When it comes to building your blog audience and expanding your social media reach, one of the best strategies to implement is to invite guest bloggers to write on your blog.

But to do it right you want to be strategic with who you choose to ensure you don’t just reach ‘anyone’ or ‘everyone’ but targeted readers and followers who are interested in your business, products and services.

So who and what should you ask when looking for a guest blogger for your blog? Here are six tips to help.

1. Invite influencers

The best guest bloggers are those who have influence in your industry or a large social following. Influencers will not only build your credibility by association with the “wow they know them?” factor, it also helps you to leverage their contacts.

The right influencer can rapidly increase your following and website hits. By sharing their blog post they expand your reach not only to their following, but their followings following when their loyal readers who enjoy their content share it on. Get this process right and you can find your blog going viral.

2. Find influencers who share your target market 

To really maximise the guest blogging opportunity for your business also make sure that they have the same target audience as you. While a boost in ‘likes’ is great for your ego, at the end of the day you want to make sure you are reaching people who want to buy your products or services.

3. Ask for original content

Original content not only guards against penalties from Google, it also ensures your guest blogger will be more inclined to share the post. 

Just think about it, if you spent time writing an article that you weren’t going to post again wouldn’t you share it on social media so your ‘tribe’ could still read it? 

4. Ask them to share

Sometimes it is not enough to assume a guest blogger will share the post, people are busy and they may not even be handling their own social media accounts. 

This is why it pays to ask if they could share the post across their social media, blog and newsletter when you are organising the guest blogging opportunity. 

5. Mix up your format

Keep in mind that not everyone will be able to, or want to, sit down and write a blog post, so give them options. 

You could do an interview (a great way to also maintain control of your content), feature a case study on what they have done, a checklist they use, a list of resources they draw on, or questions they ask themselves/professionals/before they buy.

There are many different ways to get content out of people while making the process easy for them and interesting for your audience.

6. Give suggestions

At the end of the day you know your audience best so don’t be afraid to offer suggestions around content. In fact, most people as busy as they are will appreciate the prompts. 

Something as simple as “we are currently looking for someone to write on [x] covering [point 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]” will suffice. This also gives you control on the content going up on your blog.

While you are offering suggestions, you may also like to include the audience they are writing for, your ideal word count and any terms and conditions around promotion so your guest blogger can deliver what you are after.

Do you invite guest bloggers to write on your blog?

Amanda