by John Boudreau
In this day and age, surely you understand the benefits of having a blog. Updating your website with new, relevant and quality, engaging content is one of the best ways to attract visitors – expanding your audience – build your expertise, and, of course, make the search engines happy. However, have you ever considered that there is more to blogging than just on-site? Perhaps there is a guest blog or two in your future…
What Is Guest Blogging?
You might first be wondering: what is guest blogging and why should I do it. Let us tackle part one of that questions with this response:
- Guest blogging is an article or blog post published on a site or blog that is not your own.
- There are various incentives for guest blogging.
As a guest blogger, you are providing your expertise to another site or blog, usually in exchange for links, relationship-building and an increased audience. For a booming business such as yours, it should be a no-brainer to take advantage of something like this. Unfortunately, remarkably so, many businesses are not taking advantage of such an important and significant marketing strategy.
Perhaps, one of the reasons behind that is a misunderstanding of the benefits of guest blogging. Allow me to share some or the meaningful benefits with you.
Benefits of Guest Blogging
There are NUMEROUS benefits to guest blogging. For the purposes of your marketing strategy, you may see the benefit in some or all of these. However, this is a list of my top 3 benefits of guest blogging.
- Gain Quality Traffic: Typically, a guest blog is posted on a site that has a large following. It is a reputable source for the industry you are writing about and you are centering yourself as an expert in the topic you are guest blogging about. This means that the traffic and visits coming in to that blog are quality. These people have sought out information and you are giving it to them.
Which leads me to point number 2…
- Build Online Influence: As with any content marketing strategy, you want to build yourself as an authority on the web. Guest blogging is a great way to build your influence. The broader the audiences you reach the more authority and influence you build in turn.
- Build Search Engine Authority: We all know that Google has algorithms, and we all know these change all the time. However, Google values authoritative back-links and guest blogging is a sure fire way to get those.
How Can I Get Started?
Now that you understand some of the major benefits of guest blogging as they pertain to your digital marketing strategy, you are probably wondering how you can get started… today.
- Do your research. Find sites that accept guest posts. Be sure they are reputable in your industry and relevant to your expertise.
- Come up with a relevant and engaging topic and an idea of how you will approach the topic.
- Build a relationship. Email the site and express your interest. Find out how you can submit a post (that is, if this information is not readily available on the website already).
- Produce the content. Write, edit and submit the post to the guest blogging website and be cognizant that your article may or may not be accepted.
Remember, you cannot be an effective guest blogger if you do not get started at trying to guest blog. Between the backlinks and the comments from relevant users, the benefits to your SEO, digital marketing strategy and authority on the web cannot be beaten.
While you are at it, get social with the guest blogging process. Once you do get an article posted, blast it out to your followers in your various networks. The more traffic you drive to the site, the better for your web health and the guest site’s web health – this means you could be writing again for them, which would be AWESOME for you!
Good luck and get to writing!
