The Art of Blogging for Business

Welcome to Free Blogging for Business Course with Courses Buddy!

Let’s take a moment to step back and look at the big picture. How do people discover products and services to buy online? First of all, nothing beats a recommendation from a friend or someone you respect. Great products generate a lot of buzz on social networks and this drives sales like a charm. That’s called word of mouth. 

Then there is search.

Whenever you’re facing a problem or have any kind of question, the first place you go to Google. And if there’s a product or service that can solve your problem, it is very likely that it will pop up in Google’s search results.

And finally, advertising is a very old and proven way to get a product in front of prospective customers. We see hundreds, if not thousands of ads every single day. Which actually dilutes their ROI quite a bit. But this channel is still quite effective nevertheless.

Well, so do you even need a blog in order to tap into these three main customer acquisition channels? Well, Not really. Let me explain it with a real example. Let’s say you own an e-commerce store that sells shoe-laces from ABC website. Once someone buys new laces from them, the chances are, this person is going to brag about this to his friends and recommend the ABC website. That is, if that customer had a positive experience with that online shop.

Pleasing your customers is all you need in order to generate word of mouth.

People search for “how to lace nikes,” “how to lace nike shoes,” “how to lace air max 90,” etc. So they search for these kinds of things in Google, they match their queries with the ABC blog, they enjoy it, they dig deeper into the ABC website, and eventually they buy laces from it. This is a nearly perfect example of how content marketing can drive customers to your business from Google.

So let’s put the blog next to “Search” customer acquisition channel. What about word of mouth? Guess what people will do once they learn a new way to tie their laces? Post it on social media, of course. There’s even a hashtag #shoelaceart on Instagram for that. And once their friends and followers ask them for a tutorial where they learned to tie laces like that, they will give them a link to some article.

It’s not just the positive experience with your company and your product that can generate word of mouth. You can also generate a lot of buzz with your content. So let’s put blog next to word of mouth too.

You can spend money to promote the content that talks about your product instead of promoting the actual product directly. It may sound counterintuitive, but quite often the content that promotes your product will have a much higher conversion rate than a sales page for that product.

The hype around content marketing is real, yet many businesses struggle to run successful blogs. Despite regular updates, these blogs often lack engagement and fail to attract new customers. The typical pattern was a brief “spike of hope” in traffic followed by a “flatline of nope” once promotion ceased. 

The key realisation? Sustainable growth comes from making every article contribute to long-term traffic, rather than chasing short-lived spikes. This is the essence of the compound effect of content marketing. 

At Cousres Buddy, we shifted our focus from publishing numerous articles to crafting ones that bring consistent, targeted traffic over time. This free course aims to teach you how to achieve the same, ensuring that each article you publish adds to your blog’s traffic, leading to increased customer acquisition. 

The goal is clear: create articles that drive passive, consistent traffic and convert it into leads and sales.

We’ll start by looking at how a sudden increase in traffic happens. Then, I’ll explain two main ways to grow a blog and the challenges they bring. After that, I’ll show you why the idea of publishing more often isn’t as helpful as people think. Finally, I’ll talk about why it’s important to turn random visitors into regular readers.

Many bloggers eagerly await the quick traffic boost after posting new content. It feels great to see your traffic increase right after you publish a new post.

Where does this traffic come from? Well, what’s the first thing you do after you publish a new article? You share it with your existing audience. You send an email to your email subscribers, you share the link on Facebook, X (ex Twitter), LinkedIn and any other social network where you have some followers.

In other words, you’re inviting your current followers to visit your blog because you’ve got something fresh for them. That’s the initial increase in traffic. And the size of this section is determined by the size of your existing audience. Which means that if you’re just starting out, this section would be quite tiny, if any at all. But most importantly, there are no new people in this group.

Where Does the Traffic Come From?

Your email subscribers and social followers have discovered you long ago, so you’re not reaching any new people by sending an email to your subscribers or tweeting to your followers. This is quite important to understand.

The next thing you do to bring more traffic to your newly published article is share it with a bunch of relevant communities that flourish on different platforms. You post your article to a proper subreddit, you share it with some relevant groups on Facebook, and you promote it to some relevant channels.  And eventually, you post it to some relevant niche forums or community boards, where your target audience is hanging out.

If this is the first time you share your content with a certain group or community, then all the people who will land on your article as a result will be entirely new to your blog. But if you’ve been consistently sharing your content with this community for the past few months, most of the people there would know you by now.

So the promotion channel is only effective when starting out, but over time the amount of new people that you can reach this way will drastically decrease. And that was the second part of your increase in traffic.

So what’s the last one?

Word of Mouth

It’s word of mouth. This is the traffic that comes to your article when people from the first two sections share it with their friends and followers. This often happens passively, which means that you don’t have to do anything other than publish great content that people will genuinely want to share. But you can also generate word of mouth proactively, by reaching out to people with big audiences and showing them your content in hopes that they will share it with their big audience.

Passive word of mouth will usually improve your spike of traffic by like 10-20%, if you’re lucky. That’s because most of your blog visitors don’t have a large enough following, to bring you any good traffic when they share your article. But if you’ll manage to persuade a few big influencers to share your content with their huge audiences, that may send a tsunami of traffic your way.

So proactive word of mouth can improve your spike of traffic by like 1,000%. But that rarely happens, to be honest. The top people in your field are usually super reluctant to promote others. Especially when your blog is new and they have never heard about you before.

Turns out that the sweet spike of traffic that you get immediately after publishing and promoting a new article will mostly consist of the people who have visited your blog before. Which makes little sense. Because in order for your blog to grow, you have to be reaching new audiences all the time. And this is where the traffic from Google kicks in.

Remember: traffic from Google doesn’t come to your article immediately after publishing. It takes quite some time to build up. That is, if you invest in SEO, of course.

With a pinch of SEO magic applied, your article will start ranking in Google for some relevant search queries, and this will bring you consistent traffic that will not fade over time. But at this point you may actually argue with me.

Traffic from Google takes time to build up, while generating buzz on relevant communities and social media seems like a much faster way to bring people to your blog and grow your traffic numbers.

So on one hand we have viral traffic, the one that comes as a result of generating buzz on relevant communities and reaching out to influencers asking for support. And on the other hand we have the “SEO traffic“, the one that comes as a result of putting effort into making your content rank high in Google.

So which strategy is easier and more effective?

First of all, I have to mention that these are actually two extreme cases, which in reality don’t exist one without another exists. I mean there’s no way to consistently go viral and not get a single visitor from Google. As well as there’s no way to pull massive traffic from Google and not have a single person share your content on X (ex Twitter) or Facebook. But in order to prove my point, I will discuss them individually.

So here are the main challenges associated with each strategy. If you want to grow your blog with viral traffic, you have to be really good at creating content that will resonate with your target audience. It should resonate with them so much that they won’t be able to resist the urge to share it with others. That’s the challenge but virality doesn’t happen out of nowhere. You need to get support from influential people in your industry, who will promote your content to their huge audiences and kick start the viral effect.

Influential people are insanely hard to pitch, so that’s the second challenge. And finally, the goal of your blog is to consistently reach new people, who will become your new customers. So if you rely on viral spikes of traffic, you’ll have to regularly produce sticky viral content and regularly get support from industry influencers. Because if you stop publishing, your traffic will fade.

Now what are the challenges of growing your blog with SEO traffic that comes from Google? Well, your content still needs to be awesome. It doesn’t necessarily need to resonate with people that much, but it has to be insanely useful to them. Which is still a challenge, if you ask me.

However, the real challenge is to get backlinks to your piece of content. 

Backlinks are one of the key things that push you up in Google search results. And building backlinks is something that most people struggle with. But here’s something positive about SEO traffic. You don’t have to publish regularly! That’s because the traffic from Google doesn’t fade over time. Unless of course your competitors put in enough work to outrank you.

But I’m about to teach you how to make sure that it won’t happen. So that is my rough comparison of two blog growth strategies. I’m sure you’ve noticed that I’m favouring SEO traffic over viral traffic. Still, I do believe that viral traffic can be a worthwhile strategy for growing a blog.

Viral vs SEO Dilemma

For now, let me dive a bit deeper into “Viral vs. SEO” dilemma and explain where my strong bias towards the latter is coming from. First of all, most newbie bloggers have a wrong understanding of how viral traffic works.

Here is the picture that they have in their head: You publish an article and tweet it to your followers. Some of them like it and tweet it to their followers, some of their followers like it and tweet it to their followers. This goes on and on and because of this snowball effect your article goes viral and gets tons of traffic.

Right? Wrong!

Viral content actually spreads in a decay. Content only goes viral if exposed to a super-huge audience. In other words, someone with a huge X following has to tweet your article, so that thousands of his followers would retweet it to their followers. These two steps of the viral outburst bring the most traffic and visibility. And from there, there goes a rather quick decay in the amount of retweets and traffic.

The fact that an influencer has tweeted something, doesn’t mean that all his followers will pick it up and retweet it. Creating super-sticky content that everyone would want to share with others. And pitching the biggest influencers in your space to kick-start the viral effect. Both of these challenges are incredibly hard to crack. And that is why I am not a fan of chasing viral content.

What I love the most about SEO traffic, is that you don’t have to publish a lot of content, but still can get tons of traffic every single month. In fact, you can build your entire business around a single article.

Why force yourself to publish dozens of articles every month, when you can focus your efforts on creating just a few keystone articles, make them rank in Google and get a passive stream of prospective customers as a result.

Viral traffic is mostly a gamble.

You cannot know upfront if your article will take off or not. You can only guess. And if it does take off, you never know how much traffic this will bring you.

SEO traffic is predictable.

