How I mastered the art of Guest Blogging

I work in a software organization and my job is 'Growth Hacking'. Fancy, isn't it? Ha Ha! Let me tell you one thing since our target audience is developers, it is difficult to convince them through the usual digital marketing activities because these guys are too smart.

Agree with me?

I would say that SAAS & PAAS marketing is tougher than it looks. You cannot attract your target audience through your usual ads, videos, and social media. What you need is a kick ass content and strategy that works. I must say 'Content is the King' even now, no matter what industry you are in. With a little tuning, you can reap good benefits.

So, how did I actually try getting a targeted and quality traffic to our software business with a lot of quality backlinks? I am going to explain it step by step below.

How did I target developers?

Step 1:

My job started with understanding the developer traits and creating a persona. In marketing, creating a persona of your target audience is very important and basic approach. This helps to figure out all other subsequent processes to follow to understand your potential customer better,

Step 2:

I started figuring out the interests, likes, and dislikes of developers. Started analyzing everything about developers. Here are some facts I came to know about developers

Step 3:

At this time I know how a developer thinks and what are his/her interests, likes and dislikes but there was a big question in my mind, Where do I find the places (websites and forums in this context) to convince them (developers) with my marketing skills? This was tough.

What did I do next?

I started analyzing competitors backlinks to know where these guys are posting and getting links back. This is what you must and should do to figure out where to share your content when you are a beginner, but how? Using this tool Ahref.

Step 4:

I figured out the strong keywords for our organization and started reading all the articles related to those particular keywords. I created 'Google Alerts' for the strong keywords and received a lot of articles every day to my inbox whenever someone wrote about these keywords. I started figuring out some high authority websites that accept guest posts. Believe me, guest posting is the best thing I could think of that time and it worked out really well. This will not only help to brand your company but also helps in SEO by getting quality backlinks from other websites.

Step 5:

Now that I know where our competitors are posting/sharing their content & where developers usually spend most of their time, I started signing up to all these developer forums and websites. Started participating in the discussions. Also created a lot of discussions on different forums.

Take a look at this one example on HashNode

Step 6:

I analyzed top content by putting these strong keywords that I identified to see what went viral before through these two tools 'EpicBeat' and 'Buzz Sumo'. I got a fair idea on what type of content goes viral and how to write it. I started noticing opportunities in this area and started creating infographics. Check out this infographic I created a shared on JAXenter Magazine.

Step 7:

I started approaching these websites that accept guest posting. I started with DZone, the best place for developers. It's a developer community. My articles started picking up well. Similarly, I approached 20+ websites and forums and I currently write on 15+ websites on DevOps and developer related topics.

Here are the links below if you want to take a look at my writing,

https://dzone.com/users/2879134/pavanshippable.html

http://www.iamwire.com/author/pavan-belagatti

https://jaxenter.com/author/pavan-belagatti

https://thenextweb.com/author/pavanbelagatti/#.tnw_4yd41kYk

http://devopscube.com/author/pavan/

https://prowly.com/magazine/author/pavan/

http://www.infoq.com/cn/news/2017/01/DevOps-publish-7

https://devops.com/author/teamshippable/

DZone gave me their 'Most Valuable Blogger' badge.

Also, I won the 1st prize for the guest posting contest on DZone for getting more number of views on my articles. In this contest, more than 250 tech experts around the world participated and shared their articles on DZone.

Step 8:

I started using 'CoSchedule's Title Analyzer' and started coming up with more title ideas that might interest our target audience. Started producing a lot of content. Started approaching more and more people that allow me to guest post on their website.

Step 9:

I automated my Twitter DM to the followers (many were developers) about my guest posting, where all I write and would love to contribute quality content on your blog. Many people replied back.

I automated my Twitter DM message with this tool called 'Crowdfire App'.

This is the automated message that I am using,

And you want to see the results of using this? Here you go,

By constant hustling, at some point, I was among one of the top authors to write about this keyword 'DevOps'.

This is how I am writing a lot nowadays and publishing my articles to the targeted websites. I write about digital marketing, growth hacking, social media marketing, SEO, etc.

Hope this article gave you some inspiration and insights on guest blogging and strategies to follow.