Guest posting is one of the best ways to generate quality traffic to your blog. As a new blogger, no one knows about you or your brand. By harnessing the power and benefits of guest blogging, you jumpstart your blogging and content marketing journey.
Think of it as a way of getting in front of the audience which someone else took several years to build and keep them engaged.
Many bloggers have a challenge of leveraging the power and benefits of guest blogging as it is a demanding process. Undoubtedly, guest posting requires some pretty awesome networking skills to penetrate. However, it is not open heart surgery, and everything is ‘figureoutable’
Guest posting is a way to tap into an audience already created by someone else and is also a great way to identify which types of audiences are a good match for your service/posts/products.
Benefits of Guest Blogging
Let’s now have a look at how guest blogging can help you grow your business. There are several benefits of guest blogging:
Attract Targeted Traffic to Your Website
By guest posting on the sites that fall under your niche, you stand a chance of having your content being seen by thousands of traffic who are interested in what you do, and write about. You get instant access to your host’s audience, and if they decide to share your guest post with their email subscribers, then you get even more eyeballs on your site.
If you write engaging and useful content, the readers will click through to your website, hence driving targeted traffic to your website. With strategic guest posting, you can convert most of these traffic into subscribers. You can achieve this by offering a related giveaway that is exclusive to your readers coming from your guest posts.
There are tools online that will show a download bar only to those readers from a specific source. You can use your guest post host URL here, and show a special bonus to your acquired traffic.
Get Mentions from Other Blogs.
Since you’re guest blogging on established brands, brands following these sites will see your content, and if they like it, then they would want to post on their blogs as well. This way, you get tons of free backlinks without having to do any outreach at all.
Some bloggers are more likely to mention a website, because they have seen it somewhere, especially on established brands, whose judgment they can trust.
Grow Your Personal and Professional Network
With powerful guest posts, told in a story telling manner, will connect you with other industry leaders, and help foster your relationships. From your guest post hosts, their audience to editors you’re working with, you will always have a +1 connect or more with every guest post you write.
To foster these relationships, be present online when your blog post goes live. Respond to comments on your guest post. Be thoughtful and useful in your responses. Meet other contributors of the site. Most big companies that accept guest posts have a community base of contributors. You can interact with them via email, or via the platform is it a contributors’ only forum.
Get Social Media Shares
Great content attract social shares. Your guest blogging host already has an established social presence. When they share your content, other influencers are most likely to see I, and thus a possibility of them also sharing it with their pool of audience.
To get advantage of the eyeballs that your guest post will get, consider adding highly shareable blocks in your guest post such as Infographic, tweetable text blocks etc.
Grow Your Social Media Following.
Apart from getting organic social media shares, guest blogging can help grow your social media following. In the author bio, you have an option to include your social media accounts, make sure you add the ones that are essential to your business growth.
Since you are writing for an authoritative website, you’re indirectly getting them to vouch for you and/or your brand. Thus, their followers are more likely to follow you based on the trust that your guest post instills in them.
Become an Information Source (Authority)
By contributing your stories, articles, executable plans and strategies on others’ blogs, you are improving your online authority.
Remember that people buy from brands they trust. By regularly seeing your content in reputable publications, your potential audience and customers begin to associate your brand/ your name with value.
When they finally visit your site, they will be more likely engaged, subscribing to your lists or booking consultations with you.
Boost Your Brand.
Brand awareness is an important aspect of digital marketing. When guest blogging for brand awareness, ensure you maintain consistencies in areas such as company name, anchor texts, your brand story, your brand voice etc.
You need to learn how to cleverly but naturally mention your brand in your guest posts in a way that you do not seem salesy. No one likes being sold to anymore. No big publication will publish content that is purely self-promotional.
Get High Quality Backlinks.
The main reason why SEOs experts do guest posting is backlinks. Editorial backlinks are still a major ranking factor that is used by most search engines such as Google and Bing. When you write a guest blog, include one or two relevant links that link back to your site.
To build relevancy and help search engines discover and index your content, guest blog on authoritative websites that are under your niche.
Build Your Email List and Generate leads
If done right, one guest post can get you 2000 email subscribers. If guest blogging for list building, then you want to ensure that you add a bonus section/read more section in your guest post that outlines free resources that can help your readers implement the content of your guest post. Include your resource there.
The other thing you need to be concerned with when list building using guest posts is your landing page. You want to make it as user friendly as much as possible.
Since these are highly targeted traffic, then you have a list of qualified leads who are more likely to buy from you or follow your recommendations.
Read also: 9 Best List Building Tools for Your Blog
Improved SEO rankings
Great content, improved social shares and follower growth, and quality backlinks all help to increase your SEO rankings.
You might also want to write your guest post with SEO in mind, Your guest post, if indexed and ranked high, will mean more visits to your guest post, hence more shares and backlinks.
Get Better at Content Marketing. Guest blogging is the best way to fine-tune your content marketing skills. By deploying it, you get to learn and fine tune content marketing skills such as content creation, pitching, cold emailing, content editing, editorial workflow, content tools, content marketing etc.
Thus, guest blogging helps you position yourself in several facets of content marketing.
Conclusion
There are several benefits of guest blogging, and as a content marketer/strategist, guest blogging should be one of the areas that you give priority. Guest blogging has been said to be five times better than blogging on your own website.
To get started with guest blogging benefits, have a look at this massive list of guest blogging sites in various niches.