Regardless of the blog growth strategy that you choose to pursue, viral traffic, SEO traffic or a mixture of both, you need to retain people who land on your website. You need to grow your audience! 

I’m sure you’ve heard it a thousand times: “You have to grow your email list.”

“The money is on the list.” “Start growing your email list yesterday.”

Every professional marketer will tell you that you should be growing your email list. If you won’t convert a first-time visitor of your blog into an email subscriber, the chances are you will never see them again. This means you won’t be able to show them the next article that you publish. You won’t be able to pitch them the next product you release. 

As a result, this person won’t spread the word about your new content and new products to their friends.

Your audience is one of your biggest assets.

There are a lot of tactics and strategies that can help you grow your audience. There are some technical tricks, like popups, slide-ins, welcome mats, Hellobars content upgrades, and lead magnets. And there are some psychological tricks, like attractive character, social proof, personal stories, building rapport, etc.

Well, the best way to achieve that is by making your content rank well in Google so that it would bring you consistent targeted traffic every single month.

Well, I’m going to show you how to analyse the full traffic potential and ranking difficulty of a keyword that you want to target with your article. I’ll show you how to test your article ideas for the so-called “search demand” and how to determine their full traffic potential. The emphasis is on the word “full.”

Can you guess what is the biggest mistake that newbie bloggers make? They write articles about things that no one is searching for in Google. And actually, newbie bloggers are not the only ones guilty of that mistake. We see a lot of professional bloggers falling into that trap too.

Google is the single best way to get a consistent flow of new readers to your blog. 

You just have to blog about things that your potential readers are actually searching for in Google, so that they could find your articles and become the regular readers of your blog, and eventually buy from you.

Writing about things that no one is searching for almost guarantees that your blog will be a failure. 

You need to write about things that people are actually searching for in Google. And that is why keyword research is such an essential thing to master for any blogger or content marketer out there.

Most keyword tools take their search volume from Google’s own Keyword Planner tool, which shows you rounded annual averages. Which is not very precise, as you can tell.

Let’s understand this through an example. 

So, you’ve identified four promising keywords to target, and you’re curious about their potential in terms of search traffic. Like, the least popular among them: “authors like Terry Pratchett.” Now, according to keyword research data, this particular keyword garners only about 150 searches per month in the United States, with a similar volume globally.

It’s essential to understand that search volume figures, like the ones you see in various keyword research tools, are estimations based on data from sources like Google’s Keyword Planner, which provides rounded annual averages. Most of the keyword tools give estimates of search volume, they aren’t always precise.

Now, let’s delve into estimating potential traffic. Typically, the 1 ranking result in Google receives approximately 30% of all clicks, followed by 15% for the 2 spot, and 10% for 3. However, these percentages can vary depending on the specific search query.

Considering the search volume for “authors like Terry Pratchett” is 150 searches per month in the US, you might anticipate receiving 45 clicks if your page ranks 1, 22 clicks at 2, and 15 clicks at 3. These numbers may seem underwhelming at first glance, especially considering the effort required to craft a quality article on the topic.

But here’s where it gets interesting. While a keyword might have average search volume, the actual traffic your page receives can often exceed these estimates. Why? Because your page may rank for numerous related keywords, not just the primary one you targeted.

Moreover, let’s say your page ranks 2 for “authors like Terry Pratchett.” Upon closer inspection, you might discover that it also ranks for similar queries like “authors similar to Terry Pratchett” or “books like Terry Pratchett.” Each of these additional rankings contributes to your overall traffic.

This phenomenon underscores a crucial point: don’t solely rely on the search volume of a single keyword to gauge your article’s potential traffic. Instead, assess the total search traffic received by the top-ranking pages for that keyword. It’s a more accurate indicator of your article’s potential reach.

Furthermore, consider the content depth and quality. Pages offering comprehensive coverage of a topic often rank for more related keywords and consequently attract higher search traffic.

We can say that keyword search volume provides valuable insights, it’s just one piece of the puzzle. By analysing the broader search traffic landscape and prioritising content depth, you can better assess the true traffic potential of your chosen keywords.

Without any doubt, mastering keyword research is the key to unlocking untapped potential and driving massive traffic to your content. Below are some top measurements to choose the best keyword to target. 

Understand Your Audience

Begin by immersing yourself in the mindset of your target audience. Consider their interests, challenges, and the questions they may have related to your niche. By understanding their needs, you can identify potential topics that will resonate with them.

Conduct Keyword Research

Utilise a keyword research tool to explore the search volume and competition for the topics you brainstormed in the previous step. Look for keywords that have a reasonable search volume but aren’t overly competitive. This will ensure that you’re targeting topics with sufficient demand but still have the opportunity to rank well.

Analyse Search Results

Examine the search results for each keyword to gain insights into the types of content that perform well in your niche. Pay attention to factors such as content format (e.g., listicles, guides, reviews), length, and level of detail.  This analysis will help you understand what resonates with your target audience and guide your content creation strategy.

Identify Top Keywords

Identify the “top keywords” that drive the most traffic to the top-ranking pages for each topic. These keywords represent the most popular search queries related to your niche and can serve as valuable focal points for your content. By targeting these keywords, you can increase your chances of attracting high-quality traffic to your website.

Focus on Popular Search Queries

Prioritise topics and keywords that align with the popular search queries identified in step four. Tailor your content to address these specific search intents, providing valuable insights, solutions, or information that meets the needs of your audience.  Focusing on topics with proven search demand, you can maximise the impact of your content and attract more visitors to your website.

Well, understanding your audience, conducting thorough keyword research, and focusing on popular search queries, you can create content that resonates with your target audience and drives meaningful results for your business.

Analysing the search traffic potential of your article idea is a very simple and straightforward process. A much bigger challenge is to determine your chances to outrank the existing articles with your own one and get all this traffic to yourself.   As no one really knows for sure how exactly Google ranks pages in their search results. Google is using hundreds of different ranking factors, and they are mixing them depending on the search query.

Interestingly, a lot of people who are new to SEO, are often looking for some magic tool that will give them very specific recommendations on what they need to do in order to rank 1. Or even better a magic tool that will do it for them. But we are all afraid such a tool doesn’t exist.

For many years Google was pouring billions of dollars into building the most sophisticated search engine on the planet. So there’s no way for some third party tool to crack their algorithms and give you the power to effortlessly get your pages to the top. But what we can do is get clues from pages that already rank at the top of Google.

We can analyse them from different angles, compare them between each other and make assumptions on why certain pages outrank others. And there are only two sources of information for us:

1. It is The page itself, and
2. Links to that page from other websites.

Let’s just assume that all the top 10 ranking pages for your desired keyword are equally awesome. And your own page is no exception. The content of your page is 100% relevant to that search query. It helps searchers with whatever they were searching for. It loads fast and is optimised for mobile. It provides great user experience and it is visually appealing.

In the competitive world of online content, securing a top spot on Google’s search results is the holy grail for many website owners and marketers. But how does Google decide which pages deserve to rank higher than others? We’ll get into the intricate world of Google ranking factors, focusing specifically on the role of backlinks in determining a page’s position in search results.

Exploring Google’s Ranking Algorithm

Google’s ranking algorithm is a complex system that considers hundreds of different factors to determine the relevance and authority of a web page. While the exact details of the algorithm are closely guarded secrets, we do know that backlinks play a crucial role in determining a page’s ranking.

Understanding Backlinks

Backlinks also known as inbound links, are links from other websites that point to your own. Think of them as votes of confidence from other site owners, indicating to Google that your content is valuable and worthy of attention. 

The more backlinks you have from reputable and authoritative websites, the more credibility and authority your own site gains in the eyes of Google.

The Importance of Backlinks in Google Ranking

Research has shown that backlinks are one of the strongest factors influencing a page’s position in Google’s search results. Pages with a higher number of quality backlinks tend to rank higher than those with fewer or lower-quality links. This is because Google sees backlinks as a measure of a page’s popularity and relevance to a particular topic.

Determining Keyword Difficulty

In your quest to rank higher on Google, it’s essential to assess the keyword difficulty of your target keywords. This involves analysing the number and quality of backlinks to competing pages and evaluating their overall authority and relevance. 

Understanding the backlink profile of top-ranking pages, you can gauge the level of competition and devise a strategy to outperform them.

Backlinks are a vital component of Google’s ranking algorithm, signalling to search engines the relevance, authority, and popularity of a web page. Focusing on building quality backlinks and understanding their impact on search rankings, you can improve your chances of achieving higher visibility and driving organic traffic to your website.

To solve the common struggle of finding great content ideas for your blog will be our priority in the lesson. So that you will never have to worry about it again. We will discuss prioritising your list of content ideas, and decide which of them will have the highest impact on your business.

How to Discover Great Content Ideas

How to discover great content ideas by studying your niche regardless of the niche that your business falls into, be it business consulting, health care, insurance, photography or anything else. Indeed, tons of people are talking about it online. There might be forums or different online communities, where your ideal customers are hanging out. 

There might also be groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit or Slack and there might be some sites where people leave their Reviews about relevant products or services. In simple words, there’s no shortage of places online, where you can go and watch your target audience communicate and speak their mind. Even Reddit alone can supply you with enough content ideas to keep you busy for months.

There’s a subreddit for almost anything. You’re in the business of selling knives? No problem, let’s search for “knives”. We need to make sure that people are actually searching for these topics in Google, estimate the total search traffic potential, see if there’s a parent topic that we could target. And finally look at the number of linking websites among the top-ranking pages.

Guess how many content ideas you will find if you browse Reddit for like two hours? And Reddit is just one of the wide variety of places around the web where you can go and study what your target audience is talking about.

In fact, amazing content ideas can come from almost any source that is somehow related to your business!

