Supercharge your next guest post or What a Jezebel post taught me about internet marketing

I got a great SEO idea from the unlikliest of places. I was reading through http://jezebel.com and found a post where the author was fawning over her adult film star crush, a guy she’d never met. Stay with me. The internet marketing is coming.

The film star noticed tons of traffic coming to his site via the Jezebel post, read the post, and was flattered. A commenter on the Jezebel post linked to the author’s blog post.

So now the Jezebel author has his attention and he’s grateful for the kind words and traffic. Now’s the time for her to leverage that into an interview, or whatever she wants from him.
What’s the lesson here? Say you have a mid-level site owner you want something from, whether it be a link, a date, a review, whatever. If you can send a ton of traffic to their site and say nice things about them, you’ll get on their radar and their good side.

So how do you send a ton of traffic to their site?

Chances are, just mentioning them on your site and linking won’t work because 1. You don’t get as much traffic as Jezebel. 2. Your readers probably don’t care about your target, and therefore won’t click on your link.

You need to write a guest post on a large site with a readership likely to be interested in your target.

Remember here to pick a right-size target. If your target is such a big deal that they wouldn’t notice a bump in traffic from the biggest site you could write a guest post on, they’re too big for you. You don’t need to shoot for the moon here, just for someone who has something you want. Maybe it’s a blogger with a small-but-dedicated audience who would love to hear about your new product.

Now you need to pick a blog for your guest post. That blog will need enough traffic to create a noticeable spike. It will also need the right readership. A well-trafficked blog about UFOs probably won’t send a lot of traffic to marthastewart.com. You need a large readership, and one that is likely to click on the link to the target’s site.

In your guest post, really talk up the target in order to entice guest post readers to click the link. Tell readers why they need to visit the target’s site. This also helps butter up the target. The guest post doesn’t necessarily have to be all about the target. But it’s got to mention them, link to them, and entice readers to click the link.

For the readers to follow the link they have to be interested in the topic, either because you talk up the topic a lot (this guy is sooo fine/interesting/fun) or because the readers would naturally be interested in the link (a link to a kick-ass gardening blogger from marthastewart.com).

After the post goes live, wait for the target to indicate that they noticed the post. Monitor their social media and blog for mentions. If you don’t get a mention, leave it alone. If you do, now’s your time to strike. Ask for what you want. Your chances have never been better for getting it.

Photo by Andy Walker.