Businesses have been thriving off of word-of-mouth referrals since the time the first caveman sold flint to his neighbors. It pays to have friends and nowhere is this more true than on the internet. While there are a lot of ways to get a boost with a little help from your friend, guest blogging has grown in popularity in recent years. From referral traffic to enhanced search engine ranking, here’s how guest blogging can help you win more customers.
What is Guest Blogging?
Before considering the benefits of guest posting, it’s important to know what it is. Guest blogging, also known as guest posting, is the act of creating a new piece of content specifically for another website with links that lead back to your own website. Typically guest blogging is done on a website in a relevant industry or topic, but not a direct competitor. For example, a lawn service may choose to guest post on a deck builder’s website but likely wouldn’t seek out to post on a competing lawn service’s website. This provides new content for the person posting the article and incentives for the blog’s real author.
Reach New Audiences
One of the biggest advantages of guest posting is exposure to an entirely new audience. It’s word-of-mouth advertising for the digital age! Guest posting allows you to get your content in front of people that may have only been previously accessible through paid ads. Guest blogs are often credited to their original authors, but look and feel more like organic, rather than sponsored, content. This can lead to more trust and a higher click-through rate.
Increase Referral Traffic
Referral traffic is the website visitors that come to your website from a link on another website that isn’t Google, Bing, or another search engine. These visitors are often warm leads because they get to your website by engaging with your content or information on another site.
Guest blogs should have relevant (read: not forced) links to your website or landing pages sprinkled throughout. Be mindful to include other sources when writing guest blogs or you’ll risk your “organic” looking post getting a suspiciously “paid ad” feel which will reduce your credibility and visits.
Guest Blogging Builds Up Backlinks
One of the factors that go into how you rank with search engines like Google is the amount and type of backlinks your website has. Backlinks are exactly what they sound like: links back to your website. Search engines consider backlinks to be a sign of trust. If Site A likes and trusts the content on Site B enough to link to it, then it must be trustworthy. Quality matters with backlinks, though. If you have a lot of spammy, poor-quality websites linking to yours, you can lose ranking from your association with these subpar websites. In that case, it may be useful to disavow backlinks in order to not be dragged down.
Guest blogging is a great way to reach new potential customers at a decreasing cost. All it takes is the one-time blog posting or writing commitment and you can see residual traffic from that post for months or years if you choose the right partner. Interested in guest blog posting for your website? Check out our guest posting service to get started today!
