Guest blogging is an effective way to grow your brand and build your visibility. It is a great way to gain exposure for your blog and build your brand. It’s also a great way to generate leads, traffic, and sales.
Guest blogging is one of the most effective ways to get quality links and shares on social media. It can also help you get more backlinks from other sites that link out to you.
Guest blogging is a great way for marketers to reach out to new audiences. It also helps to establish your brand as an expert in your field. So, if you are looking for a new strategy, it might be worth considering.
An introduction is an important part of any article, so we need to make sure that it is both convincing and relevant. Guest blogging is a great way to get your content in front of new audiences and build relationships. However, it can be difficult to know what makes a good guest post so you can write one that will get accepted.
Table of Contents
What Is Guest Blogging?
Guest blogging, as well as guest posting, is a content marketing and SEO strategy in which individuals write articles for other websites to promote their brands and businesses.
Commonly, guest bloggers write content for websites and blogs which are related to their industry and have a broader audience.
The created content will help guest bloggers in many ways:
- Introduce brands to more relevant audiences
- Get traffic back to their sites
- Enhance domain authority
- Establish ties with peers in the industry
- Raise brand awareness and credibility
As a type of influencer, bloggers are familiar with posting high-quality content on their blogs to interact with followers. By placing articles freely outside of their sites, they might attract more audiences to their online journals while helping website owners increase their reach and rank higher in search engines. This strategy is relatively a win-win approach for both sides.
The writer will not receive any payments from the website since this is a guest post, not a sponsored post in which you need to pay.
Google considers links as the primary criteria to rank websites. Since guest posting provides significant chances to acquire backlinks from different websites, your SEO and other marketing strategies, such as influencer marketing, will be positively affected.
Overall, guest blogging is mutually beneficial for both the guest blogger and the website hosting the guest content. Therefore, featuring articles by guest bloggers on your site, usually at the bottom of the article, which is called the Author Box, is worth considering when you start the guest posting collaboration.
Next, we will list out guest blogging benefits and some thriving examples to help you have a comprehensive look at how this type of influencer marketing campaign can help boost your business.
10 Guest Blogging Benefits
- Increase reach
- Increase credibility and establish authority online
- Freshen content strategy
- Increase the site’s ranking in search engine
- Boost traffic and SEO
- Drive sales
- Drive more qualified leads
- Support social media marketing plans
- Win-win partnerships with bloggers in the field
- Improve writing and other content marketing skills
Guest Blogging Increases Reach
According to statistics of FirstSiteGuide, in 2020 there are:
- More than 600 million blogs available on the Internet
- 77% of people read blogs online daily
- 61% of online users in the US have made a payment after reading a blog
According to the Statista Research Department, there were 27.4 million bloggers in the US in 2014. The 2016 projection showed that there would be an increase of 14% in the number of bloggers, which means there will be 31.7 million bloggers in 2020.
As we can see, the activity in the blogging market is vast, with hundreds of millions of blogs that you can find easily on the Internet every day. By having famous bloggers in the field writing for your website, you will have an excellent opportunity to attract more new customers and raise brand awareness in their niches.
Guest blogging is a relatively win-win partnership where both sides get backlinks from each other. Consequently, with guest posting, you can be quickly linked with some of the best bloggers in the industry.
As bloggers and influencers have an especially strong connection with their fans, people will start noticing your brand since they see your brand’s name coming across all of the blogger’s posts.
For example, one of the best-known media companies – O’Reilly Media, started an online blog featuring new network technologies named O’Reilly’s Radar. In the meantime, the company’s reporters, for instance, Alexander Howard – a government journalist, maintain frequent guest accounts with top online publications such as ReadWriteWeb, Huffington Post, etc.
According to the experience of large brands with plenty of online exposure, having all content on their pages doesn’t sound right. Regardless of how beneficial the constant stream of content is to other “outside” publications, your brands will be able to gain massive attention from regular guest articles on popular sites.
Increases Credibility And Establishes Authority Online
On the other hand, if you are a blogger who is looking for a chance to boost your online authority, guest blogging is what you need to start. It doesn’t matter how good your content is, if an audience doesn’t trust your brand, it is challenging to keep your viewers as loyal users or buyers.
Guest blogging adds to your image as a reliable leader in the industry. Some of the elements that define brand value are personalized content. The audience will naturally continue to see you as a creditable brand if you know the name added to the guest blog entry on a highly reputable page.
Authority not only benefits your company SEO but also helps you in future projects. To increase your customer base and boost your company income, being a well-known brand is essential.
You will show your reputation as an information source by posting high-quality and valuable content to other high-ranking blogs. Sharing your expertise and providing examples to support your point helps strengthen how people view your content. It will help your target audience realize your trustworthiness recognized by brands. Thus, they will be more responsive to any value you may offer on your site.
According to statistics from Bazaarvoice’s report:
- 84% of millennials say that user-generated content influences their purchase decisions a lot (25%) / somewhat (59%)
People who published on websites such as Hubspot and Marketing Land might be regarded in their field as more credible than anyone who does not have any guest posts. If it is too difficult for you to write for top websites, beginning with smaller ones is not a bad idea to start creating your online credibility.
