What began on America Online as a teenage fad has expanded into a full fledged marketing technique with its own lingo and celebrity subculture. Bloggers are the gatekeepers of the opinions of the Internet, and guest blogging is not only an honor, but can also be a bonafide business enhancer.
Guest blogging here will be defined as blogging on any site other than your own. It can be one of the highest ROI activities for an Internet marketer, and is well worth the effort in terms of sales, retention, visibility, and turnover.
Here are 5 Major Benefits of Guest Blogging
1. Free exposure for increased traffic
If this was the only reason that you chose to guest blog, it could be well worth it. Guest blogging gives you the free exposure to what could be a completely new audience. Guest blogging also allows you to turn this increased traffic to your own blog. Keep in mind: Though this is not an instant overnight traffic spike, the fact is that if you continue to be seen as a guest blogger on other sites, people will begin to take notice and give your own site more traffic.
If you can, try to guest blog on web sites with similar / relevant interests. If so, you can attach added relevance to your posts and give yourself the reputation of an expert in your field.
2. Opening more doors for yourself.
You can open gateways to many other venues by guest blogging. There is never anything bad about building relationships with webmasters and the audiences of those webmasters. You never know what new professional and personal doors could be opened for you from guest blogging.
3. Guest blogging benefits your search engine optimization.
Ever since the Google Panda update, staying relevant is more a matter of total experience for your audience rather than any single metric, like number of keywords or number of one way backlinks. The major search engines are also constantly changing their algorithms, but one thing remains the same: If you are seen as relevant on many sites and your name keeps popping up for relevant and similar search terms, all the pages that you are on will experience a rise in search engine placement. You will be seen as an expert and trusted by humans and by search engine algorithms, which creates a positive whirlwind that builds upon itself.
4. Guest blogging improves your standing in social media.
Aside from the major search engines, having a social media presence is the best way to get yourself noticed by both new and old customers. Staying relevant in the cluttered market of today means that you hold personal recommendations from a community and respect within that community. Social media presence builds that more quickly than any form of Internet marketing, and guest blogging is the easiest way to put your name everywhere without hard selling it and turning others off by being annoying.
The more content that you have to play with, the more links you can post, the more pages you will have ranked in search engines, and the more visible your name will be in the public eye.
5. You will be seen as an expert.
People want to be advised by an expert. Guest blogging shows that other gatekeepers of public opinion, namely blog hosts, trust you. If they trust you, then their audiences will trust you.
Do not be afraid to give out free information. You can give away as much as you want to about your product or service; the fact is that most people simply do not have the time to implement any solution you may recommend and would rather simply pay you to do it.
Write “how to” articles and answer questions in forums that are related to your website. Once you get the regulars asking questions directly to you via private message or thread, you know that you have gained their respect as an expert.