Writing Guest Posts That Sell: 9 Best Tips

Many brands use content marketing to grow their business and increase their online visibility. That means almost all companies have their own blog. To others, blogging is their business, and so they create and publish content on social media or sites to help brands drive traffic. Therefore, guest posts connect bloggers and brands.

The reason why brands sponsor content creation is to make conversions. Thus bloggers should write posts that generate sales. On the other hand, content creators earn money from sponsored posts because companies pay them to write posts about their brand, products, and services.

Here are great tips for creating sponsored posts that sell or drive sales.

Effective Use of Keywords

You should create content that can be found in search engines. You can achieve that by placing the right keywords for the offerings you are promoting.

You can find the keywords that users are searching for in the search engine using tools such as Google Keyword Planner. Next, create content using these keywords and mention the brand, products, and services so that the target audience can find the company selling them.

Captivating Titles

An engaging and exciting title is what will entice your target audience to click and read your post. People judge books by their cover and sponsored posts by their titles. Therefore spend time crafting a captivating title for your post.

Further, the title should be accompanied by valuable content. This is what will make your post more engaging and drive readers.

Give Your Review

Generally, sponsored posts are paid reviews for someone else’s product. Although people love reviews, your sponsored posts should be an independent review that is not overly promotional. Instead, it should provide value and honest reviews about the brand and its offerings. Such content helps to build your credibility as the content creator.

You need hands-on experience to be able to write a good review about a brand. So you can get in-depth information from the company itself, read other people’s reviews as well as research about the company and its product online, and then compile your opinion about it.

You should not only put the features but the benefits of the product because this is what makes a buyer pick the product and leave the competitors’.

Such an in-depth review is valuable information to your target audience because it helps them decide whether to buy or not buy the company’s product.

Avoid Sales Pitch Hype

As mentioned above, you can write an independent review about the products your sponsoring brand is offering; however, avoid making it too promotional because it will drive away your readers. Your genuine opinion shouldn’t occupy 50% of your content.

Ordinarily, sponsored posts should be fun, conversational, engaging, and credible. People are more interested in stories about human beings but not companies’ products.

Content with too much hype drives away people, and in the end, both you and the brand will lose. So let your advertiser understand that you don’t want to write posts that manipulate readers.

Incorporate Other Media

Adding other media like pictures, infographics or videos helps to keep your audience engaged. For instance, if you are writing a sponsored post about a particular dish, you can put pictures of some ingredients, a video guide or demonstration video on how to prepare it, or an image of how the food looks when cooked.

Such media help them to learn what to expect when they purchase the products you’re promoting or get a sense of the brand, its offerings, as well as you, the blogger. You should also add alt text to your images.

Share the Content on Social Media

Promoting the sponsored posts on your social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and more can help reach a large audience and encourage your followers to share it in their individual networks and give feedback. Sharing your content on social media will help it spread like wildfire.

You can make a headline that shows how you enjoyed the product or the reasons why you want your audience to try it. Alternatively, you can pose a question or create a scenario and ask your target audience to consider it. This will encourage them to click on the link to read more about it.

You should also make it easy for your readers to share your content by ending your post with a social sharing button.

Add Subscription or Downloadable Items

Adding a free subscription or downloadable item from the sponsoring company will add credibility to your post, drive traffic to the brand and reward your readers for considering your sponsored post.

You can also use these items to encourage your audience to interact with your post and comment on products the sponsoring brand is offering on its site or social media platforms.

Disclose Your Sponsored Post

One of the paid content rules is that you have to state it’s a sponsored post or you have been paid to write it. A content creator can either be paid money or get free products.

You can do this by placing a single sentence at the top of the post or after the first paragraph where you state that the post was written in partnership with… (Put the name of the sponsor) or the post has affiliate links.

Internal Linking

It is not advisable to write a standalone piece of content. So you can try linking your sponsored post with other posts on your blog because this will work to your advantage.

In some cases, some companies might be against internal linking their paid-for content with your other posts. However, you can educate them on how they can benefit from an excellent internal linking strategy.

Takeaway

Creating unique content requires a lot of time and resources. However, it also takes huge efforts to get it in front of the target audience.

You can follow these 9 tips to optimize and share your content in various ways to drive more readers to your site and help the brand generate more leads and drive sales.