How Guest Blogging Can Help You Build Your Brand
Guest blogging is an effective way to introduce yourself to audiences you might not ordinarily reach. By writing a guest blog post to be published on someone else’s site, you get the chance to share your brand, knowledge, ideas and inspiration to audiences you might otherwise not reach.
But greater exposure isn’t the only benefit of being a guest blogger on someone else’s site. There are plenty of SEO advantages to writing a blog post either for your own personal brand or for your company’s brand and have that shared to another site’s community.
Like being a guest on someone else’s podcast, guest blogging gives you a new audience with whom to share your message. However you can be of service to others, your message and your business will benefit from guest blogging.
Learn what you need to know about guest blogging to do it well and get the most out of this practice.
What Is Guest Blogging?
Simply put, guest blogging is writing a blog post for someone else to publish on their website. You can write guest blogs for other people or other companies. In the author byline, you can write your name or your company’s name – or both, if it’s okay with the host.
It’s not just about getting your name out there, even though that’s a great benefit on its own. For a lot of guest bloggers, even more important is the ability to improve your own website’s performance.
People engage in guest blogging both as hosts and as bloggers for the many benefits this practice offers in everything from SEO to KPI.
Website key performance indicators (KPIs) are what analytics platforms such as Google Analytics lets you track to see how your website is performing. Your digital marketing KPIs provide you with fundamental information about your site’s performance, including how many visitors your WordPress site is getting, how many are return visitors, and which pages they’re visiting most.
In addition, your acquisition KPIs tell you how much of your traffic comes from referrals from other sites. You can increase your referral traffic by writing guest blogs on sites that are connected to your industry in some way, ideally sites that have a wide audience.
Using Google Analytics to measure site traffic will help you measure what is working, and identify what is not. When you see something working, double down. If you haven’t taken advantage of this great tool, you can start any time. Guest blogging on popular blogs is a great way to boost your traffic from referrals, and Google Analytics can help you see how your guest blogs are helping your own website.
Why Is Guest Blogging Important?
For WordPress site owners, guest blogging is very attractive for many reasons, including:
- Improved website traffic
- SEO benefits
- Social proof
- Greater brand visibility
- Authority and credibility
- Quality backlinks
- Expanding your network
- Reputation and credibility enhancement
- Portfolio growth
- Influencing users
- Enhanced digital marketing
What’s more, the guest blogger benefits from social proof. By allowing a guest to write a post, the host is essentially endorsing the guest blogger and showing that they can be trusted. Both the guest and the host build backlinks since each links back to the other on their own site.
Benefits to the Host
The host, or website owner, benefits from growing their site and their organic SEO without having to do all the writing themselves. The host’s website users will value the expanded point of view a guest blogger brings. Quality backlinks gets a boost, and if the blogger is positioned as an expert, the host enjoys a credibility hike as well.
Benefits to the Guest Blogger
There are two key benefits for the guest blogger: first, you usually gain a backlink, adding SEO benefits to your site. Second and much more importantly, you get to showcase your expertise, personality, and knowledge to a new audience. That audience, if they follow back to your site, then becomes your audience if they resonate with the content you’ve shared.
How to Become a Guest Blogger
If you’re ready to share your expertise and knowledge as a guest blogger, you might be wondering how to get started.
- Exhibit expertise. The best way to become a guest blogger or even a guest on a podcast is to exhibit expertise. Write on your own blog and share your knowledge, expertise, and even tutorials on how to do things. When you exhibit your expertise, it is easy to point to your writing as example content that a potential host can review and see if there is a fit for their audience.
- Get to know the audience. Anyone with a media outlet or blog. has one concern: to provide amazing and useful content to their audience. If you get to know your target host’s audience and the problems they’re trying to solve, and if you can provide solutions to those problems, you’re going to be much more successful with your pitch.
- Build Relationships: Start to build relationships with the people you want to guest blog for. You can do this by reaching out to them with a few interview questions and letting them know you’d like to feature them. Write several posts on your site that showcase these individuals—who they are, what they do, how they run their business, how their solutions contribute to your industry, and so on.
- Find Additional Guest Post Opportunities: Do a search on terms like “submit your guest post” or “blogs that accept guest posts” to find sites that are looking. Add a relevant keyword to your search term to find sites related to the topics you want to write about.
Even if you’re relatively new to blogging, you can learn the basics and come up to speed quickly so you can put your blogging skills to good use in creating guest blog posts on popular sites.
Guest Blogging Best Practices
Get the most from your guest posts and drive more relevant traffic back to your own site by following these best practices.
Tip 1: Focus on the Site Owner
While it’s true that this is your blog post, and you’ll want to write about something you know well and are passionate about, don’t forget the site owner. What would they like you to write about? What topics do they crave content about? The more excited they are about your blog post, the more they’ll promote it to their audience.
Tip 2: Familiarize Yourself with the Audience
Before you write for any site, get to know its audience better. Who are the people that visit the site, follow the site’s social media accounts, and interact with the content? What information are they seeking out, and what gets them excited? What’s the tone of the site—conversational, professional, witty, direct, or something else? Why are they passionate about the content on the site, the subject matter, or the brand? Studying the audience visiting the website you’re about to write for will help you create a blog post the site’s host will be happy with and readers will gravitate to.
Tip 3: Write Content That Connects
When you write for someone else’s site, it’s okay to personalize your post, but it’s important to create a connection with your readers to keep them engaged. Because you’re guest posting on a site that may not know you, you’ll need to connect with your audience for the first time. Create content with solutions to problems that the audience has, or focus on aspirational messages that help the audience see themselves achieving certain goals.
In today’s market, attention spans are much shorter and patience is less. People are searching for the things that help them, whether its a recipe for dinner tonight, a better way to decorate for the holidays, or how to unhack a site riddled with malware.
Tip 4: Promote Your Guest Posts
After you’ve written a guest post, use your own channels, whether social or email, to promote it. Adding a link to one of your own posts is also helpful to show any new site visitors that you have authority in your topic area of choice beyond your own blog.
Top Tools for Guest Blogging
Writing, posting, and tracking the performance of your guest blogs gets easier when you have access to the right tools. These tools can help you out.
Google Analytics
A must-have for any blogger or site owner, Google Analytics gives you key insights into your traffic, including where it’s coming from. Use UTMs to track which links are coming from the site on which you guest posted so that you can measure your guest post’s success.
Link Explorer
The MOZ link explorer tool allows you to check backlinks to see how well your guest post is performing. Link metrics, including domain authority, can help you choose which sites to guest write for. Ones with a higher domain authority are worth your while.
To Summarize
Guest blogging is a great way to broaden your reach with your message. It’s an investment in your business and part of a well-rounded, sound digital marketing strategy. By being a guest blogger, you increase quality backlinks to your site, which improves your KPIs. You reach a wider audience and potentially gain new fans.
Within your niche or industry, guest blogging can help you get recognized as an authority. Your guest blogs can influence others and bring your products, services, and brand to their attention. Both the host and the guest blogger benefit from this cooperative, network-building effort.
A Kadence Full Bundle gives you everything you need to create beautiful and engaging websites that are perfect for showing off your blog posts and guests posts. With tools like Kadence Conversions and the amazing tools within Kadence Blocks, you have everything you need to create more effective content that converts site visitors into loyal fans.
