A guest blog post increases exposure to your audience

If you know your target audience well, a guest blog post on another blog that they are likely to read is a good idea to attract more eyeballs to your blog or website. One of the biggest mistakes made with guest blogging is writing purely for the objective of getting a decent link into a website.

This is a seriously flawed approach – links shouldn’t be the reason behind why you do something to promote your website or business. Sure, links are a valuable outcome – from a genuine source. It’s a natural link, which is very rare on the web, so it should be one of the more valued links to your site.

The objective of your guest blog article should be your existing audience or prospective audience. Your blog article should deliver quality content to your target audience; it should be something the host blog is going to benefit from publishing in some way; and it should ideally,  make the readers think ‘yeah, I’ll come back here again and read some more’.

The motivation behind guest blogging and posting in general should be to build a loyal readership – people who rely on your content. The more they rely and trust in what you have to say, the more likely they are to buy from you at some stage in the future.

It’s also worth noting that you shouldn’t write a blog post for an external blog until you’ve agreed the context, writing style and length of the blog post with the host. There’s nothing worse than writing a blog post and then discovering your intended host doesn’t want to publish it for whatever reason.

How much web content is too much?

When writing for the web, there is no hard and fast rule for how much content you should write. How much you should write will depend on a number of things – for instance if you are a photographer, then the images you have produced in the past are likely to be far more effective than words. There is the obvious argument that you need content for SEO but Google and other search engines have advanced in terms of the way they evaluate content so writing reams of content stuffed with keywords no longer works like it did once upon a time.

It’s also worth asking how much information is too much information for potential customers. Is it better to tell all, including price, and then hope that readers will become customers or is it better to say enough to encourage them to make contact so that your sales team can get to work reinforcing your competitive advantage? The answer here is that it depends on the type of product or service you offer, as well as competitive factors.

Higher involvement products usually require more content

If you have a low value, low-involvement product that everybody uses then you don’t need much content to sell that product. Take socks for example, everybody uses them but not many people think about ‘luxury socks’. They just want to buy socks – quickly, decent quality, reasonable price…SOLD.

Then take something like a sports car at the opposite end of the spectrum – it’s more costly, it’s a higher involvement product (purchasing decision takes longer, more thought etc.). In this instance, you may need more content to sell the benefits of your sports car – what makes it better than a Ferrari, Aston Martin or Lamborghini. You need to communicate this – and if a test drive is the proof potential customers need, then your content needs to encourage a test drive.

All products fall somewhere along the ‘involvement scale’ in terms of the decision-making process. Knowing where your product or service sits will help determine the amount of content you need.

If you have a technical product – does your target market need to know the technical details? Do they understand the technical details? If the technical details don’t come into the purchasing decision, then they don’t need to be added.

In summary, focus on the information that sells your product, don’t use 10 words where one will do and be as short and direct as possible. If you follow these rules, you won’t have written too much – you’ll have written enough. Layout is another factor, which we will discuss next week.