At first glance, guest blogging doesn’t seem attractive.
You put a lot of
work into developing a great piece of content, then give it away so someone
else can publish it on their blog and benefit from it. That sounds a bit
weird, doesn’t it?
Even though it may sound a bit strange, many bloggers, authors and
entrepreneurs still guest blog on multiple sites. Watch the experts such
as Richard Branson, Seth Godin, Neil Patel and many others. They are all
guest blogging.
Does blogging make sense to you?
It doesn’t make sense to you? Why would someone publish an excellent
article as a guest post when they could publish it on their own blog to
drive more sales and generate more ad revenue?
Related:
Welcome to Guest Blogging 101
Well, there’s more than one reason why guest blogging is so popular and by
the time you’re done with this article, I’m sure you’ll get to work on a
guest blogging strategy as well. Keep reading to find out why.
Even though it doesn’t cost you any money to get in contact with a blog to
get permission to publish a guest post, it will still cost you your
valuable time to write a quality blog post, and time is more valuable than
money. So, is it worth investing your time on guest blogging? The answer
is yes. It’s worth every second of your time.
The founder of Mob is It, Silvio Porcellana, managed to grow his
website
search traffic by 20 percent
using guest blogging and even got his domain authority boosted by five
points. All he did was publish 44 blog posts on 41 separate websites.
Here’s how guest blogging helps grow your blog audience:
Related:
Five Lessons Learned the Hard Way for Building an Authority Website
1. Reach specific audiences.
To develop a successful blog, you need have a
target audience. Your entire blog will be built around this audience when you publish
content targeting them. However, just posting blog posts and hoping for
your audience to discover your blog will never work. You need to reach out
to this audience and promote your blog.
One of the best benefits of guest blogging is that it gives you the
opportunity to reach specific audiences through popular blogs in your
industry. This lets you leverage the established audiences of these blogs
to get the word out about your own website. In other words, guest blogging
allows you to steal an audience for your site from other established blogs.
Related:
Five Ways to Build an Audience for Your Blog
2. Improve SEO with free backlinks.
Search engine optimization is another important strategy that helps
grow your website traffic. The number of backlinks you have on your website
plays a crucial role when it comes to ranking your blog on Google.
Whenever a high authority blog links to your website, Google considers it
as a positive signal toward your blog. Your blog becomes more important and
it gives your site a boost in search rankings. The more backlinks you have,
the higher you rank on Google Search.
Brian Dean of Backlinko managed to grow his blog traffic by 110 percent by
building backlinks. He used a strategy called the
skyscraper technique, which involves a ton of work. Guest blogging, however, is much easier.
So, even if you don’t get a ton of referral traffic from your guest blog
posts, it will still help improve your website SEO.
Related:
10 Smart Ways to Earn or Build Backlinks
3. Drive traffic to landing pages.
Without a doubt, guest blogging will bring a lot of visitors to your site.
Having a proper strategy in place to direct this traffic to the right place
on your blog will allow you to make the most of your referral traffic.
Just driving traffic to your homepage is not going to do you any good.
Instead, you can
create landing pages
on your blog and link to these landing pages from your guest blogs to
direct referral traffic and turn them into leads and customers.
Related:
17 Ways To Immediately Improve Your Website Traffic
4. Build authority.
Getting published on a high authority blog is not easy, but it’s possible.
This is a great way to
build authority
for your blog as well.
When you get published on a reputable blog, your audience will also see you
as a professional and an expert. Once your authority improves, more people
will recommend your website to their friends and share your articles
without hesitation.
You will begin to get more opportunities to do interviews for other blogs
and podcasts. You may even land yourself a public speaking gig—which really
boosts your visibility.
Even though you’re publishing guest blogs for free, always focus on
creating high-quality content. This will ensure the best outcome from your
guest blogging efforts. Guest blogging is about reaching bigger audiences
and expanding your horizons. It’s also an effective marketing strategy that
will bring you results over a long period of time.
Syed Balkhi is an online marketing expert. A version of this article
originally appeared
on Entrepreneur. Copyright © 2017 Entrepreneur Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
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