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Blogging For Your Business Speaker Schedule

I’m part of the Blogging For Your Business seminar series this month, and it’s already well underway. I’m very honored to be a part of such an august group and know several of the names on here.

If you want to learn about how blogging can establish you as an expert in your field, boost your SEO, and stand out from your non-blogging competition, this is a great event for you. You’ll learn from several of the experts in the industry, you can register right here.

And if you register in time to hear my session, I will be giving away a free ebook on 12 (Or More) Steps to Improve Your Writing. (Link coming soon.)

  • Monday, May 3rd – Barry Feldman – Fast-Track Your Content Marketing Plan

    • Monday, May 3rd – Amy Woods – Repurpose Your Content Like Top TV Talk Shows

    Tuesday, May 4th – Debra Eckerling – Goal-Setting Simplified For Your Business Blog Using the D*E*B Method

    Tuesday, May 4th – Jason Falls – Holy Smokes! How to Push the Envelope and Stand Out With Social Content Strategy

    Wednesday, May 5th – Mary Kate Gulick – Cornerstone Content: Your Best, First Content Move to Boost Credibility & Authority

    Wednesday, May 5th – Rebekah Read – The 3-Step Plan to Getting Your Website Shown on Google

    Thursday, May 6th – Vicky Laffey – Never Be Stuck for Content Ideas Again!

    Thursday, May 6th – Jennifer Grayeb – How to Know if Your Marketing Is Working and Exactly What to Do if It’s Not

    Friday, May 7th – Erika Heald – How to Audit and Refresh Your Existing Blog Content

    Friday, May 7th – Ilise Benun – Content Marketing on Steroids

    Saturday, May 8th – Lily Ugbaja – Creating Content That Ranks and Converts

    Sunday, May 9th – Chad Pollitt – How to Attract Over 50K Subscribers in 6 Months

    Monday, May 10th – Urwah Kamran – The Bait: How to Create a Freebie That Turns Your Audience Into Paying Customers

    Monday, May 10th – Christine Marie Pizzuto – The Right Content Mindset

    Tuesday, May 11th – Amanda Webb – How to Attract More Blog Readers Than Ever Before

    Tuesday, May 11th – Chris Craft – The Power of Repurposing Content in Digital Media

    Wednesday, May 12th – Cara Chace – How to Fix Your Pinterest Strategy if It’s Not Working

    Wednesday, May 12th – Erik Deckers – Content Marketing Secrets Learned From the Giants of Fiction< — I WILL ALSO BE DOING A FACEBOOK LIVE Q&A AT 3 PM EDT THAT DAY. (Be sure to join the group early so you can just show up at 3PM

    Thursday, May 13th – Mike Allton – How to Create 10x Content 10x Faster

    Thursday, May 13th – Kelsey Formost – 5 Steps to Start and Grow Your List

    Friday, May 14th – Jessika Phillips – How to Capture Attention, Amplify Your Message, and Keep Them Coming Back for More

    Friday, May 14th – Lisa Sicard – Alternative Social Media Networks: Where Are Your Ideal Customers Hanging Out?

    Saturday, May 15th – Joe Pulizzi – How to Use Content to Accomplish What Few Can Achieve: Build Your Business Into an Empire

    Sunday, May 16th – Ashleigh McGarity – How to Make Must-Read Headlines That Will Attract 438% More Traffic to Your Website

Blogging for Your Business - featuring Erik Deckers

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What is the Ideal Paragraph Length?

What’s the ideal paragraph length? Is there an ideal paragraph length? Are there hard-and-fast rules that govern how long our paragraphs — “grafs,” if you’re cool and/or “in the biz” — or can you just create paragraphs of different lengths willy-nilly, like some damn hippie?

The latest episode of Grammar Girl’s podcast opened with this horrifying story:

At one university, a professor will measure what he or she thinks is an ideal paragraph length. This is a photo of a section of a tape measure.

