Have you heard this saying?:
"Your email list is your ATM."
Whether or not you agree with it, email marketing is by far the most profitable marketing channel, bringing in over 25% of Black Friday sales online in 2014.
Email marketing has a 44.25x return, meaning on average you'd rake in $4,425 for every $100 you spent on that marketing channel.
Not bad right?
But email marketing is only effective if you have a strong email list. And one of the best email list building strategies available online is guest blogging.
Why? Well, there are a few reasons.
Guest Posting Exposes You to Huge Numbers of Your Target Audience
Writing exclusively for your company's own blog is like working your butt off on a speech only to deliver it to your family in your living room.
Your audience is limited to those who are already following you and interested in what you're doing, and the content of your speech never gets the attention it deserves.
Guest posting, on the other hand, exposes you to massive amounts of your target audience - people you may have not been able to reach if you hadn't gotten in front of them where they already hang out.
For example, SumoMe has somewhere close to 700,000 email subscribers. When somebody contributes to our site, they'd get in front of a huge number of those subscribers.
With my very first guest post I was able to collect 800 new subscribers from my post on Fast Company (in just under 5 hours of work).
And a guest post I published on the blog Smart Blogger is still collecting emails a year and a half later.
Guest Posting Features You on Larger Publications
Guest posting to be featured on large publications is not new to most content marketers.
This is exactly what I'm doing right now. I'm guest posting on Huffington Post.
When you're published on large, popular media publications like Huff Post, not only are you able to get your content in front of audiences larger than yours that you wouldn't otherwise have access to but you're building social proof, too.
And guest posting is the easiest way to get a feature, too.
Every content marketer, company, blogger and publication experiences the same issue: the scarcity issue. Great content is scarce, and even more scarce is the time to create it.
So if you're willing and able to write solid content for a large publication, it's an easy way to reap the benefits of being published on it.
Social proof increases conversions (yes, to your email list) by giving you authority and encouraging people to pay attention. There are 13 different social proof types you can use to build it, and these features are one of them.
Guest Posting Helps Your SEO
Say what you want about search engine optimization, but it's important.
After all, there's no better way to get a sustainable, steady stream of traffic to your website month over month than relying on search engines to send it to you.
But to rank for any meaningful keyword in search engines requires backlinks.
Backlinks from strong websites - and the more popular the website, the more effective the backlink for helping you climb up the ranks.
You can use the opportunity of your guest post to include 1-2 backlinks to strong pieces of content you want to rank for.
Of course, make sure these links integrate with the content effortlessly and don't break the flow of the reader (or piss off the editor of the host site), but if you keep it to a minimum and only link to highly valuable resources you'd like to rank for, this builds some great links to your site.
Guest Posting Should Be Part of Your Marketing Strategy
Guest posting is one of the best things I've ever done for my personal brand, and one way that many websites have grown their email lists substantially.
In 2017, if you're not using this marketing strategy, you could be leaving a ton of email subscribers on the table.
Start using guest posting as an opportunity to build your SEO, email list, and social proof. You won't regret it.