It’s kind of difficult to admit, but for the early part of my online career, I was doing guest blogging all wrong.

I mean, it’s not like my posts were bad or anything (I hope), but I had no idea what I wanted to achieve through guest blogging, or what I should be doing with the traffic coming in to my site.

The only thing I knew was that I needed to use my bio box to say a few words about myself and then link to my site with either a general anchor text or a keyword-rich one. That was all.

On one hand, yes, it got me some traffic, and subscribers, and overall new audience, but I’m 100 percent positive that if I had done this with more thought, I could have multiplied those results many times over.

So what’s the correct approach here?

In short, it’s not only writing a great post, but also paying just as much attention to the landing page on your site where you’re sending people from that guest post.

Again, don’t treat the link to your site as an afterthought. It really is just as important as the post itself.

“Why would I bother?”

I could simply say that the method just works and that you will see great results over time. But this would be quite vague, so instead check out this article by Milica Pantic: How I Get Paid $100 For Every Guest Post on Comluv.com.

Milica is an experienced guest blogger and a regular contributor at Comluv. Her success is based entirely on building great posts, combining them with a great landing page, and offering a product to people who come through her links. In the above post, she walks you through her story.

The method

The method I want to show you that’s designed to utilize your landing pages to the max is based on the following process:

1. Pick the right topic for your guest post, and make sure it’s related not only to the blog where you want to post it, but also to the content on your site.
2. Prepare an exclusive offer on your site to welcome the people coming in (more on that in a minute).
3. Link to this offer from your guest post with a direct call to action (either through an in-content link or from the bio box).

(By the way, quite recently, we talked about how to build links from your guest posts. Check it out to get the complete picture of how you can capitalize on your guest blogging.)

How to prepare the right offer for your guest blogging landing page

A well-built landing page should offer something to the visitor right away.

For that reason, linking to your main domain – the root of your site – isn’t the best of ideas. I mean, you will get some traffic, sure, and some people will end up reading your posts, and maybe even subscribing to your newsletter. However, it’s not a very optimized setup, and you can get much better results with a custom landing page.

Your offer will generally be one of two things:

• a newsletter signup with an incentive,
• or a shameless product sale.

I’d say that a newsletter offer is easier to pull off because you get more possibilities when it comes to adjusting the offer to specific guest post and specific blog where the post is meant to be published.

Whereas products require much more work, and once you have them built, you can’t really do all that much in terms of customizing.

That being said, if you have a product that’s 100 percent relevant to the blog where your guest post is going to be published, and it’s also 100 percent relevant to the post itself then by all means make it the main element of your landing page. Otherwise, better stick with newsletter offers.

Start by brainstorming over ideas that would cater to the needs of the people coming from your guest post. What would they want to see almost immediately?

For example, if the post is about social media techniques for small businesses then the visitor would likely be interested in a cheat sheet or a checklist of all the things that a small business owner should do when performing their weekly social media routine.

It’s relevant, it provides an easy to grasp promise, and it’s what people are clearly interested in since they’ve just read the post.

Use this concept when coming up with your own offer. Always look at things from your reader’s point of view.

How to link to your offer

As I said before (in this and the previous post), linking to your landing page properly is crucially important.

You want to provide a clear call to action, otherwise people won’t have a reason for clicking your link.

Sticking to the example above, a social media checklist for small business owners could be pitched like this:

Feel free to check my newest resource – the social media checklist for small business owners (LINK-HERE). It will get you up to speed with the things you can do every week to get your first 5,000 fans.

How to showcase your offer on the landing page

The technical side of things is rather simple. You just create a new standard page in the WP Admin. If your theme allows you to do so, go ahead and strip the page from all sidebars (example here). This will give your main offer some additional visibility.

Next, customize the URL. Going back to the previous example again, if the post went live on smallbiztrends.com, you could build an URL like: yoursite.com/social-media-checklist-for-smallbiztrends – really simple trick but makes it clear that your offer is tailor-made.

Let’s keep up with the idea of the offer being tailor-made and welcome the readers with a personalized message.

You can say even something as simple as:

Hey there, I’ve noticed you’re coming from smallbiztrends.com. Thanks for reading my guest post, I really appreciate it and I’d like to welcome you with this exclusive offer. I hope you’ll get some great value out of it!

Then, go ahead and proceed with the rest of your landing page copy. I won’t cover this here, but the general goal is obviously to either convince the person to sign up or buy your product. Do what you think is best to achieve this goal.

Follow up and prosper!

That’s basically the end of my guest blogging vs. landing pages strategy.

But let’s take this even further.

After you’ve managed to convince someone to join your list, what you should do is follow up with them almost immediately and invite them to your other content that discusses some similar topics.

Think about it, you know where the person came from, you know what post they read, and you know why they subscribed. This knowledge should make it easy for you to pick specific posts from your blog and send them to the person. That way, you can re-engage them with your site almost instantly.

What do you think about this whole method? I know that it can take quite a lot of time to execute it, but it truly is worth it for your most crucial guest posts on the most popular blogs, or blogs where you’re a regular contributor.