Building Your Blog

How To Build Your Blog Without A Guest Posting Strategy

The one thing all bloggers desire most is an engaged audience who will give them a positive outcome and feedback for their business.

The way you extract that reaction is by blogging, right?

Not necessarily.How to Build Your Blog

In order to call yourself a ‘blogger’ you have to have content that is constantly appearing and fresh. While doing so is crucial on your website each and every week, this also has to happen on the websites of other related blogging sites. However, a lot of business websites that are producing content simply don’t have the time to create honest material that appears elsewhere.

Sometimes there’s not enough time in the day to do that.

So what do you do?

I came across an interesting business owner whose blog exploded almost overnight. He didn’t have a guest posting strategy either. But, he did have a couple of things you should have in your marketing plan that can help you.

In this article, I want to talk about Justin Kats, founder and CEO of Kats Botanicals, who has over 60 strains of Kratom for sale as well as other botanicals. He captivates his audience because he understands what they are looking for when they buy Kratom and are interested in and bases his content around just that.

Your product may be different, but the results are the same. Here’s what he’s done the past six months which can turn your business around.

#1 – Build A Community

The natural guest posting strategy is one that builds a bridge from a larger audience (the blog you want to guest post on) to your own brand or blog.

The guest post allows you, Ms. Ileane’s readers, to get to know different strategies from creative business owners, like Justin Kats, who you would not have heard about otherwise.

This is called a bilateral community building strategy and while it’s quite effective, remember, we’re talking about NOT guest posting.

But, we’re still talking about the community factor. Your brand needs a landing pad for your community. Currently, Facebook groups are one of the best places businesses use to entice people to engage with the brand. This is true for new and current clients.

While Facebook groups will be a great place for you to advertise your business, take it slow in the beginning. Create an environment for your customers and community members to congregate and engage one another. Use the advertising methods slowly at first, gradually working up to the point where you have enough community members who are comfortable with the process.

When you correctly create this atmosphere, your audience naturally gravitates toward this engagement process that you have established for them.

In the beginning, you may find it to be a little slow-going. Enticing the targeted audience member to the group can be done via several outlets.

  • From your Facebook page
  • From your email list
  • From your blog
  • From your product/service (in case they would like to know more before purchasing)
  • Facebook ads – depending on how much you want to spend
  • Word of mouth

It’s important to remember this can be the life-blood of your business, so make sure to create this community from the beginning.

The benefits of your Facebook Group:

  • Groups have more organic reach than Facebook Pages.
  • Groups also send out notifications to people in the community as well. This ensures even more activity and prompts more engagement.
  • Groups like this can skyrocket your business’s success rate.

When properly managed, your Facebook Group will be able to run itself, all while being a tremendous marketing resource for your blog.

#2 – Use Multi-media Content Effectively

As a blogger, you have already signed up for content creation. However, you may not know at what level you should be creating content.

The more content you create, the more opportunities your business has to be seen by more people.

Using the community feature from above, Mr. Kats explains the reason you should take advantage of multimedia content.

No matter if you’re selling clothing or SEO services, your content needs to be related to that – and not salesy or gimmicky. So many bloggers have killed their chances at sales because every piece of content was too pushy or forward.

Be helpful. Be informative. Be natural.

Here’s some of the content Justin has used in the past within his community that his audience responded well to:

  • Previously recorded (and edited) video – for the informative-based content viewer. People who have questions or simply want to know more about your business will be interested in this type of content.
  • Live video – Facebook is a great place for live video sessions. These types of media placements can keep your audience excited and engaged with your brand and what you can do for them. Take this opportunity to do giveaways and sales.
  • Regular content – AKA, written content on your blog. This needs to be an effective use of easy content which is informative and digestible for your readers. This helps them stay on track within your community.

#3 – Stand Behind Your Customer Service

Why should a blogger have a customer service strategy?

If you sell anything, you need a customer service plan. Even before you release your first product, your customer service plan must be in action.

You may even be a business of one – and more power to you – but, a solo act has to realize, without a customer, they don’t have a business.

So what does this entail?

