A few days ago, I wrote part 3 of my series about optimizing keywords for Google search engine rankings. Now that we are into the marketing portion of that lesson, it’s important to learn the most effective means to get the word out about your blog, or to market your keyword phrase.

I originally listed “guest posts” as one of the best ways to start your “friendly” marketing campaign… essentially the opposite of what is referred to as “bum” marketing. As this original thesis holds true, I have found that if you are working on a low budget (as most upstart bloggers are), you need a way to get the maximum amount of traffic and link juice pointed toward your blog, with as little cash flow involved. The solution is guest posts… so let’s give you the Net Fool’s Marketing Method!

Understanding the Costs

Let’s have a look at some of the standard costs of marketing. Usually, big corporations and partnerships have no problem opening up their wallet for some high-quality traditional advertising. Banner ads, text link ads, paid reviews and full out partnerships. However, if you are just working on your own and don’t really have the capital to spend across the competitive landscape… I would recommend that you try to focus more on the cheaper alternatives.

The funny thing here is that free advertising can be just as effective as paid advertising. Let’s focus on guest posts v. paid reviews today. If you pay a blogger to do a review, it is going to cost upwards of $100 for a quality website… sometimes more like $500. This is a hefty price tag for 24 hours of spotlight, isn’t it? What’s more is the in today’s world, people like to look past paid reviews and consider them misleading right off the bat! On the other hand, you could write a guest post for a blogger to fill in for them on a day they don’t want to write for FREE. You may not get the same level of exposure, but you’ll get yourself a link in the first paragraph pointing back to your website (and boosting your SEO) that can drive some serious traffic and subscribers your way. Sounds good right?

Capitalizing on the Marketing Spread

If you are anything like me, you won’t want to be sitting in your room all day writing out 500+ word articles just to be able to submit them to other websites for a guest post. This is something you could do once or twice, and you will probably never want to do again. So what I do is hire writers for me to do all the writing at around $3-$5 a pop. Well right now you might be thinking hey, I have no budget… how can I afford to pay someone else to do something that I could do myself!?

Over the past year, I have learned a lot about the true value of time. In the earlier stages of my blogging, I would attempt to do everything myself because I felt that if I could handle something, why would I pay another to do it? The problem with this is that some things just aren’t worth your time… and often writing articles can be that activity. You might be spending more, but you can also make more with your time!

With this in mind, would you rather pay $150 for a review on a high-quality blog, or $3 for a pre-written outsourced post that you re-format with your link in it and submit as a guest post for free? That’s pretty much the same exposure for $147 less! Multiplying this out, you could potentially just use a $150 advertising budget and use it all on guest posts… so you could get effective links placed on 50 blogs for the price of one!

Getting Your Game-Plan In Motion

So now that we understand how much cheaper guest posts are than paid reviews, let’s work on the exact method in what we are going to do here. Again, we are going to seek out a whole bunch of high-quality blogs that are located in our niche that we can potentially guest post on. Most bloggers are friendly and looking for filler, so this really isn’t as difficult as it sounds.

Once we have a list of bloggers that we think we can guest post on, we should get our articles together, eh? No blogger ever really reveals their best writers, and I don’t have a “go to” writer per se. However, you can find writers that put out excellent original content for $3-$5 per 500 words on the DigitalPoint Webmaster Forums. It’s pretty easy to find good people on that forum, so that’s where I would go for the best bang for your buck.

The key to successful guest posting is having high-quality, well-researched content that is 100% original and flows nicely. Lists of “top five” (or similar) are the norm for guest posts, as they keep things orderly and very social media friendly. I typically pay $3 an article with my articles, so this is your low-cost solution!

Once you have your articles, getting free advertising is as simple as re-writing a top section on each article that you get outsourced with a link back to your website. If you are targeting a keyword in Google, you can even link that term up as anchor text and you are on your way. Contact the bloggers you were interested in guest posting for… and send them your articles.

Remember: Never send the same article twice, we want to send everyone a unique article!

Bottom Line: This is an insanely profitable and low-cost marketing solution “for the rest of us.” By marketing the Net Fool way, you get insane cost savings every time! You can use this for as many or as few articles that you want… the choice is yours! Guest posts are perhaps the most effective marketing strategies that I have come across, and I fully encourage you to do the same.

-The Net Fool

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