Finding captivating content ideas for your blog can be a daunting task, leaving many content creators feeling stuck and uninspired. There are quite a few awesome keyword research tools that help you study what people are searching for in Google. 

Let me cover a few of the most popular keyword research tools and explain how they work.

AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic is a popular keyword research tool that taps into Google’s Auto Suggest feature to generate a list of relevant questions related to a given keyword or phrase. By entering a seed keyword, such as “cats,” users can access a wealth of insightful questions that people commonly search for on Google.

This tool leverages the Autosuggest feature to provide valuable keyword suggestions based on real-time search queries, making it a valuable resource for content marketers and SEO professionals alike.

Ubersuggest

Similar to AnswerThePublic, Ubersuggest utilises Google’s Auto Suggest feature to generate keyword suggestions based on a seed keyword. AnswerThePublic focuses on questions, Ubersuggest provides a broader range of keyword variations starting from the seed keyword. 

Although Ubersuggest lacks the focus on questions, it offers a comprehensive view of keyword variations, making it a versatile tool for keyword research.

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner, part of Google’s advertising platform AdWords, offers a wealth of keyword ideas for advertisers. While primarily designed for advertisers, Google Keyword Planner remains a valuable resource for content creators seeking keyword inspiration.

Despite limitations such as obscured search volume data and keyword ranges, Google Keyword Planner provides valuable insights into keyword trends and search volume.

Ahrefs

Keywords Explorer by Ahrefs is a robust keyword research tool that boasts a database of 4.6 billion search queries, powered by clickstream data. By entering a seed keyword, users can access a vast array of keyword suggestions, enabling them to uncover hidden opportunities and untapped niches.

With advanced features such as keyword difficulty analysis, Keywords Explorer empowers content creators to identify low-competition keywords with high traffic potential.

Keyword research is a crucial aspect of content creation and SEO strategy. Tools such as AnswerThePublic, Ubersuggest, Google Keyword Planner, and Keywords Explorer by Ahrefs, content creators can uncover valuable insights and identify high-impact keywords for your blog. 

Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or a novice blogger, mastering the art of keyword research will elevate your content strategy and drive organic traffic to your blog. 

So, roll up your sleeves, dive into the world of keyword research, and unlock the potential of your content.

Edmund Burke says, “He who wrestles with us, strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.”

This insightful quote by Edmund Burke resonates deeply with the essence of content marketing and blogging.

Analysing our competitors, identifying their top-performing content, and surpassing their achievements, we enhance our own strategies and elevate our performance. However, before embarking on this journey, it’s essential to acquaint ourselves with our rivals.

You may already have an idea of the websites competing for attention on Google’s search results. If not, simply input the keywords you’re targeting into Google and observe the contenders gracing the rankings. These are your organic search competitors.

Once you’ve identified your competitors, it’s time to go deeper into the tactics. Take, for example, the captivating website lovemeow.com. With a name too intriguing to ignore, it beckons us to explore its secrets.

A quick glance at Google’s search results for a keyword like “can cats eat dog food” unveils lovemeow.com as a formidable player in the arena. But our interest piques not just in their ranking but in their repertoire of search queries.

This is where Ahrefs’ Site Explorer comes into play. By entering lovemeow.com and navigating to the Organic Keywords report, we gain insights into all the search queries it ranks for. Yet, while informative, this data lacks actionable direction.

Enter the Top Pages report, our beacon of actionable intelligence. Here, the keywords are grouped by the ranking page, allowing us to discern which articles wield the most influence in driving traffic to the blog. Among them, an article titled “Why Does My Cat Stick His Tongue Out” stands out, drawing nearly 900 visitors from the United States alone.

The allure of this feature lies in its ability to swiftly unveil the best-performing pages of any competitor. Armed with this knowledge, we can cherry-pick the pages that yield maximum traffic while boasting minimal backlinks. But our journey doesn’t end here. With a mere click on the Competing Domains report, we unlock a treasure trove of further insights. We discover new adversaries like catster.com and delve into their top-performing pages. Surprisingly, some of these pages wield considerable traffic with minimal backlinks, presenting ripe opportunities for usurpation.

In the world of content creation, where every word is a weapon and every page a battleground, victory belongs to the bold and the strategic.

We have just shared with you a powerful method for researching your competitors’ content and uncovering valuable insights that you can apply to your own blog. But what if you could expand your research beyond individual competitors and explore the entire niche at once? That’s where Ahrefs’ Content Explorer tool comes in or you can use any other tool there is no such priority. Use what you like or understand easily.

With this tool, you gain access to a vast database of over 846 million pieces of content collected from across the web. Simply enter a keyword like “cats” into the search bar, and you’ll discover all the pages that mention this word in their content or title. Let’s stick with “cats” as our example. By filtering the results, we can narrow down our focus to pages that generate significant search traffic from Google. 

You can further refine your search to find pages with zero backlinks, indicating untapped potential.

In just a few clicks, we uncover articles like “The Best Flea Treatment for Cats for 2017” and “How to Calm a Cat in Heat,” each attracting thousands of monthly visitors from search without any backlinks. These are golden opportunities for creating valuable content that resonates with your audience.

Your website’s Domain Rating plays a crucial role in your ability to outrank competitors. While high-DR domains like Huffington Post may seem formidable, with strategic link-building efforts, you can improve your chances of ranking above them.

It’s important to note that the numbers you see in any Content Explorer (most tools have this function but with different names and with slightly different mechanisms) are periodically updated to ensure accuracy. Having these insights, you can fill your content calendar with high-quality, high-impact ideas that resonate with your audience and drive organic traffic to your blog.

We aimed to transform your blog into a customer acquisition channel, prioritising topics with significant business potential over those with high traffic potential. To illustrate this, consider HubSpot, a famous brand in digital marketing software. Despite their blog attracting almost 2 million monthly visits from Google, their top-performing article, “How to Make an Animated GIF in Photoshop,” may not directly contribute to their business goals.

On the other side, Ahrefs focuses on articles like “Keyword Research,” “Top Google Searches,” and “SEO Tips,” which may not gather as much traffic but effectively convert readers into customers. For instance, a reader who signed up for our free trial after reading our guide to long-tail keywords later became a paying customer.

It’s essential to recognize that search volume alone does not equate to business opportunity; understanding searchers’ intent is key. Queries indicating a clear buying intent, such as “best place to buy DSLR camera,” hold greater business value.  However, overlooking broader search queries with higher traffic potential may be unwarranted, especially if you can craft compelling content that persuades readers to take action.

Now, maintaining a balanced approach to assessing business value scores ensures that your content aligns with your overarching goals. Avoid investing resources in topics that may attract traffic but offer little relevance to your target audience or business objectives.

With this understanding, we hope you can generate content ideas that not only drive traffic but also contribute meaningfully to your business growth.

How to optimise your article for a target keyword and generate maximum search traffic with it. Let me begin with the question of what is searcher intent.

Searcher Intent

What is “searcher intent” and how to match it. In the previous lessons we have discussed that the biggest mistake that keeps bloggers away from getting search traffic is writing articles about things that no one is searching for. As soon as newbie bloggers learn about the keyword research and how to identify

the total search traffic potential of a certain topic, they start making their second biggest mistake: targeting the wrong keyword.

Way too often newbie bloggers would try to optimise their article for the keyword with the highest search volume, ignoring the fact that their article doesn’t really match the intent of the people who are searching for that keyword. And while they think they’re making a smart decision, they’re actually shooting themselves in the foot. How? 

Google is pretty smart at figuring out what people want when they search for something. And if your page doesn’t give them that, it won’t rank at the top. So, if you have a great article idea, but there’s not much search demand for that topic, don’t try to trick Google and optimise it for something that is not a broad topic with high search demand.

Remember, you should pick the most relevant search query, even if the search volume seems low. At least this way you get a good chance of actually ranking for that keyword and getting some highly-relevant search traffic.

Sometimes the searcher’s intent can be quite ambiguous. Like the keyword “violas”, it can be a musical instrument or a flower. And if you’re unsure about the right searcher intent for some query, the best thing you can do is put it into Google and see what comes up.

Google has invested years of work and billions of dollars into figuring out what people mean when they type something into the search bar. And they are actually quite good at it. For “violas” Google gives a mix of search results: some about the musical instrument and some about the flower. This means that the searcher intent for that keyword is actually two-fold. And there’s nothing you could do about it. So that is “searcher intent” in a nutshell.

Make sure you always check the search results for the keyword that you decide to target. If the pages that rank there are entirely different from what you were going to say, you probably misunderstood the searcher intent behind that keyword.

So you have a great keyword in mind, and you’re absolutely sure that you’re going to match the searcher’s intent with the article that you’re about to write. How do you optimise your article for that keyword?

If your article perfectly matches the searcher intent for that keyword and gives people exactly what they’re looking for, that is nearly 80% of all optimization work. Yes, Google is just a machine and it is not smart enough to actually read your article like a human being and understand why it is better than thousands of other articles on the same topic.

Squeezing your target keyword into your article more frequently than your competitors was a good way to trick Google 10 years ago, but not so much today.

Google has enough technology and enough ranking signals to be able to find the most relevant page for a certain search query without relying on how many times that keyword was used on a page.

In fact, Ahrefs has studied the top 10 ranking pages for 2 Million random search queries. 75% of all pages that ranked in Google top 10 don’t have even a single mention of the search query that they rank for anywhere on the page. This is why we suggest that by nailing the searcher intent with your content you automatically do 80% of all optimization work. Your article is likely to have enough synonyms and relevant words and phrases for Google to be able to understand what it is about.

So does that mean you should ignore any kind of keyword optimization and write as you please? Not at all. The rule of thumb is to use your target keyword, or at least the most important words of your keyword, in the following places: URL, title, headline, and contеnt.

