When you first start to guest post on other blogs, it can be difficult to find new opportunities as you have no examples of previous guest posts to provide. However, one of the easiest ways to secure your first few guest blogs is to take advantage of the working relationships that you already have including your suppliers, resellers, and industry partners.
Suppliers & Resellers
Proposing a guest blog to a business that you already have a working relationship with, such as a supplier or reseller, comes with the added benefit of a warm opening, rather than having to make cold calls. This makes it much more likely that the business owner will at least consider, and may even accept your guest blog proposal as they are already familiar with your business.
Another benefit of guest posting on the website of your supplier or reseller is that they are likely to be within the same industry as you. This is ideal when looking for guest blogging opportunities as gaining a link from a website within the same industry will increase rankings and relevance for related search queries.
Additionally, if you find it difficult to come up with new guest blogging ideas, when creating a blog for your resellers website you can write about the quality of their products based on your own expertise. Similarly, if you are writing a guest blog for a supplier, you could write a testimonial based post about the quality of the products that they provide. This is particularly beneficial for both parties as you are promoting the products and services you provide, as well as those offered on the blog site.
Industry Partners
Similarly to guest posting for your suppliers and resellers, any working relationship that you have with another company can be leveraged to secure a guest post. This can be anything from the company you hire to train and license your staff, to the accounting agency that takes care of your business finances.
The key point to remember is that, although you might already have a great relationship with your contact at that company, they are unlikely to do you any favours when there is no clear benefit for their website.
This means that in order to successfully secure a guest blogging arrangement, you have to be able to clearly show that posting your article will be mutually beneficial. One way to do this would be proposing an article based within your area of expertise that their audience would find useful. This allows them to provide expert advice for their readers on an industry topic that is normally outside of their area of expertise.
For example, if you own an air conditioning installation company and you always use the same crane hire company to lift your units, creating an article on how their cranes are ideal for lifting air conditioning units benefits the crane hire company as it will encourage other air conditioning companies to employ their services. It also lends credibility to the claim as it is being made by a third party air conditioning company, rather than the crane hire company themselves.
Vertical Industries
Once you have exhausted all of your existing business relationships, you should have a profile of past guest blogs that you can use as part of your guest blogging proposals. The next place to look for guest blogging opportunities is businesses within vertical industries. This ensures that they are not your direct competitors, yet their readers would still find your expertise and products useful and relevant.
An example of vertical industries for a pallet racking manufacturer would be pallet manufacturers, forklift manufacturers, scissor lift hire companies, line markers, and any other service that is used within the warehousing industry. These are businesses with the same target audience, yet they are not your direct competitors as they are offering different services.
Once you have identified a list of services within vertical industries, simply Google search those services within your service area and contact businesses from the search results that have a high domain authority and a low spam score. When contacting the identified business, it is important to propose a guest post idea that will provide value to both their brand and their audience.
Taking the first example given above of pallet manufacturers, writing a guest post on the importance of quality pallets when using pallet racking will be beneficial for a premium pallet manufacturer, as it stresses the importance of buying quality pallets which is their main business model. And having the article written by a pallet racking manufacturer lends more credibility to the claim than a company that is trying to sell their own products.
Additionally, because they work in a vertical industry, a link from their business website will increase the relevance of your website to warehousing related terms. Plus, if their business is located in the same service area as your business, your rankings will increase for location based terms.
In conclusion, one of the most important aspects of securing new guest blogging opportunities is to ensure that the website you are posting on is relevant to your industry, and ideally, has the same target audience. Using existing business relationships to create new guest blogging opportunities is an easy way to achieve this.
Click here to read our article on how to create an optimised guest blog.