FYI: One year after this post was published, we decided to launch the community of guest bloggers for people interested in guest blogging. So please go ahead and join: MyBlogGuest
New Audience: Guest posting will open up your blog to a new audience that may not have previously read your work. As long as you write something that catches their interest, they will curiously click through to your blog to see what else you have to offer.
More RSS Subscribers: Once they click through to your blog, if visitors find information that is either informative, entertaining and/or useful, they will most likely subscribe to your RSS feed to see what you are going to publish in the future. Keep in mind that in order to draw visitors (and potential RSS subscribers) to your blog, you need to write an amazing guest post that piques their interest.
Win-Win Situation: When it comes to guest blogging, both bloggers benefit from this arrangement. The guest blogger gets to expose their content to a new audience, while the other blogger gets a great free piece of exclusive content to publish.
Networking: Since a good guest blogger should be replying to reader comments, this is a great opportunity to start conversations with new readers. Not only can you establish new relationships through comments, but other people’s thoughts can also be a great tool for thinking of new topics for your future posts.
Fresh Perspective: If you are normally a solo blogger, then having a guest blogger is a great way to add a fresh perspective to your blog. This works even better if the guest blogger has a slightly different area of expertise that they can share with your readers.
Different Social Networks and Reach: Each of the bloggers may utilize different social networks, and have varying amounts of reach on each one. For example, my main social networks are on Twitter, StumbleUpon, Facebook and Blog Catalogue. Although I don’t have the strongest presence on Digg, I can work with a guest blogger that does (but doesn’t necessarily have a strong StumbleUpon profile). Since we will both be trying to promote each guest post through our various social networks, our combined efforts will give our content a farther reach.
This combined effort creates what I like to call “Social Media Synergy”. If you want to see “Social Media Synergy” in action, just check your analytics program a day or two after guest posting, and I know that you will be happy with the increase in traffic that you see.
Link Building: Although this last one is pretty obvious, it’s definitely a nice benefit of guest posting. Like my bio below, you can include some information about yourself (along with a link or two back to your blog and website), and this will provide you with a quality backlink to help your SEO efforts.
If you know of other benefits of guest posting, please let Ann and I know by leaving a comment!
This is a guest post by Gerald Weber. Gerald is the President and Founder of Search Engine Marketing Group, which is a leading search engine marketing and web development firm in Houston, TX. Gerald also maintains an Houston SEO blog.
*I would like to give a special thanks to Ann for not only introducing me to the concept of guest blogging, but for also being kind enough to allow me to write a post for her wonderful blog!