Freshens Your Content Strategy
Continually creating and distributing content may sometimes make you run out of ideas. But you don’t need to worry about that anymore since now you can easily have someone who is an expert in the field that writes for you.
Guest posting opens the chance for a host blog to outsource content writers without any additional fees. It contributes to freshening the content strategy of businesses.
As well-known and knowledgeable individuals write the content, you will no longer worry about the quality of guest posts on your sites. Your readers might also enjoy this as they get to read fantastic content, which provided a different viewpoint that they didn’t expect.
For example, Salesforce (one of the largest cloud computing services as a software (SaaS) company) takes guest blogging seriously.
The guest blogging activity is popular among all the company members, from the CEO Marc Benioff to coders. CEO guest posts at TechCrunch about cloud computing and the coders guest post on Google Code’s official blog about how to build a Google Earth app for Salesforce.com Foundation grantees and how to visualize user cloud’s data.
Instead of having separate departments produce content and do the marketing job, Salesforce integrates the whole team into guest blogging. Through the incorporation within the company, they want to include as many voices as possible around the company, which emphasizes guest posting is a team effort, and Salesforce is open to hearing anything its employees want to say.
The impressive results show Salesforce’s winning of numerous contacts with bloggers and many first-hand tutorials on using its software.
Guest Blogging Increases Your Site’s Ranking In Search Engines
A backlink is a link from a website to another. Search engines, for example, Google, use backlinks as an indicator for rating. When a site links to another, it means the content is worth noting. High-quality backlinks will help websites gain a high ranking position in search engine result pages (SERP).
As backlinks are attached every time your brand appears on blog posts and vice versa, you can prove your brand value and relevance to search engines, and it will be easier for people to find your content via Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others.
However, there are still people who are writing low-quality guest posts merely to get backlinks in return. These poorly written and pay-to-win articles might be penalized by search engines as unhelpful for readers and only meant to build links. You should avoid this by establishing criteria for delivering high-quality and targeted posts whenever anyone asks to submit guest posts.
For instance, Intel, one of the world’s largest PC microprocessors, let a blogging celebrity named Ekaterina Walter, build her brand, freely write guest posts to other sites, and links back to her blog. As her guest posting career goes further, she loves working at Intel as well.
Therefore, without putting any limit or action, Intel can support its influencer employee as well as earn credibility and reputation for the company itself at the same time.
Guest Blogging Boosts Your Traffic And SEO
Although there still exists abuses of poorly written guest posts to get links, guest blogging remains robust digital marketing tactic. Nowadays, guest blogging is one of the best ways to build high-quality backlinks, which is why it also helps generate more quality traffic to your sites, boost your SEO and even enhance your return on investments (ROI).
Backlinks play the most crucial role in search engine algorithm, SEO, and your overall strategy for developing your website.
When you post on other blogs and websites, your brand is linked back to those articles. Search engines, for example, Google, will evaluate your site as relevant and useful based on how many times others cite your brand.
The more backlinks you achieve, the more traffic you gain. The higher traffic you get, the higher-ranking position your website has in SERP. Therein, a relatively high rank means more people will see and possibly access your site when searching for relevant keywords.
Besides, a single backlink from a leading blog might benefit your SEO greatly, making it simple for search engines (like Google, Bing, and other alternatives) to identify and index your content.
Your link can be placed anywhere within the article. However, the position in the body would be ideal. It will look more natural to the readers, and they will be more likely to click through to find out more about you and your brand. Attaching links in the biographical part where you talk about your background and your company is also acceptable.
Drives More Qualified Leads
Well-created and easy-to-share guest content can get backlinks to itself organically over time. Links to company pages enable the generation of referral traffic, which generates leads and high-paying clients on your website.
Guest blogging might bring you not only visitors but also other people in your industry. As you mention them as informative and qualified external links in your articles, they will notice your posts as well as be more likely to learn about your brand.
If your blog is about what they are interested in, they may contact you to guest posts or link to your site as a reliable source. Being a source will help extend your network as well as lead to collaborations and partnerships that improve your sales funnel.
Relevance is the most important criteria to consider guest posting. If you post articles on an irrelevant but popular website, you won’t get a target or qualified leads, and it’s a waste of time.
On the B2B perspectives, guest posting is one of the most powerful marketing tactics for your B2B business.
B2C sales cycles are shorter than B2B sales cycles due to the provided goods and services. For example, it takes less time for a customer to evaluate and process a mobile app purchase than a business does when it comes to a business software payment.
This difference indicates that the priority of B2C and B2B brands might also be different. It is crucial, especially with guest blogging, since it may influence the kind of publishers you target.
As B2B businesses aim to find authorized and relevant blogs to guest post, they can get in front of target customers as often as possible, which will maximize the benefits of guest blogging and drive more quality leads to the company site.
Meanwhile, a B2C brand may sometimes sacrifice the relevance factor to aim to a higher authority site since its goals are improving organic keyword rankings through backlinks.
Drive More Sales
According to Oberlo’s statistics:
- Companies that publish 16 or more posts per month receive 3.5 times more traffic than those who publish fewer than four blogs and other posts.
