Earlier in the week, we talked about third party blogging and how guest blogging on such blogs can prove to be extremely beneficial for your organisation.
By working with a third party blog that is well-known within your industry, you can publish high quality, informative content to their already established audience, increasing everything from your brand awareness through to your website or blog’s traffic, with the general outcome being an improved number of conversions.
But how beneficial can it be having guest bloggers produce blog posts for your blog?
We’re not talking in terms of finances here – whilst some well established blogs will be able to charge respectable figures for a guest post, the guest blogging process in general is one that doesn’t involve any money exchanging between parties, with payment to the writer generally only in the form of backlinks through to their website – but actual business benefits.
1. Fresh content
The primary purpose of a business blog is to provide content to your readers on a regular basis. Whether you find it easy or not to develop new ideas for blog posts as per your blogging schedule (which should ideally be at least twice per week), guest blogging gives you the opportunity to publish fresh content on your blog, something that will be of benefit in a variety of ways – even if you don’t have trouble thinking of ideas for new content, a new voice can ensure your blog doesn’t become stale or too repetitive, a common problem seen on many business blogs.
2. Increased audience reach
When you develop your own business blog, you develop your own audience. Over time, this audience will expand through recommendations, social media sharing and discovering through the search engines, all fantastic channels, but all channels that take time to fully come to fruition.
When you publish guest blog posts on your blog, you’ll find the author will tell their own audience about it on their blog and through their social media accounts, instantly promoting the blog post – and therefore your business blog – to what could potentially be thousands of new visitors.
3. Improved networking and blogger relations
With your own blog, you generally focus primarily on your readers. They’re the people you’re producing the content for and they’re the people who will hopefully convert into customers.
The problem is, there’s a whole world out there of bloggers and each and every one of them can help you in one way or another – but only if you have a good working relationship with them, something that can be achieved through guest blogging.
For instance, you might need extra content one week at the last minute. Whilst this is without doubt a possibility without having any relationships in place with bloggers, it would take time to find a blogger who fits in with your niche and who could develop content that is suitable.
If you’ve already got relationships in place with bloggers, however, a lot of the potential headaches can be removed – a quick call or e-mail to the bloggers you’ve worked with in the past could be all it takes to receive an array of blog posts ready to publish a little while later.
4. Better SEO positioning
As part of an effective business blogging strategy, one of the key benefits is improved positioning in the search engines for your chosen keywords, generally through the publishing of high quality, regular content that has just the right amount of keywords included in it.
However, as we’ve talked about previously, we’re moving towards a much more social internet and Google in particular are looking to do their utmost to make the search experience as user-friendly as it can be and they are therefore analysing various aspects of the ranking process.
Take links as an example. It can be tempting to only include links to your own blog posts, products or service pages within your blog posts and generally speaking, as long as the blog posts aren’t all sales based, this will help to drive traffic to where you want it to go. However, with guest blogging, the links will point to blogs or websites that aren’t yours – and Google will reward you for this.
It will realise that you’re not only talking about your products or services and you’re trying to promote high quality content elsewhere, therefore theoretically sending traffic away from your blog. Yes, that means a few visitors may click away from your blog, but the eventual result could be a considerable amount more find your business blog more easily in the search engines.
5. Greater brand reputation
Your readers visit your business blog because they’re interested in what you have to say. They return because they like what you’re talking about and they want to know more.
If care isn’t taken, however, your blog can easily become a sales platform, where you purely talk about your products and services and nothing else.
Similar to the above point, through guest blogging, you can show your readers that you genuinely care about their interests and don’t simply want to provide information about your own business. You can publish content that’s of benefit to your audience, but which takes a step away from what you would perhaps normally talk about – and when you do, you’ll find your reputation amongst your readers naturally improves.
Guest blogging can help tremendously with your blog’s development. From building relationships with other bloggers to developing your audience’s perception of you for the better, accepting guest blog posts on your business blog can seem like you’re inviting people to take traffic away from you, but the simple truth is this aspect is actually tiny – if not negligible – in comparison to the number of fantastic benefits you’ll be able to experience.
