Yes Kids, Go Guest Post For Fun & Profit

Just in case, this is what guest posting is (C/O TrackMaven):

Guest posting is creating content and publishing it on another person’s website. Blogs are a very popular platform for guest posting. This is a great way to build an online reputation and for a company to get its name out there. By posting on another person’s blog, not only will a company’s followers see its content, but anyone who follows the host blogger will see the company’s content as well, thus reaching an audience that might be unaware of your brand.

I did the guest post thing last week on Agency Post, Business2Community and the Portland Ad Fed websites.

Agency Post On Procurement

My blog post, You can’t Avoid Procurement, But You Can Learn How To Sell Them, appears on the fast growing ad agency blog Agency Post, which was recently bought by HubSpot. As I say,

Few words strike more fear and loathing in the hearts of agency management than “procurement.” This P-word gets its rap from being viewed as an impediment to an advertising agency’s ability to sell its strategic and brand-building creative expertise. Instead, agencies have to sell on price.

However, the role of procurement isn’t that simple.

It has its own ying and yang.

The major point I make is that clients of all sizes and shapes (regardless if they have a procurement department or not) are interested in getting the most bang from their ad agency buck. Yes, its that ROI thing again. I suggest that agencies have a compensation plan and a POV on agency-client financial management (“we care and pay attention to details”) that they can share with prospective clients.

Get ahead of the issue and… look much smarter than the other agencies.

Business2Community On Meeting Management

On the well-read and high Page Rank website Business2Community (Page Rank = 6) I wrote about meeting management in How To run A Smart Meeting. We waste hours and cash on poorly run meetings. it is brain numbing. As I say,

Effective meetings deliver three key benefits:

1. Effective meetings focus on and achieve meeting objectives.

2. Well-managed meetings take up a minimum amount of time.

3. Participants leave the meeting feeling that a sensible process has been followed and that their time has been used effectively.

This post was easy to do as it is a slight rewrite from my soon to be published book: The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches. I did the same for the Agency Post guest post. Repurposing, with thoughtful adjustments for the new platform,  is a good thing if you want to reach new audiences.

Portland Ad Fed On Guest Posting

For the brand new Portland Ad Fed website I wrote about the value of guest posting. The article Go Forth And Guest Post discusses why I, and you, should guest post. Get over the thinking that guest posting’s primary benefit is getting a link back to your site to make Google love you (Google makes too many algorithm revisions to count on this). Just love the fact that YOU are building awareness by having your pearls of wisdom on other people’s well-read website. As I say, yes again,

I admit it. I am a habitual guest blogger.

I do this for a few reasons. One is simple ego-boosting. But the most important is awareness growth for my agency consultancy. It works because I can get way past my current blog, Twitter and LinkedIn readership to introduce myself and my thinking to a much larger advertising audience. I trade articles for audience.

Matt Cutts On Guest Blogging

Matt is in charge of spam at Google. He is one of the most read people on the subject of SEO in the industry. In the article,  The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO, he discuses why guest posting is and isn’t a good thing. Bottom line, it is a good thing if your posts are high quality and you are seeking marketing awareness. It is bad for the industry when posters act like poseurs. Read on,

It seems like most people are getting the spirit of what I was trying to say, but I’ll add a bit more context. I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bath water. 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. I changed the title of this post to make it more clear that I’m talking about guest blogging for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

I’m also not talking about multi-author blogs. High-quality multi-author blogs like Boing Boing have been around since the beginning of the web, and they can be compelling, wonderful, and useful.

I just want to highlight that a bunch of low-quality or spam sites have latched on to “guest blogging” as their link-building strategy, and we see a lot more spammy attempts to do guest blogging. Because of that, I’d recommend skepticism (or at least caution) when someone reaches out and offers you a guest blog article.

My advice: go guest post for fun, pleasure and fame.