Content creators know that building a thriving online presence can become a double edged sword given enough time. The more you write, the more your market dilution can become.
Google crawlers are interested in new and diverse content, but there comes a limit to how interesting that content can be without a developed set of backlinks that show the interests of real people as well.
This is where guest blogging can help. In fact, a well planned guest blogging campaign can act as a lifesaver for your online presence.
Benefits of guest blogging
The guest blog post is a time honored tradition of bloggers all around the world. Simply put, this is the practice of writing a post for someone else’s website rather than your own. This may seem counterintuitive; after all, you’re meant to be competing with that other blog, right?
The truth is that these other participants in your space are competitive entities, but they are also your peers. Building relationships with other blog authors and thinkers in your space is as important as creating interesting content for your own site. The relationships you forge in your professional space are key to building on the successes of today and turning them into larger wins tomorrow.
This is due in part to the behavior of indexers: search engine bots seek out content to rank and index, and higher ranked websites show up at the top of search engine results pages. And as previously mentioned, backlinks show a pattern of trust between readers and creators that Google and others reward.
Consider this example: would your readers trust the reporting of one newspaper article over a competing story breaking across six media outlets? The more exposure something has across a platform, the more seriously it is taken. The same is true for the sourcing of that exposure, so consider the political leanings of your audience for a moment. Are they more likely to consume and trust reporting from any particular outlet?
What to do in a guest post
Guest blogging is a functional method of tapping into the psyche of your readership, and by extension, cracking the code of the internet’s crawling algorithms. By curating content across other sites as well as your own, you can create a rich network of interest in your own product. Likewise, extending the opportunity to post guests’ work on your page assists in their development, which in return boosts your own.
However, with the offer to write for another site in hand, it’s important to maintain your content discipline. This is a chance that you can’t afford to squander. By maintaining the same voice or style that you employ in your own content, you can draw in like-minded readers from other areas of the market who hadn’t found your content before. This means free marketing material that can grow your pool of readers with each post sent off for publication.
But quantity does not best quality, and maintaining your rigid commitment to high quality content should not be sacrificed just because the work won’t be appearing on your platform. If anything, it’s more important than ever to be mindful of the quality of your work, since these readers may be coming to your article with nothing more than a name and short bio to go on. This means that in order to succeed, you need to know the type of audience you already appeal to and maintain your ability to spark their interest, even across platforms.
Guest blogging is a powerful tool in your arsenal to drive increased traffic to your site, but it’s one that you must employ with a solid strategy. Maintaining your professionalism and posting often will help grow your site’s online prowess.
