Running a business is no easy task. One of the first things you’ll have to worry about is perfecting your product or service. Then, you’ll need to worry about building the ideal team—hiring slow and hiring fast when necessary. If you work in certain industries, like the construction or health industries, you’ll need OSHA certification to property train your staff. And lastly, marketing the business: a step that’s so big, many business owners get lost in the shuffle when it comes to deciding what to prioritize.
Guest posting is one aspect of marketing outreach that can-do wonders for your business. Guest posting is a method that involves you writing for another website in exchange for a link to your site. It may not seem like the most, well, lucrative marketing tactic—but it certainly is. Here are five benefits to guest posting that should help put it into perspective for you:
Helps with Link Building
Considering you’re writing quality content in exchange for just a link, you can bet that link is pretty important. In fact, according to Google, inbound and outbound links are one of the biggest search engine ranking factors—right alongside RankBrain (the algorithm used to determine and process search queries that are unknown to Google) and content. Linking is so important to Google because they insinuate value: each inbound link is like a virtual vote. After all, a website wouldn’t link to your blog or homepage if it didn’t think it was valuable in any way. Marketers don’t link to just anything.
When you guest post, there’s almost always a link involved. Sometimes, the link appears at the bottom of your penned blog, in the “About the Author” section. Other times, the publisher/blogger allows you to fit the link naturally into your guest post. To take a look at how your website is faring in terms of links, use a tool like Moz’s Link Explorer.
Spread Brand Awareness
The more your brand and content is spread across the Web, the easier it is for others to discover your business. This is especially true if you’re just starting out. As a business—whether a startup or medium-sized enterprise—you’ll find that guest posting is inexpensive and highly scalable. Realistically speaking, you can’t drop millions or even thousands into customer acquisition. Building brand awareness through guest posting can help shorten the sales cycle and spread your value proposition in place where your customers are likely to be. Think of it like dropping a bread crumb trail for potential customers to visit your site.
Build Your Authority
In the world of marketing, authority is all about the accumulation of trust you’ve built in your industry as a brand. By writing valuable pieces as often as you can, in as many places as you can, you’ll start to gain authority and recognition in your space. It helps to look around at the blogs that are leading in your industry, as well as the guest posts that are being published on those blogs.
For example, as a marketing and web design agency, you’d want to scour the best marketing and design blogs to see how those blogs are gaining authority. Neil Patel is a great illustration of how to build an audience and become an authority figure. As a marketing and SEO expert, Patel offers his readers value-infused content chock full of screenshots and images to demonstrate his points.
Grow Your Social Following
Social media is such an important aspect of marketing a business today. Each time you create a guest post, you leave a trail of social media sharing icons behind. Furthermore, because you’re guest posting on a site that people trust, you can consider the blogger as a vote for you, too. By posting on different blogs, you increase the likelihood that your social follows and shares will increase, too.
Converse with Other Thought Leaders
While you’re building authority and leadership in your space, guest posting also opens up the possibility of speaking to other thought leaders, too. More people will recognize and discover your name, which can create opportunities you may not even have thought of otherwise. These opportunities could include speaking engagements, additional guest posts, or even additional clients.
It’s not uncommon for major publishers to have several guest bloggers in their roster. With that in mind, a community is often fostered among those guest bloggers, which can take you even further. For example, you might learn that another guest blogger is speaking at a conference you’re interested in, and can get you tickets, or even introduce you to the event coordinator for future speaking opportunities.