Google allows you quite some flexibility in keyword targeting. That is why, by simply matching the searcher intent with the content of your article, you’re already making it 80% relevant to that search query. Because you are already using all the right words.

I’d say that further refining your URL, title, headline and content will probably move the needle by another 10%. This percentage is quite arbitrary, there’s 0 science behind it, but you get the idea. And I’m sure you want to learn about the final 10%.

Optimise Your Content to Rank for More Keywords

What we’ve just covered is how to optimise your article for a single keyword. But as you already know, it is rare that a page would rank in Google for a single keyword only. I mean, you cannot rank 1 for “how to tie a tie” and not rank anywhere in top 10 for something like “how to tie a tie tutorial.”

Take any search query and there would be hundreds, sometimes thousands, of other ways to put it. Google tends to rank pretty much the same pages for all these relevant search queries. Your page might be ranking poorly for that main keyword. But still get decent search traffic from all these variations.

Let’s examine the search results for the query “website traffic,” using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer tool. Our results are that Ahrefs Blog only ranks 5. But it still gets almost 6,000 visits from search according to Ahrefs. All because it ranks for over 600 other relevant keywords. And that’s in the US alone.

Let’s look at the global search traffic data via Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool. The total traffic to the page is almost 9,000 visits per month, with 63% coming from the United States and 10% from the United Kingdom. Pretty decent result, for an article that doesn’t rank in top 3 for it’s main keyword, right?

So let’s look at the keywords that are bringing it traffic from Google: “website traffic,” “check website traffic,” “website stats,” ‘website traffic estimator,” “website popularity.” “how to see how much traffic a website gets.” That’s a pretty wide rage of search queries that it ranks for. I mean, things like “website popularity” and “website traffic estimator” are not so closely related. Google decided that Ahrefs article is worth ranking for both of them.

The reasons are that they are practising what we preach and focus on creating great in-depth authority content, rather than filling it with hundreds of keywords. But who doesn’t want more traffic, right?

So here’s how we are going to optimise this article for maximum search traffic:

1. We need to study the keywords that we already rank for and make sure that we mention them in our article.

2. They need to study the keywords that competing pages rank for, but our page doesn’t. To do that, a Content Gap tool that can be found within Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.

3. We need to study other popular searches, relevant to our main search query. For that purpose you can have quite a few reports in Keywords Explorer, under the Keyword ideas section. And you can also use Google Keyword Planner tool, which will suggest quite a few interesting keywords to consider.

The goal here is to study the things that people are searching for, related to your main topic and try to expand your article based on that knowledge. This is how you should be writing your articles in the first place. Study what people are searching for and create an outline for your article, based on these searches.

This will help your future article to rank for all these searches and get maximum search traffic from Google. This is probably the best advice that I can give you, in terms of optimising your article for Google. Knowing what people search for around a specific topic will help you create an amazingly useful article for these people.

You must be keen to pick a new topic and write an amazing new article for your blog, right? If you’re looking for a quick win, the best thing you can do is audit the content that you already have on your blog. And here’s why.

Firstly, your published articles may already have some backlinks, which signals to Google that they are cool and deserve to rank. The new article has to be promoted in order to get some websites to link to it.

Secondly, your competitors most likely don’t bother updating their content. So if the top-ranking articles for your target keyword seem outdated, you can often outrank them by making your article up-to-date and re-publishing it as if it was brand new. 

Google will usually reward fresh content with higher rankings.

Your past articles might be simply targeting the wrong keyword, and therefore not bringing you any traffic. Figuring out the right searcher intent and re-optimizing your article for the right keyword can do wonders to your search traffic.

So here’s how you audit your existing content. Go through every published article that you have on your blog and assign it to one of the three following groups.

Update

These are the articles that already bring you some nice traffic from search. Even your best-performing articles can be updated and improved. Most bloggers never bother improving their top- performing articles, and that’s a huge mistake. Because the guys who rank below you are most likely working hard to outrank you.

Merge

It doesn’t make much sense to have multiple articles on the same topic. It’s always better to have one great in-depth article other than five mediocre ones. Especially, if those duplicate articles have some backlinks. You can use 301 redirects to point these backlinks to your main article on that topic and help it rank better.

Delete

This group is optional. Some people believe that getting rid of your underperforming content makes Google love your website more. I cannot prove or disprove that statement, but if I were in charge of Google, I’d definitely use something along these lines as a ranking signal.

I’m sure you have many great articles on your blog that could be further improved. Do it and you’ll see a nice traffic boost in the next few weeks. And then you can go ahead and publish some new amazing articles, using all the tactics and strategies that you’ve learned so far in this free business blogging course.

You’ve probably heard people saying create great content over and over again. And you know what? They’re right!

The stuff you put on your blog makes a huge difference in how well it does. That’s why it’s more important to focus on making really great content. If you want all the time and effort you spend on things like finding the right keywords, getting backlinks, and promoting your content to pay off, you’ve got to start with killer content.

Why Your Blog Content has to be Great

The first question that arises is why your content has to be great. Well, we have already gave you a ton of great tips on keyword research and how to discover great topics to write about on your blog. But here we are about to teach you how to promote your content and how to build backlinks to your content, so that it would rank high in Google and bring you passive search traffic every single month.

But wait! There’s something in-between, which is insanely important for your blog’s success. And that is creating great content. The quality of your content predetermines the very success of your blog. If your content is low-quality, all the promotion and link building tactics that I’m about to share with you won’t work.

As well as the other way around – if your content is top-notch, you’ll have to work a lot less promoting it. The word of mouth will do the job for you.

Great content promotes itself. While low-quality content is awfully hard to promote. Marketers called it the “Publish & Pray” approach and it won’t get you very far. This approach refers to the practice of creating and publishing content without a clear strategy or plan for promotion, and then hoping that it will magically attract attention and engagement.

Moreover, we do recommend you to be active everywhere, where your target audience is hanging out. And promote your content to these people, whenever you get a chance. So instead of spending your time looking for “secret” marketing tactics that will help you to hijack these communities, you should instead put all this time into making your content as awesome as possible! Because this is the single best way to conquer any audience and turn them into your fans.

Your goal is to make your content so awesome, that anyone reading it would want to share it with someone else. So before you start promoting your new piece of content, please make sure that it deserves to be promoted in the first place.

While preparing for this very course we will advise you to “create great content.” What does it mean to “create great content?” Well, there are a few ingredients that will make your content great and they are: Quality, Uniqueness, and Authority.

Let me expand on each of them one by one.

Quality

Honestly, there’s no shortage of advice on how to improve the quality of your content. So I’ll just do a brief recap of the things that I’m sure you’re already well familiar with. Here they are:

Learn to Write Well

Writing is a skill that almost anyone can learn and master. At first your writing will be very clumsy and tough to read, but after some learning and practice people will start enjoying your articles. Luckily, there’s no shortage of advice on the topic of how to improve your writing. Just start learning and practising as soon as possible.

Now, the next thing you do to ramp up the quality of your content is improve how it looks. It is a well studied fact that most people will skim through the article before reading it, which will help them to evaluate if it is worth reading at all. And if your article doesn’t look good, people are unlikely to risk their time reading it.

Here are the things that make your content visually appealing.

The Design of Your Blog

Quality images, short paragraphs, subheadings, quotes, lists, and all sorts of formatting tricks. All these things make your article pleasing to a human eye and transmit a message to your blog visitors.  Also, the author of the article invested quite some time to ensure a pleasant reading experience. The last, but not the least.

Write an Eye-Catchy Headline

You need to write an eye-catchy headline. Headline is the only bit of your entire article that people will see on X, Facebook, Google and on the homepage of your blog. Which means you only have about a dozen words to persuade people that your article is worth their attention.

Writing headlines that lure people into your article is both art and science.

There are many ready-made headline templates that you can try using, as well as many psychological tricks that will educate you to create your own attention-grabbing headlines. Make sure to brainstorm at least five different headlines for every article you write. If you won’t invest the time and effort into coming up with just five headline variations to choose from, your entire article is almost guaranteed to flop, no matter how good it is.

Andrew Chen says, “Titles are often written as a vague pre-thought, but in fact, it’s the most important creative decision you’ll make.“

All these things are just a proxy to the actual idea behind your article. Which brings us to the second ingredient of great content: Uniqueness.

Uniqueness

Many people research everything that has already been published on that topic and then try to squeeze it all into a single article of theirs. But this way you’re only creating a clone of existing content and not adding any extra value. And if it’s a clone, it doesn’t deserve more attention than the original.

So with this approach you’re immediately putting yourself one step behind your competition. If you want to stand out with your content – it has to be unique.

So how to create unique content?

Well, you still have to research everything that has already been published on the topic. But then you don’t create a clone. You create something that would be different from what’s already there. Ideally you want to say something that hasn’t been said before. Which is rather hard to do, as it requires you to be at the very forefront of your industry. These people are called thought leaders.

Another option is to find a new angle, which would be somewhat different from the conventional opinion on that topic. Ideally you’d want to turn 180 degrees and challenge the status quo – this often generates a lot of buzz. But only if you have good arguments to make your point.

Eventually, if the above is not an option, you might simply try to explain that topic better. You might not be the thought leader of your industry, but you might be a great writer, teacher, and storyteller.

If you invest enough time into finding better arguments, better proof and better examples, you do have a chance to outperform the original piece on that subject. And now, here goes the last ingredient of great content: Authority.

Authority

In order to say something entirely new and unique, you have to be at the very forefront of your industry. You have to be an authority in your niche. If you’re not the best person to talk about a certain subject, find “hacking” authority that writers have been using for ages and interview them. That’s how you “hack” authority.

