“Guest blogging” or “guest posting” simply means writing or publishing an article on someone else’s website or blog.
It’s not something every blogger allows, though.
Those who guest blog mainly do it because it’s an amazing strategy for growing your blog readership and platform.
It’s also a great way to increase traffic to your website, and increase your leads and sales, especially if you’re new to the business and struggling with traffic generation.
There are tons of benefits of guest posting. Here are a few:
1. Building relationships
If you’re a good guest blogger, and your contribution adds value to other peoples’ blogs, you’re going to build relationships with other bloggers, other people in the same niche as yourself.
Bloggers can be incredibly influential now, because they make up a large percentage of discussions and conversations that are happening on the Internet, and are connected to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Being friends with good bloggers can be a really good idea.
And if you can grow your influence through your friendship with other bloggers, this will eventually enable you to grow your own followers and blog subscribers.
2. Search engines
When you guest post, the one non-negotiable condition you should have is that the host blogger must include a link to your blog somewhere in the post.
This backlink will raise the value of your blog in search engines over time, which will cause your blog to be easier to find when people search through Google, Yahoo!, Bing or whatever search engines.
Guest posting can also strengthen your Author Rank.
Google will factor in the author of an article into its search engine rank algorithm as well.
3. Communities
Guest posting can help you enter established communities, and share your message.
You’ll be able to connect with new people, which can benefit you if you do things right.
If your articles add value to discussions, over time people will come to like, respect and trust you. This will allow you to get more readers, fans and followers, and will help you brand yourself as an expert in your field.
Of course if done wrongly, you might end up being known as “that guy” who does nothing but try to sell himself and his own agenda, which you don’t want.
With that being said, what about allowing people to guest post on your site?
This depends. It can be a good thing, but for those of us who have personal blogs, it has bad points, too.
But if you have guest blogged on someone else’s blog, you might want to allow the host to guest blog for you, so there is mutual exchange in your relationship.
Consider these:
The Pros
- Guest posts can give your readers a unique new perspective on certain topics. It’s a good thing, because you’ll be providing them with value.
- A guest post can bring new readers to your blog, because the guest blogger will definitely promote their guest post to their followers.
- You’ll have time to focus on other things, because you won’t have to think of coming up with a blog post.
The Cons
- You might lose readers if you allow too many guest posts. People come to your blog to read your articles, after all. People might get bored or turned off.
At the end of the day, the argument for allowing guest posting on your blog or not can go either way. It’s good to change things up a bit, but not too often.
