A few months ago, I got some sage advice from @SujanPatel about how to rise up to become a contributor on top sites. The primary advice that I’ve successfully applied thus far is starting by getting your content published on industry/niche sites along with actively promoting it to improve its reach and have reference content to pitch to bigger publications.
Taking that advice, I set out to solve this challenge. I set my targets on a handful of sites and have successfully published to 2 of them thus far. These 2 pieces of content are helpful for:
- brand exposure for our company
- increased subject matter authority
- SEO value back to our site
- reaching part of our target audience
Essentially, we are nurturing our prospects without having to get them to our website or fill out a form. Plus, being on an industry blog provides additional credibility as an information source vs. solely branded content.
Publishing these 2 articles took a different course to get noticed by the managing editor and get the content reviews/approved. Note: these are original articles that I’ve written top to bottom, not collaborative news stories. We’ve had some success with collaborative news stories as well but that is for another post.
Here are the 2 ways this happened for is. I think you’ll find this rather useful:
Getting published on Relevance.com was partially serendipitous. Often when we write content, we will tag influencers and authorities in Twitter to ask for their comments or feedback. For this particular post, “The Most Relevant Business in the World”, we tagged @relevance to ask for their expert feedback. Shortly after the tweet, Relevance.com’s Content Coordination replied asking if we were open to syndicating this post on their blog as well. In less than a week of coordination and information exchange with Danielle, the post was re-published on Relevance.com under the title “Why Your Marketing Content Needs More Relevance”.
Now we have a recurring gig available to us on Relevance and are on track to publishing again next month. And of course, considering the name of this arm of our blog being “Relevance” as well, it clearly showed we were on the right track. 🙂
The key takeaway from this publishing experience is making sure you reach out and interact with authorities related to the topic you are writing about, which can lead to collaboration/publishing opportunities.
One of my other defined targets for publishing was marketingtechblog.com. Our technology fits in this space and I recognized Douglas Karr’s authority in the space and the respective audience on his popular blog would be a good fit for us. My initial attempts at connecting with Doug didn’t work. Using the approaches of having shared interests/expertise and existing original content he could use on his site didn’t work. So I dug into his site a bit and discovered that his banner advertisements were being run through buysellads.com. I checked out the pricing for 20K impressions and it was very reasonable so I mentioned to my CEO that sometimes you need to “pay to play” and suggested running advertisements on the site to experiment and to see if it caught Doug’s attention. Sure enough, less than 48 hours after our ads went live, Doug contacted us asking us to write a blog about “Deploying a Successful Marketing Automation Strategy”.
The key takeaway is the people you are wanting to connect with are usually business people. Support their business and they’re more likely to do the same for you.
I hope that these 2 examples help you to get your content published on 3rd party sites. They were all varying experiences that I learned a lot from AND can be applied to your own marketing efforts.
I did also allude to a bonus tip in the headline of this article. But, first and interesting side note: I was also trying to get a piece of content published on CMSWire but was having little luck. The editorial manager was incredibly helpful and friendly, but for some reason, I couldn’t get the piece through (after 2 months of email exchanges).
So the piece highlighted in the following bonus tip was original meant for CMSWire, but instead landed here: get the experts on your team to start doing native publishing on LinkedIn. As an example, earlier this month I published “9 Key Takeaways from 20 Marketing Automation Projects” directly on LinkedIn which has had nearly 600 views, 90 Likes, 11 comments and 23 shares. Many of our blog posts don’t have close to this kind of engagement. Consider writing original articles or re-publishing existing articles on LinkedIn to reach an additional and active audience. (Make sure you promote that content, too).