But I’m sure that whatever industry you’re in, there are many high-profile people who are easily accessible. Think about journalists. This is one of the core duties of their profession to find credible sources and use them in their writing. If you want to create great content, you need to be a journalist.

Write Unique Blog Content That Makes an Impact

If you will write about things that cannot be found elsewhere, your blog is almost guaranteed to be a success. But where do you find these unique things to blog about? It can be data that your company produces, insights you have because of your industry experience, or stories about the people you have access to. 

Let’s focus on that last sentence. You can craft unique content from: The data that your company produces, insights you have because of your industry experience, and stories of the people you have access to. Anyone can collect some unique data about their industry. Anyone can come up with unique insights related to their industry. Anyone can connect with industry experts and get a bit of help from them.

So I could easily write a cool article based on my own experience in guest blogging. But why would people listen to some random blogger with 0 credibility, right? As we’ve just discussed, people want to learn from authorities.

Majority of people are too lazy to take risks. But risk is no doubt a good thing! The more steps you take towards making your content awesome and unique, the less competition you’re going to encounter. 

Google’s Andrey Lipattsev has disclosed that backlinks rank among Google’s top 3 ranking signals.  Most SEO professionals concur that achieving Google rankings without any backlinks is highly improbable. 

Various SEO research studies have consistently demonstrated a significant correlation between the quantity of backlinks directed to a page and its position in Google search results.

Do you always need backlinks to rank? 

This is a tricky question to answer. The majority of SEO professionals agree that it’s not possible to rank in Google without any backlinks. There were quite a few SEO research studies that showed a rather notable correlation between the number of backlinks pointing to a page and the position of that page in Google search results.

You know even the usage of an exact match keyword in title, headline or even actual content of that page had a weaker correlation. So, it seems that everything is in favour of backlinks, right? Well, most SEOs think that you can rank in Google without any backlinks. Can you rank in Google without backlinks? This is not a “Yes or No” question. The only correct answer here is “it depends.”

There are three things in place which allow these pages to get a ton of search traffic without any backlinks pointing at them. First of all, there’s simply a lack of competition.

Quality relevant page has a good chance at ranking for a keyword even without any backlinks. Mostly, ranking results have high Domain Rating. It stands for Domain Rating and reflects the strength of the overall backlink profile of each website.

For your page to rank in Google without backlinks, three requirements should be met:

• There should be a lack of pages on that topic in Google.
• The top 10 ranking pages for that keyword should have 0 backlinks pointing at them.
• The Domain Rating of your website should be higher or at least comparable to the Domain Rating of the top ranking websites.

Obviously, I’m oversimplifying things quite a bit, but you get the general idea, right? And in fact, it almost never happens that a popular search query with good business potential would meet all three of these requirements.

So in the absolute majority of cases you will need backlinks pointing directly at your page, in order for it to rank high in Google. And in case you decide to target some “unpopular” topic where the top-ranking pages don’t have any backlinks pointing at them, you still need a decent Domain Rating. This indicates that your website has accumulated enough of the so-called “link juice” that can be transferred to other pages via internal links. And the natural question that comes up at this point is:

How do I grow the Domain Rating or Domain Authority of my website, so that the pages that don’t have backlinks would still rank well in Google and generate search traffic?

Well, all you need to do is create content that will attract a lot of backlinks so that you could then funnel the “link juice” from these pages to the pages that you struggle to get links to via internal links. In SEO we call this kind of content “linkable content,” or “linkbait,” or “link-worthy pages,” or “linkable assets.”

All these terms mean more or less the same.

Write Content That Attracts Backlinks

Great content promotes itself, while low-quality content will always flop, no matter how hard you promote it. Well, great content also tends to attract a lot of backlinks.

Great content doesn’t always attract backlinks. There are a few more requirements that need to be met. Linking is just a form of sharing. But just because a piece of content is “great”, this doesn’t necessarily mean you will share it with others.  In order to link to a piece of content, you have to own some kind of web property where you can link from. Which the vast majority of people don’t have. This is why link acquisition is a hard nut to crack. If you want your article to attract backlinks, you need to make your readers want to share it with others.

Now, there has been a ton of research along the lines of how word of mouth works and what makes people want to share something with their social circles. Generally, the things that people enjoy sharing will fall into one of the four categories: Emotion, Utility, Numbers, and Stories.

The first group is about content that will spark an emotion in you. For example, news will often take us by surprise, make us angry or make us upset. In very rare cases, it may also cheer us up. And once you feel that emotion, you naturally want to share it with others. Humans are social creatures and we tend to pass our emotions on to each other, rather than keeping them inside.

The second group is all about utility. If we discover something particularly useful, we’ll be inclined to share it with others. This is a way to earn the so-called “social currency.” If you provide value to the society by helping them solve their problems, the society will love you back.

The third group is all about numbers. Numbers help us make a point and add credibility to what we say. That’s why we like to reference research to solidify our argument.

And finally, stories. We love stories because they’re easy to relate to. It’s one thing to read some general advice on how to lose weight. But it’s a totally different thing to read a real story of how someone has lost weight, and learn from their first-hand experience.

So these are the four general types of content that people like to share and some basic psychology behind them.

All you need to do is analyse competitors’ content and find out what brought them the most backlinks. Also, if you want your content to get links, you need to get some eyeballs on it first. Because people cannot link to things that they don’t know exist! 

Even link-worthy articles require a ton of promotion in order to get links.

Secret to Acquiring Bundles of Backlinks

The definition of natural backlink may vary from person to person, we can say that a backlink can be called “natural” if you didn’t make any effort to connect with the linking website or any person associated with it.

Let’s say you sent someone a personal outreach email with a heads up about your article. You didn’t ask for a link directly, but they have linked to your article anyways. You made a targeted effort towards acquiring a link from that specific website so that link is considered manually built.

Suppose you posted your newly published article, and one of your social media followers linked to it from their website. In that case, it is a perfectly natural link. This time you didn’t direct your efforts towards that specific person and their specific website. This was a broadcast message to your entire social media following. Within this simple story lies the “secret” to link acquisition. 

You can get bundles of natural backlinks by publishing your content to a big audience of your fans. The more money we pour into our ads, the more people we’re going to reach.

If your article is link-worthy, some of these people will naturally link to it. Most people don’t have a big audience of fans or any budget for content promotion.

So if you’re only starting out with your blog, I have some bad news for you. Start building your audience as soon as possible. The sooner you build a large audience of people who you can easily reach with your newly published content, the sooner you can let go of all of those tedious link building tactics.

When you’re promoting your content, what’s your main goal? For most people, it’s all about getting as many people as possible to read their new article. They feel good when they beat their old traffic records. But here’s the thing: aiming for a traffic spike is a short-term win. It’s like a burst of excitement that quickly fades away.

If you want your blog to really grow, you’ve got to aim for steady, consistent traffic. The best way to get that is by ranking high on Google.

Four Common Content Promotion Mistakes

If you want your blog to grow then you need to focus your efforts on building passive consistent traffic. Which you get by pushing your articles to the top of Google search results.

The primary goal of content promotion should be to build quality backlinks to your content, so that it will start ranking in Google. And this brings us to the first mistake of content promotion.

Mistake 1: Focusing on Short-Term Traffic over Backlinks

Generating traffic basically equals acquiring backlinks. So, the thing is this equation is only true for big and established blogs and won’t really work for those who are just starting out. Let me give you three reasons why.

Reason 1: Only a tiny percentage of all your visitors will link to you. From my personal experience, acquiring one natural backlink for every thousand visitors

is a pretty good result.

Reason 2: People tend to link to websites that they know and trust. This explains why Wikipedia has a ridiculous amount of backlinks and their articles are super-hard to outrank. Most people would prefer to link to a Wikipedia article over a similar post on a blog that they’ve never heard of before.

No one wants to risk sending their readers to some questionable website. That’s why brand new blogs struggle to acquire links naturally. 

Reason 3: Most people don’t have a website to link from which makes natural link acquisition nearly impossible. So, turning traffic into natural backlinks is the kind of luxury that is only available to well-known established websites and the success largely depends on the type of industry you’re in.

If you’re not in the fortunate position of being a well-known and established website, I’m afraid you’ll have to manually build your backlinks, rather than wait for them to come naturally.

Mistake 2: Giving up Content Promotion too Early

Most bloggers have a so-called “content promotion checklist” that they reference when promoting every new article that they publish. Send a newsletter to email subscribers. Post on social networks (X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc). Submit to Reddit and any relevant forums and communities. Reach out to everyone, who was mentioned in the article, etc.

Some bloggers have more items on their checklist than others. But as soon as that list is completed, they forget about that article and move to a new one. And that is a big mistake!

You should not quit promoting your article just because you’re out of the items in your content promotion checklist, no matter how big that list is. Your goal is to rank high in Google and get passive search traffic to your article. 

So your content promotion should not stop until you reach that goal.

There’s a rather famous piece of advice, which suggests that you should put 20% of your efforts into creating content and 80% of your efforts into promoting it.  Creating an absolutely outstanding piece of content that your readers will love, and promoting it super-hard and not quitting until it reaches the top positions in Google. So why don’t you do a bit of research and throw a few more items into your content promotion checklist?

Luckily, there’s no shortage of different tactics that you can use, just Google around a bit and you’ll find a ton of ideas. Publish a guest post that references that article and make people want to check it out.

What stops you from publishing more and more guest posts that each link to your article, thus helping it to crawl up the Google rankings. Same with outreach, it scales rather well and it’s a great way to get quality backlinks.

Mistake 3: Abandoning Your Old Content

Let’s draw a scenario. A year ago you published a great article. You promoted it a lot and got some nice backlinks that helped it to rank in Google top 5 for its main keyword. Ranking in top 5 is a very good result, so you decided that your job here is done and moved on to creating new content, never bothering to revisit that article again.

