Guest Blogging is Critical to Marketing and Business

Guest Blogging is Critical to Marketing and Business:  from Business 2 Community by David Mercer
Gaining exposure on high traffic sites with a guest blog post is one of the best ways to get more traffic for your business. Becoming a regular guest blogger will help to earn you more followers, and income.
Ultimately, it’s a numbers game. The more readers you can reach, the more likely you are to attract new fans, followers and customers.
This article is going to talk about why it is important to create guest blogs, how to do it effectively, show how industry professionals are doing it, and discuss how to measure the ROI (Return on Investment) for guest blogs.

Guest blogging considerations

Writing guest blogs can be a time consuming and difficult job. Often, high quality sites are really busy and simply don’t have the time to discuss your ideas for a new article or post. Simply getting on their radar can be a frustrating, time consuming exercise.
In addition, any content you write for someone else helps drive organic search traffic to their site, not your own.
But these are relatively, small prices to pay if you go about guest blogging correctly.
Talking of which, it’s important to note that I am talking about guest blogging – not submitting your RSS feed to a blog network. With Google on the warpath about cleaning up duplicate content, or content that has little value, it is important to understand that only original and unique content will create lasting value going forward.

What’s so good about guest blogging?

The highly beneficial aspects to guest blogging far outweigh the less positive aspects. Here are some of the top reasons to write a guest blog post:

• Guest blogging associates you with other high quality sites
• Guest blogging exposes you to a new readership
• Backlinks associated with guest blogging help increase your own PageRank and position in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)
• Guest blogging helps to drive highly engaged referral traffic
• Guest blogging forces you to make new contacts and connections
• Guest blogging helps establish you as an authority and source of information in your industry niche

Integrate guest blogging into your overall marketing strategy as soon as possible. Regular guest posts of high quality make you an attractive proposition for other high quality sites looking for great content. In other words, great guest posts can lead to invites to further guest posts on larger platforms.

How to choose appropriate sites and blogs for your guest posts

Since blogging is resource intensive in terms of time and effort, it is important that you find the best blogs and sites for your guest content. Which ones are right for you depends on your own particular niche, writing style, and so on.
However, you can make the right choice by factoring in the following:

• How similar is their content to your own?
• Is their audience likely to be interested in your blog or business?
• Do they offer backlinks and an author bio?
• How large is their audience (traffic volumes)?

Ideally, you want to write for blogs and sites that have more or similar traffic to your own. There’s no point in offering to write a guest blog for a site that has no viewership – the whole point is to drive you new readers to your own business and blog.

Who’s guest blogging?

I always think it’s important to back things up by demonstrating (if possible) how things work in practice. When it comes to guest blogging, there is no shortage of great examples. The fact of the matter is that “anyone who is successfully driving traffic has created content for other sites“.
It’s almost easier to try find someone who hasn’t written a guest blog. Here’s a list of great guest blogs written by various leading bloggers, marketers, social media types, and so on:

• Blog Smarter: Don’t Just End Up Trading Hours for Dollars by Sunil on Problogger
• 5 User-Friendly Tools for Building Your Online Portfolio by Heather Huhman on Mashable
• 13 Website Social Optimization Oversights That Make You Look Foolish by Angie Schottmuller on Search Engine Watch
• Altruism makes cold hard business sense when it comes to social media. by David Mercer (me) on social media today

Take note of the fact that often the guest blogger is praised in some form or another for their contribution to the guest site or blog. Also note the amount of social engagement (by looking at the amount of views, retweets and other social shares generated) and exposure these blog posts created.

Analyzing the ROI for guest blog posts

The ROI for guest blogs can be tricky to calculate, because, like any content, the return may take days, weeks or even years to materialize.
Return may come in the form of additional social media following from people clicking the “follow this author” button in the guest blog bio. It may come in the form of a spike in traffic that leads to additional ad or affiliate revenue. It may even manifest itself in additional sales or business.
Any good analytics software, like Google analytics will allow you to isolate and analyze referral traffic from guest posts. In this sense, you are able to get a fairly good idea of what the direct traffic and associated benefits are.
However, guest blogging should really be thought of as brand or business building. It’s not necessarily something that has a direct and immediate return on investment. However, the positive effects and rewards of a high quality guest blog post can be long lasting, far reaching and sometimes, exceed your wildest imagination.

Guest blogging resources

Take a look at these resources that can help you find places to write guest blog posts, or help you be more successful as a contributing writer:

• Guest Blogging Tools and Advice: Interview with James Agate
• 25 Guest Blogging Resources
• ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
• Blogging All-in-One For Dummies
• Guest blog for Site prebuilder