How to Grow Your Email List Through Guest Posting on Other Sites

Make sure to be very clear about your guest blogging objective.

You know why Matt Cutts called guest blogging a spammy marketing technique?

Because most marketers use it solely for building backlinks to their content.

And there’s nothing wrong with it as long as your content is relevant to the overall theme of the host blog and the links are built in a natural way.

Guest Blogging

Here’s what Matt said in an update to his original post on guest blogging

“There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there.”

Get in Front of a New Audience

But the real benefit of guest blogging is that it allows you to reach a much bigger audience, helps you build a strong brand image and route people from a bigger blog to your own email list.

Create a post specific lead magnet

What’s the most common way to use guest blogging for email list building?

Find the right blogs, submit a quality guest post, get an author bio link, and then hope people click on it, visit your blog and subscribe to your mailing list.

Not exactly an efficient strategy.

If you’re really serious about building your email list with guest blogging, you need to use an enticing free offer and strong calls to action to drive people to your list.

Set up a Landing Page to Capture Leads

Routing visitors from a guest post to the homepage of your blog is one of the easiest ways to ruin all your hard work.

As I said in the last point, people need a strong push to convert into subscribers. Routing them to your homepage doesn’t serve any purpose.

Which is why you should always use lead magnets in your guest post byline and route the visitors to a landing page that converts them into subscribers.

Here’s a good example of a simple landing page with a strong call to action.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y8AlsU82a95bJSzupSEh5DGZ1X_xxt_Id-O-jRg46m4/

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Oezwi86PYoDqEnRlkzlA3R9paGVB2mzRV2JTsDOT97I/

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1vBFqRqSB5xwN2BIgu8-xAidFOkHvt1x4uAbcmswyFdo/

Choose a Site

After searching and finding a list of appropriate sites, it is time to pick two or three that you want to target. Like I said earlier, you are going to put a great deal of effort into writing a guest post, so you want to get the most out of that effort.

You will want to choose the sites that are the best in the below four categories. I keep a spreadsheet where I list my prospective guest post sites to help me to choose the best ones.

The columns that I have for each category are detailed below.

Activity

Another benefit that you hope to get from a guest post is interaction with a new community. You want the readers to comment and ask questions.

To find this, just click around on some of the recent posts on the site and see what kinds of comments are being left. If it is active with lots of comments, that is a great sign of an active community.

If there are only one or two comments on each of the posts, that’s probably not the place that you want to spend your time and effort on.

If you follow these steps, you won’t have any trouble getting featured on authority sites. And remember, don’t wait until you think you are perfect before starting this.

Get started now.

Take action, even if it isn’t perfect, and start moving forward towards being seen as an expert in your field.