Why Guest Blogging & Leaving Breadcrumbs is a Good Idea — Because Anderson Cooper Does It

Last week, I mentioned that guest blogging is one way to market your blog. If you watch 60 Minutes regularly, there’s a good chance that you know Anderson Cooper (an employee of CNN) has contributed stories to 60 minutes every couple weeks for quite awhile (his latest feature was an eye-opening one on “War Against Women” in the Congo). Additionally, there’s news today that Charlie Rose from PBS is going to start contributing stories as well. What is the significance of this?

Anderson and Charlie are, in a sense, “guest blogging” (if they were writing). They are tapping into the massive audience of 60 Minutes and building their brand awareness with an audience who otherwise might not be aware of their work. How? By leaving “breadcrumbs” to their main shows. To me, it’s a win-win for everyone. CBS gets great content/reporting for 60 Minutes while Anderson and Charlie build awareness for their own shows — not by spamming — but by adding value.

The concept of leaving breadcrumbs is pretty straight forward. Go to a place with a large audience and build your brand awareness through providing value to that audience. In Anderson Cooper’s case, the “breadcrumb” is when 60 Minutes introduces him as “Anderson Cooper from CNN” — there’s no mention of CNN during his reports (and there shouldn’t be). There is also a significant benefit to CBS in this case; viewers who watch Anderson Cooper’s show are more likely to watch 60 minutes if Anderson is doing one of the featured reports.

There are several people in the real estate space doing a great job of utilizing the opportunity to leave breadcrumbs — two that come to my mind right off the bat are Larry Lohrman and Jay Thompson (both of whom happen to contribute to Geek Estate).

• In my opinion, Larry is the most knowledgeable guy on the web when it comes to real estate photography. He packs his own site with fantastic content, but also manages to write great stories here on Geek Estate that entice many to click through to his site and learn more about his topic of expertise (real estate photography).
• Jay’s another guy who loves to spread breadcrumbs as his marketing strategy. Of course, he writes most of his content on Phoenix Real Estate Guy, but he also contributes to BloodHoundBlog, Phoenix Real Estate Technology Exchange, and Geek Estate Blog.

In an effort to keep this short and to the point, I’m not even going to get into the SEO benefit to leaving valuable breadcrumbs all over the web.

Anderson Cooper is “guest blogging” — so why aren’t you?