A while ago, I saw a comment on Facebook about professors who are teaching college students to make all their paragraphs the same length. The woman wrote, “There are professors at my school who deduct points, sometimes even letter grades, if paragraphs aren’t the same exact length throughout a paper. Because writing should be ‘balanced’ and it can only achieve ‘balance’ if all paragraphs are equal in length.”

Since this is one of the most preposterous things I’ve ever heard, I thought I must have misunderstood, but I asked for clarification and learned that the “uniform paragraph length rule” is so pervasive at this university that one professor uses a ruler to measure physical paragraph length in an introductory English class.

Let me say it right now, upfront.

There is no one ideal paragraph length.

According to Grammar Girl, both the Yahoo! Style Guide and the college handbook A Writer’s Reference (affiliate links) say the ideal paragraph length is between 100 and 200 words. However, “good writers treat this as a suggestion and not a hard and fast rule.”

The problem is, we live in an age of skimmers, not readers. If you’re a content marketer, blogger, or essayist, you don’t have the luxury of getting people to dig into a block of text between 100 and 200 words. Large blocks of text without any white space make our eyes glaze over — at least mine do — and we just zone out and get the early morning stares. A big block of text just looks boring as shit. People ignore long paragraphs because they’re dense, so we should avoid cramming in that many words, of which this is the 100th.

Seriously, that graf is exactly 100 words long.

That one was eight.

And that one was four.

Do you see the difference? Do you feel how much easier it felt to read the short one-sentence paragraphs instead of that 100-word monstrosity?

Like it or not, people don’t read, they skim. They prefer short paragraphs, not long chunks of text. Sure, you can slip them in once in a while, but people tend not to read them. Did you even notice I said “shit” in that 100-word paragraph up there?

Unfortunately, writing teachers tend to give young writers bad advice, which is why there are “rules” about paragraph length.

Just remember, there’s the right way to write, and the school way. And the two are frequently different.

Paragraphs Aren’t a Part of Your System, Man!

Paragraphs can — and should — be varying lengths. If you want to write 200-word paragraphs, go ahead. If you think you can manage several 200-word paragraphs in a row, be my guest. But I’ll bet if you were to do a heat map or readability study of your work, you’d find that very few people are slogging their way through that bog.

There are already several “rules of English” that we can safely ignore. Either they’re obsolete, the language has changed, or they never should have been a rule in the first place.

I’ll admit, I’m not a big fan of some of the changes that are happening to the English language. Like the fact that “literally” now means figuratively. (Seriously, go to Google and enter “define literally!” That irritates me to no end!)

A screenshot of Google's search for the phrase Define literally. It says used for emphasis to express strong feelings while not being literally true.Conversely, some things were incorrect in the first place, and they’re only now being fixed, like the whole “don’t end your sentence with a preposition” thing.

Teaching students that a paragraph must be of a certain length is also terrible teaching. Good writing will have paragraphs of varying length, from a couple hundred words (Yeesh!) to just one word. To teach otherwise is a disservice to your students because many of them will go through life thinking it’s a requirement when at best, it’s a guideline.

And before you tell me, “You have to learn the rules before you break them,” I would say 1) there’s not a real rule about paragraph length, and 2) you can teach people that paragraph lengths vary without blowing their minds.

They can make the leap from not knowing how long a graf is to knowing that it can be different. You don’t have to spend an entire semester teaching them this one rule, only to tell them, “Just kidding!” at some undetermined point in the future.

Bottom line: there’s no ideal paragraph length, and you can make them any size you want.

Seriously.

Photo credit: Qimono (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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The Importance of Citing Original Sources In Your Content Marketing

Content marketers like to cite long-held statistics in their blog articles that get batted around from story to story, blog to blog, marketer to marketer. They’re the stories that get told over and over and over again, but no one is actually sure where they come from. They’re just widely accepted and firmly believed, even though they may be decades old.

For example, when I worked in direct mail, we repeated the stat that dirt mail postcards had a 1 – 3% read rate. That is, for every 100 people who received a direct mail postcard, roughly three people read it.

