Guest Blogging for Your Content Marketing Strategy

May 31, 2015

Guest blogging is still relevant

By Maureen McCabe

You may have considered guest blogging as part of your small business marketing strategy to increase your online presence and reputation. When you are new at guest blogging, you want to choose small media outlets to build your content portfolio. Then you can approach larger media sources such as the Huffington Post or Forbes and provide them with your portfolio, as this is a typical requirement for well-known online mediums.

You may think that guest blogging is not relevant anymore, especially after Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, wrote about its decline. However, he was saying that there is a right way and a wrong way to guest blog. You should not do it solely for link-building purposes, such as including as many links as you can, or buying links that pass PageRank. Link building should not be your only strategy, so you have to make sure you are guest blogging for other reasons. Most importantly, it should be about writing quality content and providing value to readers.

Let’s dive into the right reasons to guest blog:

Audience Reach

Being a guest blogger on a company’s website can get you and your business in front of a larger audience. The company will have followers that may not already know about you, so you are able to increase your visibility. Another small business marketing idea is for both the guest blogger and the company you’re blogging for to share the post on social media. That way you are expanding your audience even further in order to increase engagement and sales.

One piece of advice is to make sure you only write blogs for websites that fit your small business marketing strategy and connects you with the right target audience. Research a few websites you would like to write a blog for and take note of how much engagement their previous posts have been receiving. Then you can decide which website would be best for visibility and audience engagement.

Increase Authority

Look for websites that already have authority. This means the website publishes quality content that is well recognized and respected by industry experts. When you are approved to be a guest blogger, it means that the company is vouching for your credibility and your content’s originality. Search engines consider it a vote of confidence, especially with backlinks, and assume that your website is important and a valuable resource. Therefore, you can begin to rank better organically on search engines such as Google or Bing than if you were to use your own domain to post the blog.

Another goal is to get your guest blog on the first page of a search engine, as opposed to page three or four (which typically doesn’t get much visibility). This will drive traffic to your website through the backlink in your blog, and potentially increase lead generation and sales.

Mutually Beneficial Relationship

Guest blogging provides an advantage to both parties. The company is receiving a new perspective and fresh content to post on their website. This can give the company’s website a boost in search engine rankings, especially if your guest blog reflects current news and information, and it also garners attention from commenters and social media shares.

The guest blogger gets the advantage of producing content for a well-respected company that can help you develop your profile as an industry expert. The more frequently you post for the same company, the more trust and online authority you can build. If the audience enjoys your post, they can start following you on social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, or visit your website. It may take some time to build traction and see engagement with your audience while you are still building a relationship with them. However, in order to provide a valuable blog to your audience, you need to produce quality content. That means you need to do research and put time into writing the blog. After all, that’s what Cutts has been trying to say all along.

Remember to follow search engine guidelines and policies when you are guest blogging as you can be penalized and dropped from the results page. Those guidelines and policies catch spammers who only guest blog as a way to generate links.

For more information about blogging for small business, check out these posts:

Tips for Submitting Your Listing to Online Business Directories
Using a Keyword Search Tool to Create Great Blog Post Ideas
Eight Tips on how Blogging Increases Your Website Ranking

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