Undoubtedly, guest blogging is currently one of the most trending things that is being done in the blogging world, or the ‘blogosphere’ as it is called by many. From new bloggers to the famous ones, all practice guest blogging for several reasons.
If you’re not really sure what guest blogging actually is, here is a quick introduction.
What Is Guest Blogging?
Guest Blogging is the act of writing and posting an article on any other blog than the self-owned one. The author generally gets a credit in the form of 2 main things –
- Name (The credit of the article is given to the author)
- Backlink(s) for improving the site’s rankings (Discussed later in this article)
- The authority and duty to reply to the comments made on the post, if applicable.
Note that if the article does not have any author credit apart from the backlink, it is likely to be a ‘Paid Post’ where a site owner pays a certain amount to the blog owner to provide a clean backlink from within the article.
While there is a huge number of webmasters who are making a negative use of guest blogging, there are far more positive things that one obtains from the same. If you’re a blog/site owner and haven’t yet started guest blogging, continue reading this article as you’re going to find some worthy benefits of doing the same. If you’re an experienced blogger, it is likely that you’ve already started guest blogging but you’re yet welcome to read this article further!
Why Should You Practice Guest Blogging?
Following are some key reasons why you should involve in the ever-beneficial act of guest blogging.
1) Foundation Of Your Reputation
A reputation, in the ‘Online World’ is simply defined as the number of people who respect you, are interested in what you provide and trust your advice/suggestions. Just getting known by anonymous people around the world cannot be regarded as your reputation.
In guest blogging, you usually choose blogs which already have a huge (the word means a lot) readership and many readers at that blog are engaging – meaning that they do appreciate the good and they do correct the incorrect. Hence when you post an article on a well-reputed blog, it is read by a great number of people – which would take a lot of time if it was your own blog because not many are aware about your existence. To increase that, social media helps a lot as you get to know a huge number of people you’ve never met before. So by reaching out to the readers using other blogs as a platform, you tend to increase your social media friends, which obviously define your reputation.
2) The Push To Your Blog/Site
Any blog/site is built to receive traffic – which is really hard for the beginners no matter what they try. Traffic is built eventually and that said, it also clearly means that there is no overnight success to build traffic (unless you go for the non-recommended black hat SEO). Any successful blogger would surely say the same thing.
Many are confused to believer that guest blogging is proven to be a great source of traffic. This is because they think the “The article is being read on the other blog – so how am I getting traffic”? In a way, the question is relevant, but here’s an explanation answering the same –
When a huge number of people read your post and see a different name in the author description, they usually take a look at the author’s blog. This doesn’t happen for every visitor, but it surely does for a good number of those. Now, do not think that “Only One Visit per Visitor?” because those one time visitors might convert to regular readers and it all depends on you how to present your blog in front of the visitors. Hence, this does bring in a lot of traffic which you might sometimes fail to realize.
3) Grow In The Eyes Of Search Engines
Search engines love to rank quality content higher and that’s why you see some great quality pages in the top places when you search for appropriate keywords (e.g. How To Make Money Blogging). When the sample keyword is searched, the ‘First Page Results’ are filled with links that have great quality content in them. But ever wondered how that is done?
If you don’t know, something called “Pagerank” comes into action here. The higher the pagerank of your site, the better it is ranked on the search engines. One most recommended way to increase the pagerank of your site is by getting quality backlinks to it. ‘Quality Backlinks’ mean that the backlinks should be coming from high quality sites. There are many factors that influence the ‘Pagerank’, but for the moment you just need to consider backlinks from guest blogging – and you’re getting them!
4) Mounting Your Own Skills
All blog owners have different requirements for the submitted articles. Some believe in sharing personal stories, some believe in wider use of media, some believe in hardcore on-page SEO etc. This means that when you keep writing differently as per the requirement, you don’t realize but you actually develop some immense writing skills and later bring all of them out as a whole blend! This means that you awaken the skills of the writer within.
Being a good writer further helps in being a better guest blogger, and the cycle starts again and it is a never ending cycle of building relationships, getting traffic, impressing the search engines and again increasing your writing skills, and the cycle continues!
Conclusion
If you haven’t started guest blogging yet, it’s never too late. Start with one post and see the results – you would definitely crave to write and get the second one published! Just make sure you choose the blogs to guest post wisely. Doing it for a friend is good, but even that blog needs to have some well-maintained reputation.