Sometimes citing original sources means going way, way back.I asked my boss, a direct mail veteran of 30+ years how he knew that, and he admitted he didn’t know. It was just something he’d always heard and said.

There’s another famous story about “a Harvard study” where the researchers found that reducing the number of choices of gourmet jams led to increased sales. I’ve heard that story told so many times in hushed tones around marketing campfires — “and one of the researchers had a hook for a hand!” — the urban legend is now taken as lore, but none of us knew the origins of the story.

(For the record, it’s a study from 2000 by Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and Mark Lepper of Stanford University. Not Harvard.)

And of course, there’s Ernest Hemingway’s famous-but-fake quote, “Write drunk, edit sober.”

He didn’t actually say it, and I’m ashamed to admit, I perpetuated that urban legend for a few years until I finally looked for the original source of the quote.

Original Sources Fight Fake News

Black and white image of a journalist, probably a sportswriter, with a pipe, holding an old-style phone.The last four years have shown us the importance of fighting the gaslighting and intellectual laziness of calling something fake news. And we know that the only way journalists can counter accusations of fake news is to do original reporting.

That is, they interview the original sources of information. They go all the way to the insiders, the people who made a thing happen, the people on the scene. They don’t repeat stories from other news sources, they don’t pass along claims they saw in other newspapers or TV news segments. They don’t report things they heard from other reporters.

Journalism is not just a game of Telephone played by people repeating claim after claim after claim. When you see a story in the New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, or Associated Press, you can be reasonably sure these journalists have gotten their details from the original sources on the scene.

(They have to, because if they’re found to be making things up, they could get sued. It’s rather telling that the people who whine about “fake news!” have not sued the news outlets over it. They could win millions of dollars if they could demonstrate that anything in the media was made up.)

So What Do Original Sources Have to Do With Content Marketing?

Fortunately (for many of us), marketers are not held to the same standards as journalists.

(I mean, could you imagine???)

But for those of us who actually do try to uphold some level of ethics and honesty, original reporting can only help us.

And while not all of us have the time, money, or resources to do our own original research — studies, surveys, massive A/B testing — we do have the ability to track down citations to their original source. (If you can do original research though, think of all the bloggers and speakers who will write about your findings!)

With my background in academia and being a “little-j journalist” (i.e., I’m a newspaper columnist, not a professional journalist), I’m all about the original sources. Whenever I need to cite a specific source, I always look for the original study or story that inspired the game-of-Telephone citations we typically find on the web. (See the above jam study)

The “famous” Coopers & Lybrand Document Management Study

Several months ago, I was doing a search for document management statistics, and I found article after article that shared some very damning statistics about paper filing systems, all from the same 1998 Coopers & Lybrand document management study. Here are a few:

  • US companies spend approximately $20 on labor costs in order to file a document, $120 on the labor required to find a misfiled document and $220 to reproduce a lost document.
  • For companies that manage their own files, employees spend between 20-40% of their time searching for documents manually.
  • Employees spend more than 50% of their time searching for information.
  • The average document is copied 19 times.

Terrible! Just terrible! Why are people still using paper files if we know this to be true?

Again, given my fixation on citing original sources, I found a blog post that linked to another article where I could find the statistics. It linked to another article with the same stats. Which linked to another article. And another. And another. And so on and on.

I followed over a dozen articles, each linking to another article, hoping to find the original copy of this clearly-important study. I mean, an entire industry had built their whole raison d’être on these statistics, so surely someone somewhere had something on it!

Right?

I found several dozen blog posts, and none of them — seriously, not one! — linked to the original study. They all linked to each other, but no one had a PDF copy of the famous Coopers & Lybrand study.

But I did find a 2012 article from a company called Scan123 about these incredible statistics:

These are usually attributed to a 1998 study by consulting firm Coopers & Lybrand, which merged with Price Waterhouse to become PricewaterhouseCoopers in that same year. These “facts” are still repeated by electronic document management companies almost fifteen years later because they paint a compelling picture of costly inefficiency to which a document management solution is the answer. We used to cite this study ourselves in our marketing materials for Scan123.

