Personal Branding and Guest Posting Tips From an Expert: An Interview with @SujanPatel by @wonderwall7
As you may know from my other interviews withAnne Ahola Wardof CircleClick,Eli Schwartzof SurveyMonkey, and John Doherty of HotPads, Search Engine Journal has partnered with Searchmetrics to host a one-day, invite-only executive marketing event in San Francisco calledSEO, Content Marketing, & Analytics: The Three Pillars of Online Marketing Success in 2014.
My fourthinterview is with Sujan Patel, founder of Single Grain and current chief marketing officer of Bridge.us.
Tip: If you do a guest post make sure you do everything you can to drive traffic & social shares. Itll pretty much guarantee an invitation to write on the site again.
Thank you Kelsey. I dedicate a few hours each week to focus on personal branding. I do a lot of guest blogging on anywhere I can, reach out to new potential publications each week and stay connected to those publications Ive already wrote for. Ive been doing this for a few years now so it [now] only takes 1.5 hours a week to do this but when I first started it I spent days.
I do as much guest blogging as I can. I aim to write 10 blog post a month (4 for my personal blog, http://www.sujanpatel.com, and 6 for other sites). I guest blog on Entrepreneur.com, Forbes, Business Insider, Open Forum, Small Business Trends, Fast Company, Inc and of course, Search Engine Journal. I guest blog on every blog/publication that marketers, entrepreneurs, and startups owners/employees go to for information. Guest blogging is crucial for branding. The first thing you mentioned to me was that you see me everywhereIm not actually everywhere, Im just in the places you (a marketer) frequently visit and in case you miss me there, Im sharing my post on Twitter and Facebook so youre forced to see me.
Its great for getting tons of crap traffic and useless comments. All kidding aside, it does help with social shares and start the spread of content but I believe in quality over quantity, and for most businesses, the Reddit user base isnt relevant.
Bridge.us is software that helps immigrants discover their options and apply for immigration into the US. Its 80% cheaper than using an immigration lawyer (if you use our paid version). And, its a lot easier than spending hours on the web trying to find your immigration [information]. I joined Bridge.us for two reasons. 1. I want to work on something that is making a positive impact to millions of people 2. Its a boring industry and if I can market something as boring legal/immigration, then I can market anything.
Like any startup, I wear a lot of hats, from UX designer, product manager, PPC, SEO, content marketer, CROthe list goes on. My main role is probably best known as a growth hacker, where Im responsible for making sure people understand our software (and making necessary changes if they dont) and driving qualified traffic to the site.
Businesses need to understand that it takes time and serious effort. Gone are the days you can build a few links or optimize a handful of pages to increase organic traffic. Now online marketing requires more work and signals that are more real (or at least harder to inflate), such as brand, social presence, and value.