Every new guest blogging project – or simply a guest post – starts by picking the right site and the right topic that is most likely to resonate with the site’s audience. But apart from that, you also need to decide what type of content you want to create. There are a lot of possibilities, but some of them make more sense for guest blogging than others.
For instance, your goal is to get the most out of your post in terms of people coming back to your site and taking action on what you have to offer. So the guest post itself needs to somehow make them want to give you a chance.
In short, what this means is that above all else, you need to present you expertise, give people a solution to a problem, but at the same time, let them know that if they want more, they will have to follow your link.
So having that in mind, here are seven content types for guest posts that you should try out first.
1. Tutorials
Let’s start with the obvious. Tutorials have been with us for a long time as a content type, and it’s for a very good reason – people simply love them in the business blogging space, and so do blog editors.
No matter what specific niche you’re in, there are always so many topics, so many challenges and so many issues that need in-depth explaining that you will never run out of new tutorial ideas.
And you shouldn’t worry about the abundance of advice already out there either. Many topics need re-writing or re-evaluating every year, especially if they focus on strictly business-related methods or practices. For example, you could easily go out and write a post titled, “How to Do Facebook Marketing in 20XX” every year.
The only key to a good tutorial is to pick a specific problem and then give a viable solution to it. At the same time, let the reader know that they can find more over at your site.
2. Case studies
A very powerful content type, primarily because people know that case studies are based on real world data, so they can get some actual insight, and not just an idea or a theory that the author has.
The difficult part is getting the right data, and for that reason, case studies are often the most time consuming type of guest posts to create. You need to look around, browse existing studies, reach out to some sources, maybe even network with new people, all in order to get the right data.
But the nice part is that once you have the idea on what case study you want to share and what’s the takeaway for the reader, most blog editors will be happy to feature it on their sites.
3. List posts
The magic of list posts lies in their incredibly appealing headlines and the promise that the content inside is easily digestible due to being a list of semi-related elements rather than one bit consistent essay.
Blog editors are usually very receptive to list posts because they are well aware of the results that those things usually bring.
Therefore, your “only” challenge is to come up with an interesting enough headline. When it comes to the content itself, make sure that the list is well balanced and that each item is of similar length and purpose.
List posts also allow you to plug your website in a natural way by simply making one of the items focus on something related to your business.
4. Large lists of links
Large lists of links are somehow both easy and difficult to create. The easy part is that it requires relatively little effort to find the specific links that you can place on the list. The difficult part is to make the list coherent and provide good experience for the reader. And the more items there are on the list, the more difficult it gets.
The way that’s been the most effective for me when creating such posts is to start with the idea first – a specific problem – and only then begin looking for individual links to other tools and resources that help in solving this problem.
The great part is that plugging your site/business is very simple with these kinds of posts. You just make it one of the items on the list.
5. Series
We talked about guest blogging with a series of posts before, so let me just mention this briefly. For the complete how-to, please click the link earlier in this paragraph.
Basically, the idea with post series is, why would you land just a single guest post on a popular site when you can land multiple ones?
6. Success stories
There’s nothing like a good success story! We all like to read them, especially if they touch upon an area that’s important to us. That’s one of the reasons why success stories are so popular on all kinds of blogs.
Editors can’t resist publishing them because it boosts their credibility a lot. For example, if you’re an editor at a “make money blogging” blog then if someone reaches out with a post titled, “Here’s How I Made $XXXXX Blogging,” you will be very tempted to publish it.
The difficult part, obviously, is to have a good enough success story.
However, once you do get your hands on something like this, you can go ahead and try approaching the absolute top blogs in your market. There’s a really good chance they will say yes.
7. Asking what they need…
This is a tricky one, but it’s a really interesting concept you can use every once in a while.
So instead of coming up with a content type yourself, simply ask the editor what they need.
Just a couple of things here:
- Do this only if you already have some relationship with the editor. Sending this as a cold pitch won’t work.
- Be ready that the suggestions you get back might not be 100 percent related to your business.
Let me give you an example here. A while ago, I looked through the content on my site when building a large WordPress-related resource, and I found that I didn’t have any post on installing WordPress. If I had been approached back then by someone asking me what I needed, they would have had a good chance of landing a guest post. Well, no one reached out so I had to write the post myself.
8. ?
Any ideas for what might be the entry #8 here?
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