List Building Strategy #2: Guest Blogging…. With a Twist

Getting featured on a site with a bigger fan base than yours is one of the best ways to grow awareness of your brand and your offering in your target market.

And like I mentioned in the intro, it’s a good idea in theory, but unless you reverse-engineer your approach to it, it’ll yield fewer subscribers than you’re hoping for from your efforts.

But it can be effective, if you do it right.

Here’s the trick, though:

That irresistible offer that is your lead magnet, make sure it’s something that’ll resonate deeply with the blog audience.

Otherwise, don’t even waste your time.

And make sure you use the information in your blog post or the podcast interview to build up to a call to action for people to click through back to your site to get the lead magnet.

Yes, the post itself should have a call to action. Not just the author bio at the end.

Bryan Harris talks about this in his tutorial on writing what he calls an expanded guest post.

His strategy is twofold:

First, set a really big expectation at the very beginning of the article that you’ll deliver on throughout the post and with your call to action to download your lead magnet at the end of the post.

Continue reminding readers of this promise to build up the expectation before the climax of delivery.

Second, use lots and lots of visual examples. 

He suggests you set the reader up for these by using the words ‘for example’ over and over again, every time you’re about to introduce something that validates the claim you’re making.

This provides visual proof that you really do know what you’re talking about and gets the reader hooked on you as the expert to trust for this kind of information.

According to Tim Soulo’s epic post on the ROI of guest posting, the average referral traffic from the average guest post is a measly 56 visits.

Which is hardly worth your time to write, if you ask me.

But when you make sure you’ve got links back to your content within the body of the guest post, your potential referral traffic boosts by 387%… and you get even more ‘juice’ if the things you write leading up to that link make people want to click it.

And when Bryan Harris used his own strategy of writing an expanded guest post:

He went even further beyond that and collected a massive 323 new subscribers from one guest post within three days of it publishing!