Have you ever written a guest post before?
“Just write a guest post,” they say.
“It’s great for growing an email list,” they say.
I have a confession to make.
I am 4 months behind on writing guest posts.
Why?
Every time I go to write a post, I freeze up. Writer’s block. Procrastination. Call it whatever you want. But if you’ve ever TRIED to guest post regularly, you know exactly what I mean.
The last two guest posts I’ve written have generated over 1,000 new email subscribers to this site, but for some unknown reason it’s incredibly hard for me to produce them on a regular basis.
Writing for my site is easy. But writing for someone else is terrifying.
- What should I write about?
- How detailed should the article be?
- Can I backlink to my site from the article?
…you know the drill.
Well, recently I stumbled upon an interesting little hack that’s helped me get back on track and avoid all of these paralyzing questions.
Whether you are a guest-posting pro or have never written one in your life, use this to come up with killer ideas for your next article.
Here it is…
Next time you go to write a guest post, ask yourself this question:
So, if the person whose site you are writing for were hosting a conference and you were invited to speak to the audience, what would your speech be about?
Asking this question removes writing from the equation and forces you to focus on the audience you are “speaking” to.
Let’s workshop a quick example.
Imagine you are a food blogger invited to speak at a marketing conference that Noah Kagan is putting on. Those are two seemingly unrelated industries. Food and marketing.
What would you talk about?
Could you still teach the audience something that would be interesting and relevant? You bet!
Here are a few different headlines you could use:
Headline 1: How to market your business like a restaurant
Headline 2: How I used incredible pictures to 5x my sales and how you can do the same thing
Headline 3: I work 80 hours a week. How about you?
Headline 4: Why I hate my job and how you can avoid the same trap
Headline 5: Time management for restaurants
Combine your industry of expertise with the topics that your audience is there to hear about.
Make sense?
Quit thinking about writing and start thinking about speaking.
Conclusion
A few days ago I had a coaching call with my friend Tony.
He was struggling with coming up with topics to guest post on, so we spent 45 minutes going over exactly how he could use this method.
In the call we covered:
- How to brainstorm a list of ideas to write about on other people’s blogs
- How to outline your post
- How to ensure the post is incredibly good
- How to do all of this in less than 30 minutes
I’ve included our entire coaching call as a free download inside the free resource center.
To download it, click here
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