Bylines And Guest Posts
By Lon S. Cohen
I was having lunch with a friend when the subject turned to the old industry standby – the bylined article. The conversation got me thinking. If you can get them, bylined articles can be really effective in your public relations and communications plan. In the case of New Media the bylined article concept has morphed into something more powerful than ever before and includes the guest blog post.
The Marketing Profs website describes bylined articles as “articles written under your name—or, in journalism parlance, your byline. Such articles are a vehicle for you to flex your industry-knowledge muscles. The material in the bylined articles should be presented in a way that demonstrates discreetly what makes you an expert in your particular field.”
As a professional it’s great to start a blog, a Twitter account and thread all your social media through Friendfeed to show everyone how much you know. Creating good content is a perfect way to drive traffic to your website and set yourself apart from your competition by highlighting your unique expertise. Basic SEO says that there is no better way to help your SERP ranking than fresh content. Content is king wearing the whitest of white hats because you’re actually giving something away to get something back. (Of course, unless Google suddenly decides you giving away expert content written with certain subjects or heavens forbid keyword results in mind was advised by an SEO professional and penalizes you for it.) Besides all that, you may just get the most expensive and hard to come by commodity on the Internet these days: Trust.
Google would be nothing without all those webmasters, bloggers and various others doing the work for them since what Google like best is “authority” and who gives the authority of one website over another but the masses linking to the webpages we like. (It’s very hierarchal being all about “ranking” and “authority” and such but until we have three-dimensional VR webpages, we’re kind of stuck with the list-like model we have.) So if you want traffic to your site, then you have to establish trust within the community so that people will want to link and reference your webpages. There are plenty of ways to be rocketed up to the top of the trust heap immediately but since Oprah hasn’t called you back for an appearance on her show yet you’re going to have to build it up brick by brick.
Before you’re a trusted expert online in a particular field, people have to find you. Yes, cream does rise to the top but besides being good, having a little luck and garnering a real puritanical work ethic, sometimes you need a jumpstart. Writing bylined articles for established, trusted and widely read websites will go a long way to getting the good stuff you’re writing on your own website noticed by others. This is a first step in establishing a small but loyal audience.
Things work a little differently in the blogosphere and online news outlets than traditional printed media. Before you had to wait until a bylined article was printed and then show it off to everyone who walked in the door or put a photocopy in your media kit, handing or mailing it out one by one. Now people can go from reading your article online straight to your place of business with the click of a hyperlink. You get instant traffic. If people like you enough they will subscribe to your blog or follow/friend you on one of your Social Media accounts. The more people like what you write, the more they will link to it and repost it on their own websites and in their feeds. The translation from bylined articles or in guest blog posts to trust (following you to your other publishing platforms) to authority (having multiple people link to you or your story) is almost immediate.
On the web a good article doesn’t have to go viral to the point of a pandemic to be effective. You just need to start establishing yourself within a small community. You’ll also have to take baby steps. Don’t go for the big dogs just yet. Start commenting on the blogs and websites you like to read in your industry. Then when you see an opportunity, strike while the iron’s hot. If you see a controversy brewing and you have a strong opinion on the subject that also happens to dovetail nicely with your expertise then go right in and offer your point of view. Things heat up and cool down quick on the web so you need to get your thoughts down right away. This may mean writing a post or article at odd hours like smack dab in the middle of the day or late at night. Offer your point of view position to the editor of the blog.
Don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t work the first time, continue to develop articles and responses on different subjects. If there’s a particular website that you think has the perfect audience then see if the editors are on Twitter or Friendfeed start engaging them, responding genuinely to articles in their publications. When you feel that you’ve developed a pretty good rapport, shoot them a direct message through the same service you had been conversing in to see if they’d be open to one of a query.
Here’s another good trick. My most interesting articles start as comments or a series of Twitter posts I begin to write about an article or blog post I find online. I start to write so much that I think to myself, this can be much more than just a comment it’s a whole argument. Of course you need to work it up. Sometimes you find there is less content that you originally imagined. Other times you discover that you’ve written an elegant 500 to 1000-word response. When I read something that gets my passion up I find that’s usually the thing that easily translates into a whole article or blog post. There have been cases when I’ve reacted to something I read from a link on Twitter that resulted in multiple Tweets. If I start Tweeting out like crazy, I turn to the old word processor and expand them. (This is a good technique for crafting inspired blog posts as well.) While I don’t encourage flame wars a good old-fashioned point/counterpoint can go a long way.
For another good article on the effectiveness and use of bylined articles see this article in Entrepreneur.com.