Guest blogging — finding blogs that are relevant to your industry and writing original articles for submission to these blogs — is a great way to enhance your business’ search engine performance and visibility to niche audiences. It’s a time-consuming process, though: you look for blogs, write the article, pitch it to editors and wait for feedback. Wash, rinse, repeat.
If you’re a small business owner and you wish to manage your guest blogging efforts more efficiently, check out these tools:
MyBlogGuest is an online community created by Search Engine Journal author Ann Smarty. It has a traditional forum that connects you to blog owners who are looking for guest-written articles (on a wide variety of topics) to publish. You can also use MBG’s articles gallery to upload your articles to a database, which is filtered by category and lets blog owners pick out articles for publishing.
BloggerLinkUp is another free guest blogging tool with simple, straightforward solutions for guest bloggers looking to drive traffic and get more exposure. It features various contact forms: one for offering guest posts, another for offering a product/service for reviews and another for announcing a contest or giveaway. After you fill out a form, a message will be sent to the BloggerLinkUp community, automatically generating leads for finding bloggers who’ll publish your guest articles.
GroupHigh is described as “blogger outreach software” for creating and managing your own network of bloggers and publishers to connect with. It personalizes your pitch, automates the process of researching blogs (based on topics, content and location) to which you can submit articles, and notifies you whenever your business/brand is mentioned in a blog post.
HARO stands for “Help a Reporter Out,” which is exactly what this online publicity service does. It can function as a guest blogging tool, but HARO can also facilitate media pitches and expose your brand/business to national news agencies and media companies. Service packages start at $19 monthly; this sends real-time publicity opportunities straight to your inbox, from journalists who need sources for their articles. If these journalists recognize you as a good fit, you have an opportunity to respond, tell your storyand promote your business. For $89 a month you can outsource this and hire Bite Size PR. They monitor services like HARO for requests that match your business and respond to reporters on your behalf.
Chris Campbell is the CEO of Review Trackers, a leading online review management platform for multi-location businesses looking to track, analyze, and generate reviews on sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google, and Foursquare.