Seriously? That’s it?

No, that’s not all. They also cited a 2010 blog article by John Mancini who wrote:

While many of us have used these stats in a million presentations, I wonder, “Does anyone have the original report? Does anyone know the actual name of the report?”

One of the speakers at a recent AIIM seminar on ECM mentioned the data, and an attendee asked for the original source. Having used the data a million times myself, I searched through my hard drive. No dice. Then I turned to the web. No dice. Many references to the “1998 Coopers & Lybrand report,” but no actual copy or link.

Oops.

As of Scan123’s article in 2012, John Mancini had not received an original copy of the “1998 Coopers & Lybrand report,” so I emailed him to see if he has received anything in the last 11 years. I’ll let you know if I hear anything back.

(Update: I emailed John when I wrote this article, and on April 27, 2021, he wrote back to me: “Nobody ever came forward with the original report.”)

Bottom Line: Find Original Sources

If you want to avoid the marketer’s curse, or the label of “fake news,” stick to as much original reporting as you can. Do your own original research and interview your own subjects. If you can’t do that, then get as close to the original sources as you can.

Find the original study and download a PDF copy. Link to the original readable file in your blog articles and reports. Pull blockquotes from the original article (like I did above).

Don’t just do a quick Google search and link to the first article you find that supports what you say. That’s how the Cooper & Lybrand study became an industry-standard without an original document to back it up.

Photo credit: Jarmoluk (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)
Photo credit: C.A.D.Schjelderup (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 4.0)

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A Quick and Dirty Editorial Calendar

One of the things that have always irritated me about social media marketing is the near-fetishization of the editorial calendar.

I’ve known companies that have scripted every single tweet, Facebook update, Instagram photo, and blog article for an entire year, dictating the date and time each message will go out, and color-coding it to product launches, corporate events, and phases of the moon.

And I’ll admit to more than a little schadenfreude when those year-long schedules were derailed by some corporate crisis, takeover, merger, or product cancellation.

I’ve never understood the fascination of such strict, rigorous scheduling because it’s so easily disrupted, but I like the idea of general guidelines. Just a few recommendations to keep me on the right path, not a step-by-step, turn-by-turn map of the route I have to take.

As I like to say, “Just tell me where I need to go, I’ll figure out how to get there myself.”

So here’s a way to make a quick and dirty editorial calendar.

A sample editorial calendar for social media and content marketing.

  1. To start, create a spreadsheet on Google, Excel, or Numbers. Label the days of the week, and create enough lines for your posts for each day. The example above has three posts per day.
  2. Color code the alternating weeks by hand. Don’t use the application’s alternating rows command because it doesn’t let you group them this way. (At least I haven’t figured out how to do 2 or 3 rows at a time without screwing up the header..)
  3. Put the dates to the right of the block.
  4. Put a row below the month, and put the Topic Of The Day in each cell. If you’re going to run a daily theme, spell it out here. If you want a weekly theme, put it to the right, next to the dates column.
  5. You can also drop hashtags into each cell. In the sample calendar above, I could drop in #contentmarketing in every Monday spot, #language in every Tuesday spot, and so on. This gives you a little more flexibility to label each post and keep a running theme. For example, for one client, I post a funny little picture on Instagram at 3: 15 every afternoon. (You can see Marcel and his crazy little adventures here.)
  6. Do a Google News search for your particular keyword or hashtag. Start scanning the stories and open up each one that seems to fit what you’re looking for. Do a quick read through and then copy the headline and the URL and paste it into the cells. Helpful tip: Don’t go to news.google.com, because their selection of articles is rather limited. Instead, do a general search and then click the News button at the top of the page. Then select the Recent menu, and choose Last 7 Days. Copy that URL and paste it into a cell on your calendar. Do that for every keyword/hashtag you need. Label them, and set those cells’ formatting to clip the contents, not wrap. (It screws up the look of your calendar.)
  7. Schedule your posts no more than one week in advance. Every Monday morning, I schedule the week’s social media posts for all of my clients. This way, I’m not working too far ahead if there are any major disruptions to their news or social media flow.
  8. With each new month, just Duplicate the most recent page. Then, highlight the calendar, hit Delete, and start all over. Change the dates, drop in your hashtags, and start filling up the content again.
  9. Use a service like HootSuite, Buffer, or TweetDeck to schedule your posts. To schedule your social posts, use a service like one of the ones mentioned, or any of the other options out there. Of course, these all cost money, and some are more expensive than others. You can post to TweetDeck for free, but it only lets you post to Twitter. However, there’s a workaround: Set up a few automation tasks on IFTTT.com or Zapier.com. These tools will let you automate certain tasks, such as reposting an Instagram photo to your Twitter account, or texting you every time it’s going to rain in your area. For a couple clients, I use Zapier to repost all tweets with a certain hashtag (#LI) to LinkedIn. This saves me from spending money on HootSuite, Buffer, or other social scheduling tools.

