Guest blogging is a powerful marketing strategy for both businesses and marketers. As a business owner, guest posting allows you to increase traffic to your site, provide engaging content to your readers, and attract new audiences loyal to the blogger. The guest blogger enjoys backlinks on your blog post, which creates a win-win situation for your business and the guest writer. As a mutually beneficial venture, guest blogging is a content marketing strategy worth considering.
What are the Pros?
1. Establishing Your Online Authority
Converting readers and loyal subscribers into paying customers takes trust. By publishing quality content, you build your business as an authority on the subject matter. As your blog continues to produce informative posts, you generate trust between your brand and your readers. Search bots also hunt for quality posts, which means that your business blog stands to grow organically. By inviting bloggers with a high domain ranking, you also stand a chance to improve your website’s search ranking. With every dofollow link to your post, you increase the link juice to your website, which progresses your domain authority.
2. Improved Exposure to Target Traffic
Traffic is the heartbeat of any website or blog. Guest posts are a great way to develop traffic to your site because they provide different information to your readers and pave the way for new audiences. Remember, that since your guest blogger is also looking for exposure, you benefit from any backlinks they make to your website on their blog or social media pages.
3. Growing Brand Awareness
Guest posting is an excellent opportunity to improve your brand visibility. By establishing your authority in a specific niche, your blog post attracts new readers and repeat readers who may be interested in subscribing to your blog. Your guest blogger also introduces their audience to your website through backlinking and social media sharing. As the guest blogger amplifies their message, your brand gains recognition. Generating quality content also persuades readers to share the blog post on their social media handles, which also improves your brand awareness.
4. Building Relationships and Creating Networks
Creating a mutually beneficial relationship between your business and the guest blogger is ideal for business. You can leverage the relationship between you and a guest blogger long after the blog post for future social media marketing, content promotion, and backlinking. As the blogger expands their reach, so does your brand.
What are the Cons?
1. Reducing Your Authority
Quality content automatically ranks better on a search engine’s search results. To ensure that only quality posts gain recognition, Google has heavily cracked down on guest blogging to prevent page rank manipulation. These regulations mean that any link schemes such as publishing poor content for the sake of ranking or paying for links could see your website rank deteriorate. By posting irrelevant content on your blog, you also risk damaging your reputation and losing loyal subscribers and clients.
2. Poor Integration
Guest blog posts may provide new information to your readers, but may also introduce a different writing style that readers may not welcome. Adding fresh content to your website may be difficult, especially without a strict guideline for guest bloggers. Before publishing new content, your guest posts should be in line with your conversion funnel and generate more leads instead of eliminating them.
3. Content Syndication
Content syndication occurs when a third party republishes digital content on their website. Understandably, no webmaster desires another site to benefit from their content more than they are. In most cases, as the webmaster, you expect to reserve exclusive rights to the publishing of the guest post. Unfortunately, as a webmaster, you have no control over guest bloggers who choose to republish their content. Aside from being penalized for sharing similar blogs, your website may also rank lower since search engines have no way of verifying the source of the blog.
4. Failure to Follow Through
Guest bloggers might not follow through on their promise to deliver quality articles within an agreed timeline or not deliver at all. Since they are working for free, your blog might fall last on their priority list after their paid assignments. To avoid constant email and messaging battles with your guest blogger, ensure you research their previous work relationships to confirm if they keep time.
How to Find the Right Guest Blogger
Finding the right guest blogger for your website will ensure that you enjoy the advantages of guest posting without sacrificing your brand’s credibility. With the few tips below, you can easily navigate the online world and find the ideal guest blogger for your website
1. Always Conduct Your Research
Before inviting a guest blogger, ensure you are fully aware of their competence. Instead of merely relying on their proposal and samples, dive further into their website to analyze the quality of their blog posts. Look at their writing style, grammar, editing, word count per blog, persuasiveness, and their knowledge in your business. You should also analyze a blogger’s social media profiles to see if they are keen on generating traffic for their content on platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.
2. Go for a Professional
Numerous marketing firms have experienced writers who can serve as ideal guest writers. Hunt among marketing pools or go for writers with sufficient knowledge in your business. Even if a blogger is a freelancer, their experience, samples, and emails should provide evidence of their writing skills. It would help if you also looked at the blogger’s domain authority and website hosting to ensure that you maximize the SEO benefits of guest blogging. Lastly, ensure that your guest blogger is fully aware of relevant keyword research, long-tail keywords, titles, and meta descriptions required to improve your blog post rankings.
3. Analyze Their Linking Pattern
As Google continues to crack down on backlinks, you need to ensure that your website is on the safe side. Go for a guest blogger with experience so that you can analyze the number of backlinks they hide in a blog post. Do they sacrifice quality for keywords and links, or do they focus on SEO and quality over links to their site? Be on the lookout for blackhat SEO strategies that seek to manipulate search engine algorithms in a quest to improve search rankings.
4. Have a Strict Guideline
Rather than relying on a single writer, invite several bloggers to submit guest posts and provide a strict set of guidelines. Your rules will help you sift incompetent bloggers and leave you with those worth your time. Review each article and hire an editor if necessary to ensure that you select nothing short of excellent.
5. Ask for Exclusivity
To prevent content syndication, request exclusive rights over the guest post before signing on a blogger. With exclusivity, you can flag any duplicate posts made by the blogger or delete your post should the blogger decide to repost the content on another website.
6. Have a Disclaimer
Disclaimers distance you from any negative opinions a guest post might bring up. You have probably seen disclaimers at the top or bottom of the page, clearly stating that any opinions voiced in a guest post belong to the blogger and are not a representation of the website.
Conclusion
Undertaking a guest writing program is resource-intensive as it requires time and critical analysis. However, guest posting establishes your online authority, improves traffic to your website, contributes to lead generation, grows your brand awareness, and builds relationships. Through intensive research, strict guidelines and commitment, your business will reap the benefits of guest posting.
With over 10+ years of experience in marketing and design, Jiun help businesses manage and execute marketing campaigns, track goal metrics, develop SEO-friendly content, optimize the buyer lifecycle, and collaborate with multiple partners, vendors, and press to maximize a brand’s lead acquisition strategy. Her background in marketing, graphic design, and front-end web development allows her to easily plan, communicate, and develop projects to meet your organizational goals.
Healthy and Fitness
Every blogger should read this article before starting Guest Blog Post. Very good article with complete analysis of pros and cons of Guest Blog Post.