- 86% of content marketers use blog posts as part of their marketing strategy
- 60% of consumers say blog posts are valuable in the early stages of the buying process.
As we can see, guest blogging helps generate considerable traffic, which is the core of any online business or website. Your company sales might potentially increase with something as simple as a guest post. You can increase conversions by optimizing the landing pages, CTAs, and other website features.
Statistics summarized by FirstSiteGuide points out:
- 61% of online shoppers in the US say they purchased after getting a recommendation from a blog post
- 47% of surveyed customers admit going through 3 to 5 blog posts before buying something
- High-earning blogger have 5.6x chance of selling service or products than low-earning bloggers
Blog posts affect the customer-buying process, which directly influences the sales and returns of companies.
By posting content on popular blogs, you contribute to raising brand awareness and credibility in your target audience community. If you do it right, this can drive qualified leads to your site for conversion and sales.
You might focus mostly on offering and selling activities on your blog, guest posts, on the other hand, should be used to help expand your audience. Instead of contributing directly to the revenue, guest postings can act as a part of your sales funnel.
By reaching more potential customers via backlinks and knowledge showcases in others’ websites, guest posts will help navigate audiences to your main sites where you sell your products and services, which will boost your sales indirectly.
Guest Blogging Supports Your Social Media Marketing Plan
Social media marketing and content marketing always go together. Your social media marketing campaign will not succeed without any content to share.
Your guest blogging activities help generate fresh content that the company can use to share across social platforms. Use hashtags and links to inform your audience of the original guest posts.
If readers like your content, they will probably like, share, retweet, or comment on your posts, all of which will increase your brand visibility in communities.
Besides, if you post articles on a blog with plenty of social media activity, shares will come naturally when your content is released. In addition to the traditional format, you can add other highly sharable types of content in your guest post.
For example, infographics might help you achieve three times more social media engagement than any other kind of content, said HubSpot Research’s statistics.
Your social media profile is growing from mentions and shares. You may appear in recommendation lists of “who to follow,” which is a start for the snowball effect that can begin with a few simple guest posts.
An example of this is Evernote – a technology company that owns the Evernote mobile application designed for note-taking, organizing, task management, and archiving.
Phil Libin, the ex-CEO of the company, was a guest blogger at TechCrunch, shared the behind-the-scene procedure and first-hand experience of developing an application for iPhone. This article revealed figures, which put Evernote in the risk of competitors imitating its strategy.
The higher the risk, the greater the chance, illustrating the enormous potential to have a loyal community of supporters on social platforms.
Builds Positive Relationships Between Big Websites And Bloggers
Connecting with influencers used to be extremely difficult; however, it is simple with guest blogging nowadays.
There are many big websites, for instance, HubSpot, which accepts guest posts from a community of bloggers. Blogging communities will be an excellent opportunity for content creators to gather around and connect. At this point, the website becomes a platform that is a playground for writers to contribute and promote themselves.
No matter how the community works on different websites, your authorship is always guaranteed. Each site has its policies and terms to protect guest bloggers in their platform. Therefore, instead of worrying, all you need to do is being active in the community.
Interactions, discussions, and conversations are what make the community bigger and stronger. The better the website grows, the more beneficial your blog site will be. An invitation to other authors to guest post on your site is not a bad idea to maximize the benefit from the community.
You will expand your popularity in social media through partnerships with other bloggers through guest blogging, which eventually leads to more blog subscribers.
As a part of the guest blogging community, your site may now be more visible and get noticed by not only individuals but also businesses in the industry. The visibility is beneficial for your career as well as your brand.
Guest Post Blogging Improves Content Marketing Skills
Guest blogging is simply an activity of writing blog posts for other sites to promote your website or brand. In other words, it is also a practical way to improve your writing and marketing skills.
Practicing makes perfect, and your skills get sharpened with each article you publish. You will have a partner as well as an editor who is the website owner to help you to deliver the best posts.
Audiences who are interested in the information you provide will also help you by pointing out new ideas for improving content.
The results will be shown not only in guest posts but also in articles on your website. The more productive an author becomes, the better your site performs. You can also enroll in some online classes to improve your writing and make it to a new level.
Furthermore, throughout the process of creating guest posts, you will gradually know which content marketing strategies are the best alternative for your site.
Statistics that were provided by successful brands are average since they may work for their brand while not being useful for another. Therefore, you must find the best content strategy for your specific brand.
For example, you might find out that posts with intriguing questions as a title are more effective than simply numbered lists, single-sentence paragraphs sometimes might make it easier for readers to get your point, etc.
The whole point is that you will not know if it works until you try it. Yet guest blogging is the best way to test new strategies. It requires you to do research, implement the right style to a specific audience, perform influencer outreach, and so on.
Conclusion
Overall, guest blogging is undoubtedly a crucial step towards successful online marketing. It provides a wide range of benefits for any business, including high-quality backlinks, vast exposure to entirely new customers, authority, credibility, and positive relationship with other thought leaders in the industry.
Good things take time, and guest posting is not an exception. It requires time, dedication, effort, and a lot of patience. No matter what the result is, you will ultimately learn a lot from it.