Most online marketers know well the many benefits of guest blogging, yet hesitate to get involved in it. That’s understandable since it takes time to come up with appealing topics, write content, find the best blogs in their niche that accept guest blog posts, and get their content published. But the benefits of guest blogging are manifold, which is why you should make it a priority.
The Details:
Guest blogging helps you:
• Build high-quality backlinks. After Google clamped down on artificial link-building strategies with its Penguin and Panda updates, guest blogging has become the most convenient, effective, and rewarding method for building backlinks organically. Most marketers blog at least once a week.
• Connect with other businesses and professionals in your niche. By writing guest posts for other sites relevant to your own and accepting guest posts from professionals in your niche, you can establish connections with the people in your industry that matter, and these can lead to collaborations, joint campaigns, and even partnerships.
• Boost your traffic. A few guest blog posts published around the same time on different major blogs or websites in your niche can triple or even quadruple your traffic, not only to your business blog, but also to your main website, and if you sell products directly through the latter, then means more sales. 57% of companies with a blog have acquired a customer through their blog.
• Make your content go viral. Without exposure, great content can lay dormant on your blog and never fulfill its true potential, especially if your site is new and you have not yet had enough time to build an audience. Guest blogging is the quickest way for you to get a lot of exposure fast.
• Establish yourself as an authority in your niche. Today it’s a lot easier to convince online customers you are an authority in a specific niche, and the most effective way to convince them is through effective content marketing that offers them professional tips and advice for free. Guest blogging is one of the most effective ways to distribute your content to a relevant audience.
• Discover new business opportunities. When your guest blog posts are featured on other websites, you exchange emails with the owners or admins of those sites and reply to comments that readers leave, and by doing this you can add valuable entries to your contact list. In 2012, 92% of companies that dedicated time to blogging multiple times a day had acquired a customer through their blog. (Source: http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)
• Give your employees the opportunity to develop an online persona. By encouraging your most web-savvy employees to create content and post it in your company’s name on popular blogs, you can nurture the next superstars in your niche.
• Promote an eBook. Guest blogging is an effective way to promote an eBook to an interested audience other than your own. Most blogs will let you do it as long as you restrict the link to the author’s section, and provide content that’s useful.
• Get that extra traffic you need for a new product launch or special event. Blowing the trumpet about a new product or a special event on top blogs can get you a massive increase in traffic and activity that will make the launch/event more significant, and attract more attention from the customers/reviewers / big names in your segment.
• Find a useful purpose for content that doesn’t get published on your blog. Sometimes last-minute changes to strategy or goals can cause content you’ve already created to no longer be viable for posting on your blog. You will be better off trying to get it published on other blogs rather than deleting it or storing it indefinitely on your HDD.
The Bottom Line:
Guest blogging should be approached with the same professionalism and dedication that you devote to writing posts on your corporate blog. Never forget that.