How ever you set up your own social media and editorial calendar, find a method that’s easy for you and doesn’t require you spending many hours developing an entire schedule for the year. Set up daily and weekly themes to guide you for the kinds of messages you want to share, but keep things loose so you can pivot if the need arises.

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How to Work With a Ghostwriter

I’ve been a ghostwriter for over 10 years, working on blog articles and even books with people who have a story to tell. I’ve worked with dozens of clients and have written over 3,500 articles in that time, as well as eight books, including my new novel, Mackinac Island Nation.

My clients have ranged from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to entrepreneurs running one-person operations, both in the United States and overseas, in a staggering variety of industries. I’ve been able to learn from all of them, and — I hope — they’ve been able to learn from me.

For those of you who are thinking about working with a ghostwriter, whether it’s for corporate blog articles or even your own memoirs, there are a few things you need to realize before you start.

It’s going to cost money.

A photo of hands over an old Compaq keyboard, like a ghostwriter.
You can tell this is an old photo (from 2004) just by the Compaq logo in the bottom corner.
Writers need to eat. We have to pay our mortgages. We have to take care of our families. We don’t write for the promise of royalties or the exposure. This is not a hobby, this is our job. And just like any skilled position, the better the writer is, the more it’s going to cost. Things will get done faster and they’ll be done better than if you go with the less expensive option.

So while many people who want to write a book have a fascinating story to tell, a good writer is not going to want to spend 3 – 6 months working on your book in the hopes that they’ll get something from your efforts. It’s impolite to even ask, so if this is your plan for paying them, either save up your money or start writing it yourself.

Typically, a ghostwriter will ask for half up front and half at the end, but my practice has been to ask for half of the fee up front, one-fourth when we reach the halfway mark, and the remaining fourth when the final chapter is delivered and/or the manuscript has gone through one or two rounds of edits. For corporate ghost blogging clients, I typically work on a retainer basis where there will be a set number of articles written each month, and the client is invoiced on the 1st.

Be prepared for some give and take.

This is a collaborative process, and the manuscript will be evolving and changing. When the ghostwriter gives you the first draft, that’s so you can make the big changes, like rearranging sections, clarifying details, and rewriting problem sentences. This isn’t the finished product, so don’t get upset that your writer just handed you a pile of garbage. Your job now is to go back and read it and make sure everything is correct and you’re satisfied with the direction this is going.

That first stage is also not the time for fixing typos and punctuation or spelling errors. That will come later. Like I tell my clients, there’s no point in polishing a turd, let’s make it a not-turd first. Make all the major revisions and changes before you start fixing the tiny errors.

Similarly, you will have to call it done at some point. Yes, you want this to be perfect, and you want it to be polished to a high sheen, but that’s not always going to be your ghostwriter’s strong suit. Their job is to write the manuscript, make some revisions, and get it to a reasonable state where a copyeditor could take it over.

