It is no secret that guest posting is something that every company wants. Contributing guest articles to other websites is a great way to improve your organic traffic by earning a good variety of backlinks, not to mention help you gain some visibility amongst the community and those interested in SEO and online marketing. Creating a guest posting strategy for your own website is usually fairly straightforward (and at the very least, there are many different articles and resources to help get you started); however creating a strategy when you’re working with multiple clients isn’t so cut and dry.
If you off any kind of PPC, SEO, online marketing, or even PR services for a number of different clients, you might want to offer guest posting as a service. This then leads to the question: How can I manage different writers, links, and articles for different companies all in different niches and still be successful?
5 Steps to Offering Guest Posting as a Service for Different Clients
How you create your guest posting strategy will depend completely upon the niches of your different clients. You will most likely not be working with companies who work in your industry (SEO and online marketing), but rather companies that don’t know much about this—those in the restaurant industry, health industry, automotive services, etc. If this is the case, I recommend following the steps below to get organized:
Step #1: Hire a great writer.
I use the term “great” because I don’t think it’s completely necessary to only hire a writer with an expertise in the field of your client. For example, let’s say one of your clients is a local restaurant, and that local restaurant wants to improve their organic rankings through guest posting. While hiring a writer who knows a lot about the restaurant industry is ideal, a great writer can learn enough about this industry to begin guest posting. Someone who knows a lot about restaurants might not be able to write very well, and therefore this is likely not the route you should go. In short, first try to find a writer who has a background in writing and restaurants, and if that fails, find someone who has a background in writing.
Step #2: Give them topics related to the client’s they will be writing for. Have them write five different articles (that you will edit).
At this point, you want to really monitor your new writer’s articles. Talk with your client and see what types of sites and what types of articles they would like to see (if they have an opinion at all). By giving your new writing a few topics, you can make sure that he/she is writing about something relevant and gets the hang of things before you let them come up with their own topics.
Step #3: While editing their work, have them begin finding a list of potential sites where he/she can guest post.
Finding quality sites is something that takes a little bit of time to master. This step uses the same rationale as the last step—make sure they get a feel for what is relevant before you let him/her loose.
Step #4: Let him/her begin pitching the articles to these different sites.
You should train your writers on how to pitch to editors first. You can check out this post for more information. Once you feel comfortable with their writing style, go ahead and let him/her send out the article to a website, and consider being a “bcc” on the email.
Step #5: Make sure all guest posts are recorded.
I usually recommend letting each writer have their own Google doc where they include the topic of the article, where the article was sent, when the article was sent, the status of the article, and then the URL when the article goes live. This doc can then be shared with whomever is in charge of overseeing that writer. This keeps all of the recordings in one place, yet the different client’s work won’t be mixed up.
As a side note, I would recommend having your writers record the backlinks they’ve earned on each article. Do this by simply adding another tab on the Google doc. This will help you know exactly where all of your links are coming from in case there is a question in the future. On my writer tracker for my job, I also included a tab about the sites that I have pitched in order to stay organized.
How to Oversee Several Writers for All Different Clients
This is probably the trickiest part when working with different clients. You want to make sure that your writers are reporting to someone, but you likely have different people in charge of your different clients. Therefore, I recommend that those in charge of the client be in charge of the writer guest posting for that client. This will allow the person in charge of the client’s account to know exactly what is going on and be able to send him/her reports.
So what if you want one writer to work with several different clients? Next Tuesday I’ll answer this question in detail!
Is this something that your company offers to different clients? What is your strategy? What have you found successful and what you have found to be more trouble than it’s worth? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Photo Credit: johnleonard.com
