What’s the best way to market and grow a business? Do you often lock yourself in a conference room to avoid distractions and answer that question? Does one idea keep coming to mind? Guest writing for influential publications.
Aaron Orendorff does it. He is the founder and CEO of iconiContent, as well as the editor-in-chief of Shopifyplus. Guest blogging was a foundational ingredient to scaling his personal brand. Aaron’s used guest writing to build clients for his own business and help land a job at Shopify. He shares the importance of writing for such publications, where to start, how to find ideas for articles to be accepted, and how to pitch articles.
Some of the highlights of the show include:
- Aaron spent 2 ½ years guest posting, guest blogging, and writing articles for publications that he respected and wanted to be like
- Aaron began building relationships and cold pitching to editors anywhere and everywhere to get ahold of email addresses
- He understands that social proof is one of the most powerful levers to convince somebody to enter your funnel or start talking to you online
- Cold Pitching Process: Reverse engineering of popular topics; speaking language/terminology of audience; using Buzzsumo to find popular social media
- What are the headline formulas? What’s the word count? How did they use images? How are they interlinking? Did they like a lot of data?
- Aaron sent publishers a complete article tailored to their publication; he identified topics related to popular posts on their site and discovered competitive holes
- What gets responses from editors? Behind-the-scenes work, show instead of tell, and sending publishers a brief email with the attached article as a Word doc
- Go to About or Contact Website pages for the publications or use tools to find email addresses of the editors
- Rejections: Write an entire article for a specific publication, send it to the editors; wait to get rejected
- Risk-to-Reward Ratio: Once rejected, tweak it and send to a different publication; work your way down a publication list; risk goes way down
- After first “yes,” doors open and it’s far easier to write for publications a second, a third, a fourth time; promote articles after published to maximize opportunities
- Guest writing has helped by getting attention from editors/other writers and building relationships with them through customized, valuable articles
- To start guest writing: 1) Write complete articles tailored for specific publications; don’t send pitches; 2) Find what’s popular at their and competitors’ sites
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