the owner of the blog to publish your posts, especially on a very active blog.
You can find lots of guest blog post companies and directories by searching for things like "guest blog posting service" online. Just be aware that posting content through a guest blog posting service is a strategy that is often used by website and blog owners to try and get backlinks to their site and increase their search engine rankings, rather than as a means of connecting directly with your target audience.
If you want your content to reach potential customers directly using guest blog posting, then we recommend doing your own manual research to find sites that attract and engage a loyal readership.
As we've said earlier, the more active the blog, the more challenging you will find to get your posts accepted. The best way to ensure that your posts will be accepted and published is to spend time getting familiar with the blog or site you would like to post on. You want to make sure that your content fits with the blog you'll be submitting your posts to, otherwise your posts will not be shared and may even get rejected. If you do find a great site, then we recommend preparing a list of blog post topics and have some of those topics possibly already expanded into posts that are ready to be published.
IN SUMMARY
Guest blog posting is a strategy that can work for getting content about your business published. As long as a blog is active, you can try submitting guest posts to it.
ACTION STEP
If this strategy interests you, begin researching online for sites in your niche that allow and welcome guest blog posting. You can type something like this into a search engine: "[niche] blog guest posting" (e.g. "travel blog guest posting") and start building your list.
I hope that you have found the above information useful.
In our next section, we will continue looking at some other useful types of content for your content marketing strategy.