Justin explained how he threw out thousands of dollars worth of inventory because it didn’t meet his standards.

Again, you may not have a product someone can shelve, but the idea is still the same. Don’t allow your blog to produce something that you’re not completely proud of.

The idea is you want to be able to stand behind what you sell, and this means looking out for the people who are presently supporting your business as well as in the future.

Allow your community to interact with you. Allow them to ask questions and engage with you. The more they get to know you and your product, the more likely they will tell someone else about it.

In Conclusion

There are many ways to build your blog, but the best way is through the people. If you’re like my friend Justin, and may not have time to create tons of content on other people’s sites, then you can adjust your strategy to cover these three issues.

The reason this works is because it focuses more on the person than the strategy, and people are more receptive to intimate conversations than anything else.

What do you think? Do you have any non-guest posting strategies which have worked for you in the past that I didn’t mention? Let me know below!

4 thoughts on “How To Build Your Blog Without A Guest Posting Strategy”

  1. Hey Wade,
    How are you doing bro?
    I’m happy to see you here again.
    Social media happens to be an effective way to grow your community without the dual advantages of guest posting – I see guest posting from a community building and SEO stand points.

    And yes, it has to be organic and that means time is a factor. It takes time to build and engage with your audience. Scheduling social media posts is good but too much of it becomes spam. You must create time to seriously engage with your peers on the different platforms.

    I was also thinking of offline events. In April of this year, I attended a WordCamp event here in Buea, Cameroon where I spoke on SEO for WordPress. That pull a large community to my blog and my country popped up on Alexa as one of the top 5 countries where my readers are located.

    How about that?

  2. Great article.

    I hate guest blogging tho. I mean I rarely have time to finish writing my blog posts (I try and write at least 2k-3k words per article). So yeah, I barely have time for guest posting.

    Anyway, since I’m a lazy net hustler, here are my tips on how to grow a blog (or website doesn’t matter) without guest blogging:
    1. Paid traffic, specifically cheap sources, such as Native Ads, buying email solo ads, different media buys on sites that are related, Facebook, sometimes Bing can be cheap too… ah and popups (yeah they still work if you know how to use em)…
    2. You can try SEO, and just write good quality content, and try to build links naturally to your site.
    3. Social media, share your stuff, and hope that some big guys will find your articles and post it on their page or website
    4. Infographics. They are still amazing at bringing lots of traffic to your site easily + other websites might post your infographic on their site, thus giving you a backlink and you won’t need to guest post.
    5. When in doubt, if you’re lazy you can always just pay for a guest post, and they can even write it for you… it’s a bit costly though, and I don’t really recommend it, but hey…it can be done.
    6. Press releases can still be cheap to buy, and give you a lot of exposure, specially if your site or blog covers something interesting or ground braking.
    7. Video marketing. Youtube is the 3rd website in the world, and 400 hours of video content are added every 5 seconds, with people watching about 5 billion videos every day. Enough said.

    Ehmm.. that’s it I guess… I mean I have more tips to give but… I don’t wanna keep this too long, hope it helps 🙂

    Cheers,
    Stephen

  3. There are SO many ways to build community Wade. Last year I guest posted a bit. This year it is blog commenting and promoting other bloggers freely. Serve bloggers generously, through different channels. Social media and commenting are the equalizers; even newbies can make an impact through either technique through their generosity. Rocking post dude!

  4. Hi Wade,

    Great insights and I really love that you talked about building audience around a blog without having a guest posting strategy. That said, I guess there are multiple ways to bring more traffic to your sites.

    Social media is one of the most effective way to build audience around your blog. Just make sure to stay unique from the crowd if you want to promote your blog or business effectively.

    The key here is to engage with other people in your industry through social media regularly so you can reap the best rewards.

    Blogger outreach is another smart strategy to promote your blog while also building relationships with other influencers in your niche. Make sure to find ways to offer help to other influencers through blogger outreach strategy instead of seeking help.

    Building your community and following through Quora should be your top priority if you’re just starting out. It’s one of the biggest platforms where you can build audience from scratch by writing useful answers.

    Thanks so much for the write up and keep rocking!

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