Brands want it. Agencies are scrambling to create it. Experts are calling it the future. Consumers crave it. However, is content making anyone more excited about the future of marketing in terms of providing real business value? Jef I. Richards said, “Creative without strategy is called ‘art.’ Creative with strategy is called ‘advertising.’ ” Without a strategic plan behind your content marketing and, more specifically, your guest postings, your content is just clutter — it’s not marketing, nor does it provide any more value than a glorified “About” page.
Originally, SEO professionals used guest posting as a tool to obtain links back to a site from a variety of different domains. This was about quantity and keyword-rich anchor text. As guest blogging has evolved, this haphazard, quantity-driven practice hasn’t been replaced, even though most knowledgeable content marketers and SEO practitioners understand that guest blogging is more about building credibility and brand awareness, or using content as the catalyst for social media conversations. Also, with reports of Google’s Author Rank, your authority as an author who submits quality content to quality sites will influence the page rank of your article in search results.
In order to get past what this Midwest girl likes to call “crop dusting” content, you need to build a plan for each phase of a guest post’s content life cycle: strategy, creation, and execution. Continue Reading
