There are many benefits of writing guest posts. Over the last fifteen years, I have written hundreds of blog posts, some for me, some for my businesses, and others that were used as guest posts on external websites.
Today, I want to discuss eight benefits of guest posts that I have enjoyed in doing so.
- Positions you as an expert
- Helps build new relationships
- Improves your SEO
- Grows brand awareness
- Gives you credibility
- Builds your social following
- Share your knowledge
- Helps you improve your writing
So let’s get into it!
Positions you as an expert
By sharing your wisdom freely with others, then you are helping build yourself a profile as a subject matter expert in that topic. The thing about writing for a new audience, is that they likely don’t know who you are. If you are eloquent and educated enough to write on a specific topic, there’s a fairly good chance that you are an expert or close to an expert in it.
Guest blogging is a great way to grow your audience and your brand, however it’s the ease of doing so that really appeals to brands, too. No one needs to look for your content, which can only be good for SEO rankings. And the fact that people can read your content, perhaps for free, and link back to your website means your search engine optimisation is automatically boosted.
Helps build new relationships
Another one of the benefits of writing guest posts, is that it helps you meet new contacts and build new relationships. Over a decade ago, I had a book about freelancing be published. The reason I managed to get that publishing deal is because of the blog posts I had written on this very blog! The publishers had seen these blog posts and approached me to write a book. Amazing! That wouldn’t have happened, had it not been for my blog posts.
By getting involved with other people and brands you are helping them and building new relationships. What is great about guest blogging is that it can help you meet influencers in your industry as well as people in a completely different industry. This gives you a chance to build your network and introduce yourself to people you would never have met otherwise.
You’ll find that writing guest posts can be either a way to build a relationship or an opportunity to discover something new and exciting in your industry. This will help you reach a broader audience and you will feel more confident as a blogger.
Improves your SEO
Naturally, most guest posts come with a link or two. These backlinks to your website serve a very important purpose. There are significant SEO benefits from having more backlinks. Obviously, your aim of writing a blog post shouldn’t purely be for a backlink or two, however gaining more backlinks sure doesn’t hurt in the process.
We all start with writing for the sake of writing, but setting up optimising for blog SEO is important as well.
If you’re already online, it can take you a very long time to acquire new visitors, even if you’re very active in social media. If you have guest bloggers on your blog, this will improve your authority and traffic, as well as your organic traffic. Blogging can also raise your profile and gives you an opportunity to promote other people.
When people search for your brand name on Google, they will see your posts listed on the first page of results, appearing above and below more established brands. This gives you the advantage of not only getting more organic traffic, however also receiving more visitors from people who are already interested in your brand.
Grows brand awareness
They say the more you hear a brand name, the more you’ll start to recollect it. Studies have shown that it takes between 5-7 impressions for people to remember your brand.
Blogging is a relatively inexpensive method of brand building for most websites. Especially for digital businesses, blogging can be hugely cost effective and can really expand the reach and size of your target audience. Blog posts can be about a lot more than just making money, and that’s a huge selling point.
By writing guest posts, your potential visitors can see that your brand is doing well and worth following. It’s important to post on high-performing sites and blogs that already have a large, active and engaged audience. A well-placed guest post will get you noticed, and more importantly, your posts will boost brand awareness and recognition.
- Benefits of guest blogging
Gives you credibility
I know I mentioned the expert above, however this credibility is with your existing audience or the audience that you are building. Being able to say you’ve been published on Site X and Site Y is a great way of establishing credibility with people that you meet,
There are so many brands out there that are just waiting for someone to get in contact. A business can create some amazing work together and benefit from their marketing efforts. Involve people into the writing process One of the main reasons that people say they enjoy writing is because they can see their words come to life.
A great way to incorporate other people into this process is to ask them to write a guest post for you. It is a great way to keep in touch with your readers and work out what they like. One of the reasons that people say they enjoy writing is that it is creative. Readers like to see how writers have interpreted a subject and how they have put their own spin on it.
Builds your social following
This is one of the more interesting benefits of writing guest posts. By growing your social following, you can use that audience to promote your latest guest posts, and in turn, grow your social audience further. It’s a snowball effect in a way.
Here’s a great reason to guest blog: you learn from other people’s experiences. Even better, you can learn from their mistakes too, which may be helpful to you in the future. More traffic Adding to your traffic (which is already a great thing!) is the chance to increase your traffic.
You might gain hundreds of subscribers and a solid lead for your business. It’s like having a free placement for your content – paid opportunities are great, however they’re only worth doing once. Accomplish goals It’s common to feel that what you’re doing is worthless. And while it’s true that you can’t do everything, you can focus on the few things that will move your business forward. For example, your content marketing goals might be to grow sales, drive traffic, or improve conversion.
Share your knowledge
Whilst this may not seem to have any tangible result, there’s a certain satisfaction when you’ve built up a significant amount of knowledge on a specific topic, and you share it freely. There’s a sense of accomplishment when you share your thoughts and expert advice, and help others with no expectation of return.
I know, that all sounds very wishy washy, however it’s true. f you’ve ever enjoyed the role of speaking at a conference or event, you’ll know that feeling. You step off the stage and you have people thank you for sharing your wisdom. That’s the same feeling you can glean by guest blogging on topics that you are very knowledgable in.
Helps you improve your writing
All writing is good writing, when it comes to perfecting the craft of putting words together. Even more so when you have different sites with different expectations, tone and style guides. Being able to navigate different editorial styles, and still manage to put together an article that gets read, and enjoyed is quite an art.
All of this writing is helping you improve, whether you realise it or not. I look back at articles I wrote back over a decade ago, and realise how far I have come since those days.
I have learned a lot about different tools for blogging that I can use. People love to read what experts are saying. Therefore, you can leverage your guest blog posts to get exposed to an entirely new audience and learn what your followers are really thinking about.
In summary
As you can see from the list of benefits of guest posts above, I feel there are many great reasons to try your hand at writing guest posts.
Once again, to recap, those eight benefits of writing guest posts are;
- Positions you as an expert
- Helps build new relationships
- Improves your SEO
- Grows brand awareness
- Gives you credibility
- Builds your social following
- Share your knowledge
- Helps you improve your writing
Read my article about how to effectively pitch a few topics, and try your hand at it.
Entrepreneur, 