The question is why would you settle with any Google position but the very first one? If that article brings customers to your business, you want it to get as much relevant search traffic as possible, right? And besides, if the search query that you’re targeting has some good business value, you can be sure that sooner or later your competitors will try to outrank you with their own articles.

Abandoning your old content is not a good omen. But what are your options? You cannot just keep promoting the same article with the same content promotion strategies, because you’re only going to irritate people this way. Well, there’s a loophole that you can use.

After your article has been live for a few months, you should revisit it and find ways to make it better. And once you update your article – you can re-promote it again with the same content promotion strategies as if it was brand new.

And there’s one last content promotion mistake left to discuss.

Mistake 4: Not Spending Money on Content Promotion.

You should keep a decent advertising budget for every article that you publish at your blog. This will allow you to reach a huge number of people that you wouldn’t be able to reach otherwise. Most bloggers can’t afford to spend money on content promotion. Well, in psychology they call this a Limiting Belief.

Limiting Belief

The truth is – you can afford to spend money on content promotion. You just fail to justify it. So let me try to help you with that. I have two good arguments that should do the job.

Argument 1: The “free content promotion methods” are not free. So how much time does it take you to promote a new piece of content? One hour? Five hours? Ten? And your time is worth something, right?

So why don’t you multiply your estimated hourly rate by the time it took you to complete all items in your content promotion checklist? This way you’re going to get the cost of what you think are your “free” content promotion methods. And now that you know the price tag, why don’t you add 10% to that sum and use that money to run a Facebook ads campaign?

Think of it as an additional item in your “free content promotion methods” checklist, but this time you’re paying with your money instead of paying with your time. And you might actually discover that putting your money into Facebook ads has a much better ROI than putting your time into some of these other free strategies.

Argument 2: Your content should sell your product. The best way to justify spending money on content promotion is by getting this money back in the form of sales or customers. If an article doesn’t bring new customers to your business. I can understand why you don’t want to spend money on it. But why did you spend your time promoting it then?

In fact, if an article doesn’t help you to get new customers, why did you even create it in the first place? Do you see where I’m going with that? Paid content promotion is a litmus test for the business potential of your content.

It is very important to understand that there’s no tactic or strategy that will make an awful piece of content popular. The quality of your content always comes first! And secondly, if your content is objectively awesome, it will promote itself.  Most content promotion strategies can be organised in just six categories. Reaching your existing audience, reaching relevant communities, content repurposing and syndication, guest blogging, outreach and paid promotion.

Let’s discuss them one by one.

1. Reaching Your Existing Audience

Generally, you do that by sending an email newsletter to your blog subscribers and posting a link to your newly published article on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and any other social network where you have some following. But if you’re only starting out, your email list is super-small and you don’t have a lot of followers on these social networks. Which means you cannot expect any traffic and backlinks to magically appear out of nowhere.

So it does make sense to start building your audience as early as you can!

If you invest time and effort into building your email list and your social following, they will later become your most effective content promotion methods.

2. Reaching Relevant Communities

You can do that by submitting your article to relevant groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. You can also submit it to a proper subreddit or any other relevant forums. And finally, there’s a new trend for creating slack channels in different industries. So you can join those and plug your articles there.

The thing is most of these communities hate self promotion. You might get away with mentioning your article once or twice. But if you overdo it, you’ll almost certainly be banned. So instead of joining a hundred communities with a single goal to spam them with your content, pick 5 to 10 of the very best ones and become an active member there.

Once the moderators notice that you consistently provide value to the community, they will pretend they don’t notice that you plug your own articles now and then. And besides, if you make enough friends within each community, they will start plugging your articles into conversations without you having to do that yourself.

3. Content Repurposing and Syndication

It’s not too hard to repurpose your content into different formats (audio, video, slides, images, etc) and then submit it to appropriate platforms. Even if no one will ever find your content there, you still get a bunch of nice backlinks to your article. And besides, if the original content is awesome, why should the repurposed version be doomed to oblivion?

You might also consider repurposing the best articles from your blog into a podcast. In other words, you should try a few of these formats and see what works best for you.

4. Guest Blogging

Well, it is one of the best ways to get high-quality backlinks and sometimes even a bit of nice referral traffic to your blog. Most bloggers hate to see comments with links, but if the comment is genuine and the article you’re referencing is awesome – they might let it slide. 

Other than that, you can also try to get cited by journalists. There’s a nice service for that, called Help A Reporter Out or HARO.

Finally, if you have already achieved some notable results in your industry you can try pitching yourself to podcasts and interviews. Which often leads to quality links and referral traffic with little time-commitment.

5. Outreach

The outreach strategy is always great. If you don’t have outreach in your content promotion checklist, you’re seriously missing out. The basic rule of thumb is to send personal heads up to everyone who was mentioned or referenced in your article. But don’t ask them for links or tweets, it’s your content that should be the motivator, not you. An entirely different strategy is to reach out to everyone who has linked to similar content. Or who has mentioned similar topics in their own articles.

These are very powerful outreach methods, which deserve special attention. So the last lesson of this course is fully dedicated to outreach. And we have one last group left.

6. Paid Promotion.

Paid promotion is an absolute must if you consider your blog a business tool, not a hobby. Almost every major social network has their own Ad platform – Facebook, X, Linkedin, Pinterest, you name it. We’re sure you’re also well aware of Google’s own advertising options. These things are quite obvious. A somewhat uncommon advertising option is a paid email newsletter.

I hope that now you have a much clearer picture of how to promote your next piece of content. Or re-launch the old one.

So I’m going to share a few of the most effective ways one could build links to their blog articles. Popular blogs tend to get natural backlinks simply by broadcasting their content to a large audience of fans and expecting some of them to link to it. The pages that rank high in Google tend to get natural backlinks on autopilot.

If you’re just starting out, you should not wait for links to come naturally. You have to manually build them. Which you can do with these four strategies:

Leaving Comments

Replicating your competitors’ backlinks, Guest blogging and outreach. You’re probably rolling your eyes right now. I do actually think that this is a great strategy to kickstart your link building efforts and help spread the word about your content. Notice that I didn’t say “blog comments” but comments in general. That’s because blogs aren’t the only place where you can leave comments with links to your articles.

We also have niche forums, online communities, Q&A sites, and even YouTube videos. For example, in our own niche (which is SEO) Reddit and Quora are rather popular places where people exchange opinions and link to relevant content.

I have quite a solid comment history on both of these sites, so you know I’m advocating something that I’m actually doing myself. Reddit hates spammers and if you only post there to drop links – you’re going to get banned. But if you take time to consistently provide value to the community, no one will have a problem with you linking to your own content now and then.

Quora is a bit different in that sense. But that’s not because Quora is suffering from a lack of moderation. They’re very strict with spammers too. Do my comments on Quora look like spam? Each one is unique, well formatted and above all provides a ton of value to the conversation, before asking readers to click on my link for some extra details.

So I highly recommend that you find a few popular communities in your own niche and start actively engaging in them. But what if you struggle to find any relevant online communities in your niche? Well, you can still leave comments on blog articles? 

As a fellow blogger, I’m sure you know how great it is to get smart insightful comments on something you just published. But on the other hand, no one wants to get comments from people who’re only looking to promote their own stuff.

So my advice for leaving comments on relevant blogs in your industry is not much different from what I just said about community sites, it only works if you add the actual value to the conversation.

Now it’s time to acknowledge the elephant in the room. In 99% of cases the comments that you will post online will have nofollow links. And since the nofollow attribute means that the link doesn’t pass any SEO value to your website, why even bother?

Quora

So did these links from my Quora answers help my articles to rank better in Google? I don’t think so. But did my comments on Quora help me reach a lot of people with my content, convert them into fans, and get some natural links from them afterwards? Absolutely!

Leaving comments on relevant blogs has a ton of side benefits too! But there’s more. In other words, one simple comment with a nofollow link sets off a chain reaction of valuable events, referral traffic from a blog comment, a tweet from the blog owner, a dofollow link from that blog; some more referral traffic from that link, etc.

I hope that was a vivid enough example to persuade you that leaving comments online is not some kind of spammy old-school way to promote your content, which does more harm than good. But leaving comments is the best way to kickstart your link building efforts, put your name out there and start making valuable connections with prominent people in your niche. But make sure you go after quality, not quantity.

Backlink Ideas from Your Competitors

Well, analysing your competitors’ backlink profiles can lead to a goldmine of link building opportunities, which you wouldn’t otherwise be able to discover. But some competitors have tens of thousands of backlinks.

So there’s no way you can review them all manually and it would take too long. For example, here at Ahrefs one of the blogs we compete with for search traffic is Brian Dean’s backlinko.com. We have quite an overlap in the keywords that we’re targeting with our articles, so it would make sense for us to learn which websites link to backlinko.com so that we could pitch our own content to them.

But if we put backlinko.com in Site Explorer, we’ll see that over 11,000 websites are linking to it. That’s a lot of backlinks and we certainly don’t have time to manually review all of them. How to analyse big backlink profiles of your competitors without going crazy? Well, let me show you three great strategies that will help you to quickly make sense of such a large dataset.

Strategy 1. Find their Superfans

If someone is so eager to link to the content of your competitor, they might be interested in your content too. So how do you find these superfans? You could try going to Referring domains report, filtering by dofollow links only and then sorting the results by the number of dofollow links from a domain. The web is full of trash, you’re very likely to see a ton of very strange websites there which don’t look like websites where you would care to be featured.

Go to the Best by links report and set the HTTP code filter to 200. This will give you a list of the pages on your competitors’ website that have generated the most backlinks.

