Blogging is a marvelous tool for reaching an audience, but its potential extends beyond your own company’s blog. Even if you’re already familiar with the benefits of blogging for your business, you may not have considered the value of guest blogging. Becoming a prolific guest blogger—or even an occasional one—can help you build your online reputation, attract the attention of potential new clients, and establish yourself as an authority within your industry.
What Are the Benefits of Guest Blogging?
Before you make the decision to devote any amount of your time, energy, and resources to guest blogging, you should first decide what you hope to achieve by doing it. Setting clear goals for your guest blogging will help to ensure that you have a way to measure how successful this venture was, and it will help you decide how much time to dedicate to it in the future. These are some of the most important reasons to consider guest blogging as a business:
Earning backlinks for your website.
Building backlinks should be central to every company’s online content strategy. The more backlinks your website has, the better your search engine results are likely to be. Writing guest blogs for another website is one of the best ways to earn high-quality backlinks to your own site.
Building your website traffic.
If you have a website, one of your major challenges is simply bringing in new visitors. If your website isn’t building traffic, its usefulness to your business will be limited. If you want to spread the word about your site, one of the most effective methods is to write an article for another website that includes a link back to one of your landing pages. If readers enjoy your guest blog, they’re likely to visit your business’ website to find out more.
Establishing your reputation in your field.
Let’s face it—anybody can have a blog. While having a high-quality blog is important, you can enhance your reputation still more by guest blogging for other sites. The fact that you are given the opportunity to do this at all makes a significant statement about how knowledgeable and trustworthy you are. If you want to start growing your reputation as an established authority, guest blogging will be essential to your strategy.
Getting Started with Guest Blogging
If you’re like most business bloggers, you may not be sure how to break into the world of guest blogging—what subjects you should tackle, which sites you should reach out to, or how many times you should guest blog. Here are some tips you should keep in mind for beginning your career as a guest blogger:
Look for sites in your industry.
It’s important to use your guest blogging time wisely, and to seek out opportunities that will actually be valuable for your reputation. You should look for a blog within your field, with an existing audience that will be interested in what you have to say—and could potentially be drawn to your website. Don’t pitch—that is, propose a guest post—anywhere until you have settled on a high-quality blog.
Read the blog before you pitch.
Before you propose a guest post, it’s imperative that you take the time to read the blog and get a sense of its style, subject matter, and general attitude. Look at the kind of posts that pop up most frequently as you scroll through the blog. Study the writing style, and ask yourself what kind of audience they are targeting. The better you understand a blog, the better equipped you will be to write for it.
Study other guest bloggers.
It’s a good idea to do a Google search for popular guest bloggers in your industry. Take a look at the sites they are writing for, and read their posts carefully. If you’re planning to pitch to a specific blog, look for other guest posts that have appeared there. How long are they, and what format do they use? How many times were they shared? What qualities characterize the most popular posts?
Look for opportunities to guest blog.
Be alert to opportune moments to pitch to other blogs. If your business’ name pops up in a blog or a social media post, it could be a great time to reach out and propose a guest post. You should also keep an eye on popular industry blogs and look for news trends that you could write about. Don’t let a unique opportunity pass you by—it could be the boost you need to begin growing your online audience.
If you’re planning to start guest blogging, you need a way to ensure that all of the posts you write are well-researched and deftly written. The team at Pennington Creative can provide you with the fantastic content you need to build your reputation as an authority in your field. We can develop and write original blog copy for a wide range of industries, customizing our work to meet your specific needs. If you’d like to learn more about how our services can help you achieve your online goals, contact us today.