So be sure to work out in advance how many revisions and changes you can ask for. No writer wants to spend 12 months polishing and changing your manuscript, so save your revisions for one major passthrough rather than trickling them in. Typically, you should be able to get to the copyediting stage with no more than two revisions. If you’re not getting there, then one or both of you are the problem.

Leave the mechanics to your writer

There’s a very good chance that you’re good at punctuation and grammar, but there’s a very good chance that your ghostwriter is a nerd about it. That means that they know whether the grammar rules we learned in school are totally bogus..

For example, I was working with a client who tried — rather smugly, I thought — to correct me on a preposition I had used at the end of a sentence. So I explained to him:

This is a rule that should never have been in existence in the first place, but it had been created by an 18th-century Latin scholar named Robert Lowth in his book, A Short Guide to English Grammar. Lowth had read a similar admonition in a commentary by a 17th-century poet and scholar named John Dryden.

The problem was Dryden and Lowth were applying Latin rules to English, even though English didn’t actually need a few of those particular rules. It has been unnecessary for centuries, and most grammar nerds will never expect someone to contort their sentences just to follow that rule.

I could tell by the reaction from the client that he hadn’t expected any of that.

“Oh,” was all he said, and he never brought up grammar issues again.

The moral of the story: When someone starts spouting 400-year-old grammar history knowledge, he probably knows when you can break the rules.

So let him.

Don’t feel guilty that you’re working with a ghostwriter

Look, if you could write, you’d be a writer. If you had the time, you could do this yourself. But chances are, you’re working with a ghostwriter because either writing is not your forte or you just don’t have the hours and hours to put in the work.

This is the same reason you don’t change your own oil, fix your own leaky plumbing, re-roof your own house, or do your own taxes. You want a professional who’s good at what they do so you can look great at what you do.

Once, when I was ghostwriting a speech for a client, they felt embarrassed to have someone writing for them, like they weren’t important enough to need a speechwriter. I told them it wasn’t a question of being important, it was a question not having the time.

“Do you have four hours to devote to this project?” I asked.

“No, I barely have four hours to do anything,” said the client.

“Well, I do,” I said. “This doesn’t make you too big for your britches, it keeps you from looking unprepared when you give this speech.”

This is true whether you need a speechwriter, blog writer, or book writer. It’s not a question of whether you’re too important or have more money than sense. It’s a matter of helping you present your best story, whether it’s in a book, your company blog, or even a speech.

You need a professional who understands the subtleties and nuances of language, can tell your story in a clear and compelling way, and can do it in a timely manner.

So if you ever need to work with a ghostwriter, be clear and upfront with your expectations, and ask your ghostwriter to do the same with you. Don’t get bogged down in the process and let them do their job, while you do yours.

Photo credit: hobvias sudoneighm (Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0)

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Building Authority Through Guest Posting

Every so often, I will feature guest posts from writers who actually have important and interesting things to say. And since this is a guest post about guest posting, I liked the whole meta vibe, and decided to publish it, especially since she’s a fellow word nerd.

Ellan DineenEllan Dineen is the Marketing Associate at Design Wizard. When she’s not hard at work in the Marketing Department, Ellan can be found en route to foreign lands with a book in her hand and a podcast in her ear. With a Master’s in English and Diploma in Social Media Marketing, she knows the importance of staying up-to-date with the industry’s latest trends and insights and is keen to pass these tips on to her readers.

Want to establish your online presence? Want to be the “go-to” expert in your niche?

It’s time you finessed this thing called guest posting.

Guest posting allows you to reach a wider audience by posting your articles on related authoritative websites. It strengthens your brand and gives you a massive boost in credibility.

Like with anything when it comes to digital marketing, however, there’s a right and a wrong way to do it.

In this article, we take a look at what you should do, what you should not do, and what kind of quality content you need to be posting.