Strategy 2. Find the Power Linkers

I’ve just demonstrated how to leverage the Link Intersect tool in any SEO tool like Ahrefs to uncover potential link-building opportunities by identifying websites that consistently link to your competitors but not to your own blog. But there’s another ingenious way to utilise this tool.

Consider inputting five prominent blogs in your industry into the tool to uncover websites that have linked to all five competitors but have overlooked linking to your blog. Reaching out to these website owners with personalised outreach emails, introducing them to our blog, many are likely to reciprocate with backlinks. We’ve seen this approach yield positive results through our regular outreach efforts. Once you’ve exhausted the opportunities from this list, you can repeat the process with another set of competitors or explore further by adjusting the tool settings.

The Link Intersect tool in many SEO tools empowers you to discover numerous link-building opportunities with just a few hours of dedicated effort. And there’s one more competitor research strategy we haven’t discussed yet.

Strategy 3. Analyse their Latest Backlinks

While taking action on the previous two strategies you should always pay attention to the date when each of the linking websites was last updated. Chances are many of the websites who are linking to your competitors probably did so quite a long time ago, but they’re not actively updating their website anymore. While there’s still a chance to persuade them to link to you, the likelihood drops rather significantly. So why don’t you look at the most recently acquired links of your competitors.

In many SEO tools, there’s a specific feature designed for this task, typically called “New Backlinks.”

The essence of mining valuable link opportunities by examining who links to your competitors. Spending just a few hours browsing through their latest backlinks can unearth enough opportunities to keep you occupied for weeks ahead.

Here’s a final tip: With any SEO tool, you can set up email alerts to notify you whenever your competitors acquire new backlinks. Simply navigate to the Alerts section, select the Backlinks tab, and click on New alert.

However, keep in mind that your competitors may be gaining hundreds of new backlinks to their blog every week, if not every day. To manage this influx of data, I recommend setting up alerts for specific individual articles from their blog that are of particular interest to you. For instance, focus on articles that are currently outranking your own in Google search results.

This targeted approach ensures that you receive email alerts only for new backlinks pointing directly to these selected articles, making the reports more insightful and actionable. Give it a try with a few top articles from your competitors and see the results for yourself.

Build Backlinks Via Advanced Guest Blogging Tactics

Let me teach you a few guest blogging tactics that someone might even call “advanced.” But let’s not forget about the very basics. The quality of your content always comes first. If your content is weak, even the smartest tactics and strategies won’t work for you. But if your content is top notch, you’ll get astounding results with little to no effort. So that aside, let’s address two of the most common challenges in guest blogging.

How to never run out of blogs to guest post for. And how to create more quality guest articles in less time.

Challenges in Guest Blogging

Most guides to guest blogging will suggest you to use advanced Google search operators for finding blogs to guest post for. Like your_topic “guest post,” your_topic “guest article,” your_topic “write for us,” your_topic inurl:submit, etc. And then you’re supposed to somehow scrape Google search results for all these search queries, save them into a spreadsheet, run de-duplication and maybe even pull some SEO metrics which would help you vet them. But frankly speaking, this is problematic. 

Here’s a quick and effective way to compile a vast list of potential guest blogging opportunities in just five minutes or less. Begin by accessing the Content Explorer tool and entering a relevant topic or keyword related to your industry. For instance, if you’re in the SEO field, keywords like “link building,” “keyword research,” “SEO audit,” or “anchor text” can be used.

Upon entering your chosen keyword, you’ll be presented with a bundle of pages mentioning that keyword. To streamline the process and focus specifically on blogs, enable the “One article per domain” setting. This filters out duplicate pages and ensures you’re left with unique websites to consider for guest posting.

To narrow down the results further, apply additional filters such as language preferences and Domain Rating (DR) range. For instance, if you’re more comfortable writing for moderately popular blogs, you can set the DR filter to a specific range, such as 30 to 50.

With these filters in place, you’ll have a curated list of potential guest blogging prospects that align with your preferences and expertise. If you require more options, simply adjust the filters accordingly or explore different seed keywords to expand your pool of opportunities.

Whether you stick to closely related keywords or venture into broader topics like “startup marketing,” “growth hacking,” or “website promotion,” the versatility of this approach ensures you’ll always have an abundance of blogs to explore for guest posting opportunities.

SO, by using Content Explorer of any SEO tool and experimenting with various seed keywords, you’ll have access to an extensive and ever-growing repository of blogs to enhance your guest blogging endeavours.

How Do You Know These Blogs Allow Guest Posts

If a blog doesn’t have a “Write for Us” page, or any other signs of guest posts being accepted, why not just email them and ask about it? If you have a compelling idea and your writing is of an exceptional quality, you might get accepted even by the blogs that don’t normally allow guest writers. Majority of people who pitch guest articles are only willing to invest 30 minutes-or-so to crank out something barely readable and hope it will land them a backlink.

But most bloggers are too polite to say “Your content is awful,” so instead they say “Sorry, but we don’t publish articles on our blog.”

Why Should I Publish Guest Articles?

Even if your content is top notch and you still get a “no,” well, it didn’t hurt to ask, right? Next time that might be a “yes”. And besides, even if you were turned down, you still put yourself on the radar of a prominent person in your industry. If you really want to publish your guest article on some popular blog in your niche, try to get the attention of the blog owner via smart insightful comments first, and only then reach out offering to write a post for them. It works almost every time.

Some other questions are: why should I publish articles at low-DR blogs? Doesn’t low-DR mean that a link from them has little value? Technically, from Google’s own perspective, you’re not getting a backlink from a domain. You’re getting a backlink from a specific page. That is just how their PageRank formula works.

It is possible that a highly popular website can have a ton of weak pages, while a small new website can have a few very strong ones. And besides, some of the small websites will eventually grow into big and popular ones, right?

So you shouldn’t shy away from guest writing for a blog, just because their DR is low. A better question to ask would be “Do I think this blog will still be around in 3 years from now?”

Is Guest Blogging Worth It?

The question in your mind is, is guest blogging worth it? If the answer is “yes,” go for it. If it’s “no,” leave it, because you clearly don’t want to spend time writing quality guest articles that will eventually disappear without a trace.

Obviously, you should aim to publish guest articles on the very best blogs in your industry. But if you pitched them a few times and got rejected, you’ll have to work your way up, writing for low-DR blogs in order to build your skill and portfolio of published articles. Up until the big guys will start to recognize you and let you write for them.

How to Create More Quality Guest Articles?

I’m sure you can easily come up with a great topic for a guest article. Maybe two, or three. But try to brainstorm at least 20 unique article ideas. Let me share two awesome techniques that will solve this headache for you.

The Splintering Technique

Well, why don’t you think of this big awesome article as a collection of smaller ones, like a piece of wood that can be broken into many splinters? You create a single awesome resource that would target a general topic, and then you break it into smaller “splinters” and submit each of them as a guest article on a different blog.  And which would link back to that big awesome resource and help it rank in Google. And the thing that I like the most about this technique, is that you can produce these splinters in little to no time. Because you did all the hard work educating yourself on that topic and all its aspects while writing that big awesome article for your own blog.

Go look at your past articles and see if you can find any potential splintering opportunities in them.

The Perspective Technique

Let’s say we used the Splintering technique to turn our link building guide into an awesome guest article about the future of link building. Does that mean that we cannot use this same topic again for writing another guest article? Of course we can! All we need to do is change the perspective slightly. We could talk about the future of link building for startups, ecommerce sites, small businesses, local businesses, non-profits, etc. I know these topics sound a bit clumsy, but you get the idea of how “The Perspective technique” works, right?

For every unique guest article idea that you have in your list it is possible to create a few nice variations, by changing the perspective slightly. Applying the Splintering technique and the Perspective technique just to our single guide to link building.

We could easily come up with nearly 20 unique guest article ideas in less than 20 minutes. These are the two good strategies to follow. But don’t limit yourself to these two only, google around a bit and you’ll find quite a few more great techniques that will help you brainstorm cool ideas for your guest articles.

Blog owners might not reply to your emails for days, or even weeks. You shouldn’t worry about this but you should factor that in. Your guest blogging should not suffer from these long wait times. And hence the first hack is to send more guest post pitches than you can handle. It’s always good to have more demand than supply.

Imagine dozens of bloggers queueing to get a guest article from you. This way you actually get to pick and choose which blogs you want to write for and which ones can wait. So come up with two or three awesome article ideas and pitch them to 10-15 blogs. Just don’t send all your pitches in one day. Send the first few and give them a few days to respond. Then send the next batch.

This way, if one blogger is slow to respond, just reply them with something like “Sorry, you weren’t responding for a few days, so this article idea was taken by another blog. But don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll be able to suggest something else for you that would be just as good. I’ll be in touch with more article ideas shortly.” This is how you create a queue of bloggers waiting for your guest articles.

Link to multiple articles from your guest post. This sounds like a no-brainer, but many people simply forget that they can do that. And no, I’m not talking about filling your guest article with links to your own stuff top to bottom. Make it relevant and make it natural. If the link doesn’t quite belong there, don’t try to squeeze it in.

These days most bloggers are very sensitive to any self-promotional links, so quite often they will only allow a single link to the homepage of your website coming from your author bio. So if you send them an article full of links to your website then this might get them pissed and they won’t publish anything at all. From my experience, you shouldn’t put more than two self promotional links in your guest article. But that largely depends on the blog owner.

Link to other guest posts of yours. This is a nice loophole for when the blog owner is hyper-sensitive to having you link to your own website. Linking to your other guest articles is good for two reasons:

Reason 1: According to Google’s PageRank formula, by linking to a page that links to your website you’re increasing the power of that link.

Reason 2: You can reach out to this other blog owner and let them know you just landed them a quality backlink. They will be super happy about this and they might return this favour sometime in future. This is a simple but very powerful hack.

