Summary: Should you invest in sponsored articles to promote your brand? Is there a balance between marketing and useful content? Read on to find out!
3 Reasons You Should Invest In Sponsored Articles
Promotion is vital if you want your business to grow its clientele and authority in the industry. But what is the best way to do it? Are guest posts enough, or do you have to invest in sponsored articles? How can you promote your business without diminishing the value of the information you’re sharing? Read on for insider tips that will help you figure out the answers to these questions.
Benefits Of Buying A Sponsored Article
If you have delved into guest blogging before, you already know the many ways it can benefit your business. It enhances your online presence, builds your brand reputation, helps you establish yourself as an authority, and improves your SEO. But with more and more professionals opting for sponsored articles, you’re starting to wonder if you’re missing out on something. In this article, we compare sponsored articles against guest posts to help you decide which is the best choice for your business goals.
What Is A Sponsored Article?
So, what is the difference between a sponsored and a guest article? A guest article is a post you write for another reputable website with a larger following than your platform. It aims to share valuable insights and help you establish yourself as a thought leader in your niche. Whereas a guest post is free, a sponsored article requires a fee to the website that promotes your business. Most of the time, you provide the content, but the website can also take care of that for you. All in all, it’s a more straightforward marketing strategy for your brand.
What Do Sponsored Articles And Guest Posts Have In Common?
At first glance, you might think that both forms of content have pretty much the same benefits to offer. Although that’s not completely true, there are indeed some common elements.
First of all, you can certainly expect your article to be proofread and edited to match the website’s standards, whether you pay for it or not. In addition, you’ll get a Search Engine Optimization treatment to help your article climb up the search engine rankings. Chances for personal promotion are more limited in guest posting compared to sponsored. However, you can still expect to be added to the website’s newsletter and be entitled to at least one backlink to informative content on your platform.
What Are The Additional Benefits Of Sponsored Articles?
Naturally, you’ll find more services in sponsored writing, which is why many professionals invest in it. Let’s see what some of them are and in what ways they boost your business.
1. Integrated SEO
Investing in a sponsored article versus a guest post on an established website secures a high-quality integrated SEO strategy for your content. In simpler words, the website will make sure to thoroughly work on your Search Engine Optimization by utilizing various online marketing techniques, such as keyword optimization, email outreach to a targeted market, social media support, etc. This will boost your search engine rankings and get more and more people to notice your content.
2. High-Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are essential in building your SEO, especially when they come from websites with authority in the industry and high SEO metrics. They’re the perfect tool to push your content to the top of the SERPs. As mentioned before, guest blogging allows at least one backlink to informational content on your own platform. However, with sponsored content, this backlink can be promotional, therefore leading readers directly to your professional website’s landing page, where they can find your products and services.
3. Targeted Promotion Of Your Brand
When a website is tasked with sponsoring your content, they take special care of its promotion. Specifically, you can expect them to feature your article on the website homepage, share it on social media channels, or add it to the newsletter. When you combine these actions with their large following of industry professionals, you can easily understand how beneficial this will be for your business. Professionals are more likely to trust you when an acknowledged website endorses your brand. The influence it has on your target audience rubs off on you, building your brand reputation and leading potential clients to your business.
How To Strike A Balance Between Marketing And Value-Added Content
When you use guest blogging or sponsored articles to build your brand awareness and authority in the industry, it can be challenging to find the balance between informative and promotional content. Meaning, you want to offer readers valuable insights that reflect your accumulated knowledge, but you also want them to know more about your business and its services. It seems that your chances for success are higher when you publish information-based content and utilize a few promotional techniques. In this article, we share 4 tips on how to subtly promote your brand without diminishing your content value.
Add Value To Your Content
Before talking about brand promotion, we must first establish how to provide useful content. Firstly, start by choosing engaging topics. Readers are drawn to enticing headlines and articles that tackle issues relevant to their everyday life. Try to keep up with trends and find creative angles to overdone topics. Furthermore, don’t neglect to properly research your topics. Sloppy content is not valuable to readers. As long as you’re genuinely interested in creating useful information that answers readers’ questions and solves their problems, the quality of your articles will remain high and your readership will grow.
Promote Your Social Media
You don’t have to fill your guest post with promotional links (that might lead to its rejection) to promote your business. There are more subtle ways you can use, ones that the website itself offers you. Your public author profile can host links to all your web pages, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. This way, any visitor you engaged with your guest or sponsored article will be able to see all your social media platforms. There, they could find your personal blog, your professional website, and anything else you want them to know about your brand.
Republish Your Article
Most websites allow their guest bloggers to republish their articles on their own webpage after a certain amount of time. In eLearning Industry specifically, you can repost your article on your platform two weeks after its initial publication. Naturally, you still need to provide a link to the original website, but that solidifies your connection with them even more. Having your article posted on a respected website, makes readers trust you and look further into your personal brand.
Add A Product Listing
Finally, if you are a vendor of LMSs, authoring tools, or any other kind of software the website is interested in, a product listing is a great way to promote your business in your post. Specifically, you can place a banner at the end of your guest post, connecting your product with the article. This would lead readers to a directory listing describing the USPs that make your software stand out from the competition. As a result, your visibility grows, and your chances to attract potential leads increase significantly.
Conclusion
Writing for other websites has become a very popular marketing technique for businesses who want to grow their industry outreach. However, knowing the best ways to promote your brand using them can be tricky. Hopefully, the tricks we shared in this article have helped you distinguish between guest and sponsored articles, as well as find ways to balance marketing and useful content to attract a loyal audience.
Download our eBook Guest Posting Guide: How To Become A Top Content Contributor On eLearning Industry to learn what you can gain by guest blogging and what are the basics of writing a guest post for eLearning Industry.