If you are a blogger, you must be familiar with the concept of guest posting. As businesses realize the value of publishing content for marketing purposes, more and more companies are getting involved in blogging. This has given rise to ghostwriting and guest posting. Even those who have a blog of their own like to look for guest blogging opportunities for building links on their blog. It is both a hobby and a means to enhance your blog or site’s SEO.
Before we look into how guest posting benefits businesses, let’s define what guest blogging is.
What is a Guest Post?
A guest post is a blog article written by one person and published on another person’s blog. When you write a post on your blog, you can mention your name as the author. But when you are writing for some other blog, you are a ‘guest’ on that blog. So anything that you post on some other blog will be termed as a ‘guest post’. There is no author’s name on guest posts.
Guest posts have value for the reputation and marketing of businesses. Almost every blog these days has some author-attributed posts and some guest posts. It is difficult for the blog owner to make regular posts without fail because one person has limited capacity to do that. That’s why people and companies that run blogs encourage guest posting. It is a means to get more quality content published on your blog in a shorter time frame, which the blogger alone would have taken a long time to do so. Since most bloggers know the more they publish, the more their blog’s search rankings rise, almost all bloggers welcome guest blogging, and companies even hire individuals as guest bloggers for their blog.
On the other hand, if someone is into guest posting for free, that means they are trying to get their word out by mentioning their brand name in the posts that they make. By doing that, they are probably creating a link back to their blog or website. In short, guest posting is always a win-win situation, regardless of whether the guest blogger is paid or not. It benefits both parties, the blog owner on whose blog the guest posts are made and the guest blogger who’s doing the guest posting.
How Does Guest Posting Benefit Your Business?
Guest posting is perfect for the marketing of your business. It complements your marketing efforts in several ways. When a company allows or welcomes guest posts on their blog, they get the following benefits.
- It helps a business get a competitive edge over others regarding its word spread across the internet. This happens when a blog owner becomes a guest blogger on other people’s blogs.
- It establishes links between various blogs. This link building is a deliberate process to enhance the search engine optimization of websites and blogs. It means you do guest posting and mention your brand in your post. On the mention of your brand, you insert a link to your brand website. The other blog and yours will be interconnected, allowing search engine bots to crawl your website even more, as part of a larger network.
- It gives a blogger time to rest while guest bloggers fill their blogs with new articles. We know that to keep a blog high in search rankings, it needs to have fresh content posted regularly. If only one person is doing the job of posting on a job, he will get too exhausted. That’s why getting guest bloggers for every blog helps in maintaining the pace of posting new articles.
- Guest posting fills up a blog with articles written from different perspectives. This gives a variety to blog visitors to read different kinds of posts. If the same person writes all the articles on a blog, there is a chance that the content would become monotonous and boring. Guest posting is good for diversifying the topics and the way each topic is discussed on a blog.
- When an individual or a company’s representative makes guest posts on other blogs that get a good amount of traction, all the new traffic can start flowing into the company’s website through the links established.
- Guest posting enhances a business’s network, giving it more access to influencers who have a good following on social media. This enables companies to use influencer marketing to increase their sales further.
- Most blogs have the feature built to allow readers to share the blog posts on their social media. Guest posting makes your article and thus your word available for being shared on social media through different blogs. Wherever your guests posts are, they can be shared from there by the readers of that blog.
- This works the other way round too. Guest posting can potentially grow your social media following. You can insert links to your social media profiles into your guest posts, which increases the chances of people visiting those profiles and starting to follow them. This is just like individuals or companies inserting social media icons on their landing pages to integrate their website with their social media pages.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
- When you contribute to an authoritative blog, you are establishing yourself in the eyes of the blog’s audience as an expert in the topic at hand. This might entice them to learn more about you and your brand. In other words, guest posting helps you enhance your online authority.
- Being a guest blogger enables you to fortify your backlink profile. Most blogs that allow guest posts allow the guests to insert at least one link to their website. These backlinks make your blog or site more discoverable by Google bots. Since your backlinks need to be relevant and make sense, it is best to find guest blogging opportunities on blogs covering the same niche as yours.
- All the benefits mentioned above combined lead to more brand equity and generate more leads for your business. The key to getting here is to choose the right websites to write guest posts on. You should publish your guest posts on sites within the same niche that already have a substantial amount of traffic flowing to them.
- Guest blogging helps you get more feedback from the community. If there are more blogs where your posts are published, and your brand name is mentioned, your readers can then share their thoughts and feedback about your brand in the comments section. You can use this added feedback to design your next marketing strategy.
How to Guest Post?
The best way to do guest posting is to follow a proper step-by-step procedure. This will help you get all the benefits of guest blogging mentioned above.
- Determine the goals that you want to achieve through guest blogging. It is good to have clear set goals for the effectiveness of your efforts at the end of the process.
- Discover relevant guest blogging opportunities. Find blogs that are targeting a similar audience as yours and preferably have a good number of visitors.
- Once you have selected which blogs you want to post on, create a pitch and contact the blog owner.
- Next, once the blog owner accepts you as a guest blogger, start writing a post that’s worth publishing. Find out about the blog’s policy regarding guest posting. Make sure you follow all the rules that the blog owner specifies for you.
- Once you have submitted your post and it’s published, keep an eye out for the post traffic. See if anyone makes comments on it. Gather any feedback that you get. Keep checking in your own blog’s statistics if any traffic is coming to your blog from your guest posts made on other blogs. If you build your blog in Strikingly, you will have access to Strikingly statistics too.
Image taken from Strikingly
Guest posting is beneficial to your business and a fun activity, especially for those who like to write. At Strikingly, we hire guest bloggers to write interesting articles on web development and related topics. We publish new articles on the Strikingly blog every day to help keep up with the search rankings. We also encourage our guest bloggers to mention our users’ websites in their articles to boost our users’ businesses in terms of SEO and brand awareness.
Image taken from Strikingly
Strikingly is a website builder that enables you to build a website or a blog in simple steps. Once you sign up for a free Strikingly account, it will take you to our templates page, where you get to choose your web design from various website templates. If you started with guest posting and now want to start your own blog, you can select one of the blog templates. Or you can choose a simple business template and then add a blog section to your site.
Image taken from Strikingly
The Strikingly editor makes it very easy for you to edit your text and images any time you like. Let’s say you make a typing or spelling mistake in one of your articles. You wouldn’t need to change any code to correct it. You can click on the misspelled word and fix it right there in the editor. If you hire guest bloggers for your blog, they can also use the Strikingly editor through their account and publish their articles directly on your blog. This will save you a lot of time in running your blog effectively.
Guest posting is good for your business. On top of that, using Strikingly to build a blog for your business and then welcoming guest posts on it is even better.
