Content marketing is one of the biggest trends in digital marketing at the moment. The idea is a simple one – you create great content that publishers want to host but that also provides some marketing benefits for you too. This can be in the form of a backlink, branding or thought leadership.
Guest blogging is a staple of content marketing, with the traditional approach being that companies write an article and then look for blogs to publish it for them. It’s not a bad system by any means, but it can be quite labour intensive, which is where a site like PostJoint might come in handy.
PostJoint is a network for bloggers and content marketers. It takes a slightly different approach to content marketing as it invites marketers to submit content they would like blogs to publish. Bloggers then provide a bid to host that content, with that bid consisting of the fee they’d like to receive for publishing the article, and whether a tweet is included or not.
Lets look at the advantages for those on both sides of the fence.
How PostJoint can help content marketers
The obvious benefit is that it provides an easy way for you to find bloggers with an interest in your content. You submit your article and then leave it up to PostJoint to direct the bloggers to it. Simple. The network moderates any blog applying to join so you have a reasonable level of assurance that you’re dealing with quality sites, and the bid system gives you a decent idea of the traffic levels involved.
How PostJoint can help bloggers
The nice thing for bloggers is that you get both content for your site and potentially some extra cash for publishing the content. Each article is reviewed by moderators from the site so you are assured that the content is of decent quality, is unique and not overly promotional. A drawback however is that you only get to see the first paragraph of the article, so you’re guessing to an extent on the kind of content you’re being asked to publish.
I’ve had a play around with the site over the last few weeks, and whilst it’s certainly a promising idea, I have a few gripes about the site.
How PostJoint could improve
- More bloggers and advertisers – A bit of a chicken and egg scenario I know, and the network is only a few months old, but having more people on both side of the fence would certainly help.
- Show the entire article – If you’re reviewing bloggers then I think more good faith should be afforded them that they won’t steal the content added to the network. It’s hard to judge content you can’t see.
- Add more social media options to the bid – Whilst traffic and page rank for a blog are important, the social media reach of a blogger is another asset that should be of value to content marketers. At the moment that isn’t something that is really elaborated on.
- Make it more transparent and social – It would be great to be able to see information about both ‘advertiser’ and ‘blogger’ so you can see who it is you’re working with, especially as money is involved.
Overall though the site is well worth checking out for both bloggers and content marketers. It’s very easy to use and should speed up the process for both parties. If it can continue to evolve its offering then even better.
Sounds like an interesting site. London based too, which is nice.
Very interesting, but having had a quick scan of the site it had some major flaws in it. I don't like that you can't see anything about either the writers or the blogs (or indeed the content). Transparency is a must with these things.
Thanks for the write up Adi! New advertisers and bloggers are joining us daily and the databases of content and blogs will keep on growing but right now we're more focused on system improvements. We're also working on a better feedback system to help overcome the issues with only showing an excerpt of the article (which helps to protect the content while its an opportunity). As for social influence we do have Klout scores but again this is something we are working on. Check out our support site to see all the ideas our users have submitted. We take feedback seriously and are releasing updates rapidly!
It will be important to get people willing to pay a fair price for their articles being published as well. My initial experience is that advertisers are wanting things for a very low price, quite often for free. If you want to attract the best blogs that do this for a living then that has to change.
Most of this is going to be set by the market since we don't get involved in payments, we just help to make the connection happen. It's important to note that PostJoint does not make any sort of income claims. Having said that we've had some fees in the hundreds of dollars going through and we are working on improvements to the way offers and opps are matched up – still early days for us!
Adi – we've written up a summary of planned improvements on our blog:
http://blog.postjoint.com/planned-improvements-no…
Good stuff, thanks for the update Saleem, they sound like some promising changes. I look forward to seeing them in action.
Hey Adi. Just to let you know that we've released a whole bunch of improvements and would love for you to check them out (and perhaps update your review)!
Sad that so many offers seem to be 'no fee'. The site doesn't really stand out if it's simply another way for getting guest content.
Very informative post i like it very much
What about duplicate content? Isn't that going to be an issue?
Hi Mike. Each post comes with a copyscape rating so you can see whether it's a duplicate or published elsewhere. In my experience thus far, most posts on the network score pretty well, so most appear unique.