Identify Your Value

You won’t be able to build authority if you don’t bring any value to the table. The only reason a website will allow you to publish an article on their website is because it offers both them and their audience a massive amount of value.

No value = no guest post.

There’s another reason why value is important. As well as educating audiences, solving their problems and positioning yourself as their go-to expert, the Google algorithm also prefers valuable content.

According to research, long form content gets more traffic than any other type. This is content that contains more than 1,000 words, and which offers in-depth, valuable and actionable information to the reader.

Each time you pitch an article to another website, identify your value first. This will make it so much easier for the blogger to say yes to you.

Don’t focus too much on your ‘tips and tricks.’ Show them how your valuable content is going to benefit their audience.

Ask yourself:

  • How is your content is going to benefit people?
  • What issues are you addressing and solving?
  • Are these issues that people care about?

Solid content by itself won’t work if no one can see where the value is.

Research The Websites You’re Targeting

You can’t build authority if you don’t do your research. Unless you know enough about the websites you’re targeting, as well as their audiences, your content might miss the spot.

Take a look at your target website’s audience and ask yourself some questions:

  1. Will they benefit from a link to my web page?
  2. Will my infographics be of use to this audience?
  3. Will this audience buy from me?

Find out who is engaging with a particular website and whether or not this is an audience who will appreciate your article and advice.

To build authority via guest posting, it’s also a good idea to take a look at the content a website has already published and stick to the format. For example, do they capitalize their subheadings, do they use images in their content and if so, how do they credit the images?

When you follow the format of a website blog you are giving the editor less work, and that is very hard for them to say no to.

A big no-no when it comes to guest posting is to fail to do your research. If you identify 30 blogs and send them generic emails with your pitch before doing any research, you’ll be wasting your time.

Always take your time to learn more about who you’ll be pitching to. Then, you can adjust your content and send out hyper-personalized emails accordingly.

Top tip: Avoid spelling and grammar errors in your emails. Use Grammarly and other tools to catch these mistakes before you click send.

Produce Your Best Content

It goes without saying that if you want to position yourself as an expert, your content has to be brilliant. Each time you produce a guest post, ask yourself “is this my best piece of content?”

To this end, you need to produce long-form content (1,000 words minimum) that offers unique insights to the reader. Your advice needs to be actionable, as different as possible to what has come before, and it needs to be of use to the target audience.

A huge no-no is to spend most of the article discussing things the reader already knows. The key here is understanding who your target audience is and what stage they are at in their journey. For example, if you’re writing an article about the do’s and don’ts of digital marketing to an advanced reader, don’t waste people’s time discussing what digital marketing is. They already know.

Your content needs to be readable, shareable and it needs to be as up-to-date and relevant as possible. This means understanding the latest trends and including links to recent stats and research (as opposed to information from 2014).

It’s also a good idea to write from personal experience. After all, you’re the expert here. If you’re writing about a subject you know intimately, don’t be afraid to write from your personal experience while making sure that your personal examples are relatable to others.

Your best content will need quality images and graphics, too. If you’re not sure where to source images from, you can use a tool like Pik Wizard. To spice up your graphics so that your content is as professional, engaging and eye-catching as possible, meanwhile, Design Wizard is your friend.

Absolutely do not go into this thinking that you can get away with posting below par content. Impressive content that educates, informs and engages people is the best way to establishing your authority and boosting conversions. The ultimate aim of guest posting is to grab more traffic from other sources and you can only do this by producing your best content.

Don’t hold back on the value factor. Yes, you’re doing this for free in the sense that you don’t get paid for a guest post. But the ROI will be worth it when you start to build your authority.

Moreover, the more awesome content you produce, the more chance you’ll have of securing a guest post with a super high domain website, such as Forbes or the Huffington Post.

Conclusion

All in all, building authority through guest posting comes down to identifying your value, identifying a related website’s audience – before producing as much valuable, usable content as possible that the audience can take action on. Focus on quality, not quantity, do your research and don’t hold back when it comes to value. Educate, inform but also engage.