Guest Blogging: The Secret to Finding New Email Subscribers

We’ve often talked about the importance of maintaining an author website and building an email list to be able to reach out to your readers directly (see our Email Marketing Series), but how do you find new audiences in the first place? Once you get your social media followers and hardcore fans to subscribe to your newsletter, the frequency of new subscribers always goes down. How do you keep these numbers rolling with the years?

Marketing your book doesn’t end with your book launch. Keeping your content fresh and reaching out to new readers is an essential aspect of marketing, no matter how long ago your book was published. 

This is where guest blogging comes handy! Guest blogging is when you ask someone else to write an article for your blog, or you request someone else to allow you to write an article in their blog. Providing a great way to generate more traffic towards your website. In fact, according to Gregory Ciotti, who currently works on the content marketing team at Shopify, says that guest blogging strategies helped him acquire more than 36,000 new email subscribers to his website.

Here are some benefits to being a guest blogger or accepting guest posts as an author.

1. Find New Email Subscribers

Every author or artist is looking for ways to reach new audiences, and there is no better way to do it than by collaborating with the community. Guest posting will help you build connections both within the writing community (your guest post on another’s website or vice versa) and also the reading community.

When you accept guest posts, you will be able to publish fresh content on your website and explore new ideas and thoughts. When you write guest posts, you expand your horizons and give more effort and research into your writing, submitting some of your best work for other audiences to see—thus increasing subscribers to your newsletter.

2. Build Your Author Credibility

Working with other authors means you become a part of a larger community, and you’re no longer a single person defined by the number of sales you have. Guest posting on other authors’ websites will get you noticed as a writer, and help you build your brand awareness and credibility among unfamiliar readers. A real benefit to this is the freedom to link to your own website and socials in your guest post.

3. Get Referral Traffic

Referral traffic is when people visit your website through other links, instead of looking you up on search engines. By guest posting, you’re enabling your website to be found by a trusted third-party who endorses your content to their own visitors/readers. According to SproutSocial, “the Google algorithm sees these links as positive ranking factors since they signal users’ confidence in the authority and relevance of the information.”

When you write guest posts, you can link to your website and socials—even your Amazon author page—within the post and grow your readership. This traffic, coupled with an effective SEO strategy, will help boost your website rankings and thus your online presence.