Write guest articles for blogs that have never linked to you before. It is a well known fact that the number of unique domains that link to a page correlates well with the ranking position of that page in Google. Correlation is not causation but the experience of many thousands of SEO professionals confirms that the more unique websites you have linking to your page, the higher it usually ranks in Google.

So when building links via guest blogging it’s in your best interest to pitch blogs that have never linked to your website before.

Should you say “no” to every blog owner who gives you the opportunity to write another guest post for them? Well, as we just discussed, Google’s PageRank formula counts backlinks between pages, not websites. But clearly every subsequent link from the same website will have less value.

Otherwise it would be too easy to manipulate Google by creating just one website with a million pages that link to you.

You should only write a second or third guest article if it’s a really good blog. Or if you don’t have any better guest post opportunities at the moment but have a few finished articles that you need to publish somewhere.

Let me clarify that outreach is not a digital marketing strategy. 

Influencer marketing, guest blogging, broken link building, these are the strategies in digital marketing. And outreach is just a tool that you use in order to execute on them. If you want influencers to promote your content, you need to reach out to them. If you want bloggers to publish your guest articles, you need to reach out to them. 

As you know there’s no such thing as an “Ultimate Guide To Outreach.” It simply cannot exist because there’s just too many use cases to consider. We’re only going to focus on using outreach for spreading the word about your content and landing some high-quality backlinks along the way. And before I tackle the two common outreach issues where to find outreach prospects and what to say in your outreach emails.

I want to address three things that people often get wrong when promoting their content via outreach. And the first thing that many people fail to understand is that outreach is in fact content promotion.

Most people would conclude that their outreach has failed and would probably never bother doing it again, because “it doesn’t work.” But think about it, sending 100 emails with 80% open rate, you’re putting yourself on the radar of 80 awesome hand-picked people from your industry. 30% clickthrough rate means that 30 of these awesome people have actually visited your blog and read your content. And a 10% reply rate means that you’ve just made a connection with 10 awesome people from your industry.

Yes, you didn’t get any tweets or backlinks. But it would be WRONG to say that your outreach has failed, as long as your emails get opened, your links get clicked, and people reply to you. That’s why I said that outreach is content promotion.

Next, it brings us to the second thing that people often get wrong.

There’s a fine line between outreach and SPAM. Yes, if you send 10,000 emails in a week, or even in one month – that is SPAM. There’s no way to properly research this many people and send each one a personalised email in such a short timeframe.

So when I say reaching out to 10,000 people, I actually refer to a long term strategy that would be executed in the course of a year or maybe two. Which gives you enough time to do it right and not be a spammer.

Think of outreach and SPAM as two ends of one spectrum. This spectrum represents the amount of effort that you put into each individual email that you send. This includes finding the person you want to get in touch with, researching them, to make sure they’re a good fit, and obviously, writing a personalised outreach email to them.

On one end of this spectrum we have an auto- generated list of people which you never bothered to manually review. Also a generic outreach template which you copied from some popular “guide to outreach” and barely even customised. This approach is pretty much the definition of the word SPAM.

On the other end of this spectrum we have a small list of people who you took time to thoroughly research, which gives you the opportunity to write a unique and very personal outreach email to each of them. That is how outreach should be done in the ideal world. But in all honesty, both ends of this spectrum are nothing but extremes that you should stay away from.

Don’t send 10,000 nearly random people a generic email template especially if you care about your reputation in that industry. That would be the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot.

At the same time, you don’t need to spend weeks researching a handful of people and crafting the most perfect outreach emails possible. Just to realise they’re too busy right now for whatever you’re sending them.

The right approach is somewhere in the middle towards the “Ideal Outreach” end of the spectrum. Each industry is very different. I recommend that you experiment with the amount of effort that you put into each outreach email before deciding where on this spectrum is right for you to settle.

Perfect outreach doesn’t guarantee any results. 

A situation where you spend weeks thoroughly researching a handful of people and sending them the best outreach emails they have ever received. And then it turns out they’re too busy to reply. This is quite a common scenario.

If you tried outreach before, I’m sure you will agree with me on that. And the reason why it happens is painfully obvious. Your “perfect outreach email” may flop due to a hundred different reasons that you’re not even in control of. 

What time of the day the person will see your email. Will they open it on their mobile phone or desktop computer? Are they in a good mood? Is their schedule full right now? How many other emails they have received today. 

So perfect outreach doesn’t guarantee any results.

You need to mentally prepare yourself for this and not get discouraged when people don’t reply to your emails. Also, do experiments with your email subject. If you’re using a generic email subject like “something you might like,” don’t expect people to open it. You should create subject lines that would somehow reflect your outreach excuse.

Now, if your clicks rate is low, invest more time into vetting your outreach prospects. It can be that you’re simply reaching out to the wrong people, or they are no longer interested in that topic. Or make sure to clearly specify what’s so unique and awesome about your article that would make them want to click the link and check it out.

Lastly, if your Reply rate is low, make sure you ask for their feedback.

A simple request like “Let me know your thoughts” actually works quite well in terms of getting replies. Also make sure you’re not asking for a favour. Most people prefer to not reply to emails because they don’t want to say “no.”

As you know, these tips are mostly based on common sense and might even seem obvious.

How to build links and promote content via blogger outreach? I placed “build links” first in this question so that to remind you that this is the primary goal of your outreach efforts.

As for promoting content, it’s a natural byproduct of your outreach efforts rather than the primary goal. So who should you reach out to? Who are the people that are likely to link to your piece of content?

How about the people who have already linked to existing articles on the same topic. How about the people who have already published articles mentioning that topic. Do I even need to explain why these two groups of people are the perfect outreach targets? They clearly have websites to link from and they clearly have a certain interest in your topic.

Now, let me show you how to easily find these people. If these people have previously linked to some other articles on the same topic, they might as well link to your articles too. That is of course if your article is somehow better than the one they’re already linking to, or offers a unique perspective. Otherwise they just won’t care.

So how do you find people who have linked to similar content? Well, the best place to start is of course by doing a few Google searches for the topic that you want to rank for with your article, see who ranks at the top, and then look up who’s linking to them.

The question is how do you actually persuade all these people to link to your article when they’re already linking to your competitors?

People who published articles mentioning your topic. Being a blogger yourself, you’re hardly excited when people reach out to you about the articles that you wrote months ago. But when you publish a new article and people reach out about it within days or even hours, you’re very open to a conversation, right? That’s why it is so important to use all sorts of alerts in your marketing. Use alerts in your marketing and act on new outreach opportunities as soon as they land in your inbox.

So we have just covered two groups of people: those who have linked to similar articles and those who have mentioned your topic in their articles. But if you have studied outreach before, you might say that I’m missing out one more group of people that you could reach out to. People, who tweeted articles on that topic.

Yeah, you could start monitoring X for fresh mentions of your topics or when people tweet articles that are similar to yours. But why send these people an outreach email when you can simply tweet them back? This is more of a social media engagement strategy rather than an email outreach strategy. Try it both ways and see what works best for you.

Write Effective Outreach Emails

We appreciate your journey, as we reach the final lesson of the Free Course on The Art of Blogging for Business with Courses Buddy.

If you don’t have a compelling reason to reach out to a person, don’t reach out to them! So your outreach email should be focused on the recipient, not you! Why would anyone care about a random person who’s reaching out to them out of the blue? So you have to find a way to make your outreach email about them!

Well, to fuel your thinking process let me give you three common outreach excuses.

1. You know they are interested in the topic and your article provides a fresh angle that they can’t afford to overlook.

2. You know they have a strong opinion about something and your article has some new and unique proof that further reconfirms their stance.

3. You’ve actually mentioned them in your article and featured their work.

As you can tell, the first two outreach excuses are very much alike. And they rely on the “Fundamental Rule of Content Marketing” that I can’t stop rehearsing again and again.

If your content is awesome and unique, many people would be happy to get a personal heads up about it. You can use the first outreach excuse if you’re 100% sure that your article talks about something that your recipient doesn’t know.  Just make sure to articulate that something in your outreach email, don’t make them read the entire article to find out what it is. 

Moreover, the second outreach excuse is all about sending them some additional details or arguments about the things that they already know. This could be a new case study that proves their point, or maybe some relevant news.

Now, the third outreach excuse is entirely different. This time you’re not appealing to their knowledge, but to their ego. Who doesn’t like when others say good things about them and feature their work? If you ask me – I surely do! 

So whenever you mention the work of other people in your article, you should always give them all the credit and you should always send them personal notes of appreciation for doing such amazing work. But like with any other strategy that I’ve shared in this course, it won’t work unless it’s genuine.

These were the three general outreach excuses that I recommend you to use when reaching out to people. But what about backlinks? So far we only discussed how to make people care about your outreach email and reply to you. But how do you actually persuade these people to link to your article?

Well, I’m afraid there’s no way to do it. Unless of course you offer them money.

Keep in mind, there’s no magic outreach excuse or a selection of words that would persuade someone to link to your article right there right now. Most people are very reluctant to go back and update their old articles. But if you manage to impress them with your content, many of these people will gladly link to it from one of their future articles. 

And that’s it!!!

The end of this lesson as well as of this Free Guide to Blogging for Business. I hope that you enjoyed it and that you’re going to put all those tips, tricks, and strategies into action and grow the traffic of your blog and the revenue of your business.

Don’t forget to Blossom!

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/the-benefits-of-business-blogging-ht

https://academy.hubspot.com/courses/blogging-training

https://www.shopify.com/blog/how-to-start-a-blog

https://neilpatel.com/how-to-start-a-blog

https://www.impactplus.com/blog/blogging-for-business