Guest blogging has become an integral part of digital marketing. This is particularly true for new startups and less known brands. When your business is new or small, you are relatively unknown and need an active platform to promote yourself.
Guest blogs can achieve this by putting your business in front of the right audience quickly. This method has have proven its effectiveness for businesses in all kinds of industries.
In this piece, we look at reasons why guest blogs are one of the best ways to generate leads for your business.
Quickly Present Your Business to a Large Audience
When your business is new, your audience is usually quite small. Guest blogs give you an opportunity to put yourself and your content in front of an already established audience that are interested in similar topics.
If you just post your content on your own blog, it will generally pass by somewhat unnoticed. Guest blogging gives your business an audience right from the first day.
Build Relationships in Your Industry
When you post guest blogs at popular websites, you approach new people every day. Many of these people may be working in the same industry or niche as you.
Posting guest blogs allows you to present new ideas on a forum and give you new opportunities for building relationships. If you carry on a pleasant interaction with readers after your post is accepted, you can even become good friends with some of them.
These people could be suppliers, buyers, influencers and even competitors. They open up new opportunities for collaboration. The good thing about guest blogging is that it helps build a community of like-minded individuals. It is a great way to network and build relationships.
Get Social Media Followers
Most guest blogging sites allow you to post your contact details in your bio. This includes your social media account where people can follow or connect with you.
The ultimate goal of guest blogging is to connect with as many people as you can. With the right and relevant people in your social circle, you can quickly offer them products and services in the future that you have an opportunity to sell.
Build an Email List
Another important goal for businesses and influencers is to build an email list. One effective way to grow your list is by guest blogging.
The process is similar to mentioning your social accounts in your guest author bio. Many blogging sites allow guest blog writers to post their email address or website address in their bio. You can further improve this by offering more information to your readers in return for signing up to your subscription list.
Here’s one way to do that. Simple put a CTA in your bio that says something like, “You can download my free ebook/whitepaper on how to do something great. Then, link this to your landing page where readers can sign up.
Use Multiple Blogging Sites for Getting New Customers and Leads
In the online shopping industry, businesses that post consistent and frequent blogs attract the most attention from users. More attention and visibility translates into more leads, potential customers and conversions in the long run.
The trick here is not to stick to a single blogging site but use multiple guest blogging platforms for you, improving your visibility. You should look into writing guest blogs frequently and provide educational and entertaining content for readers.
Some businesses hire a full time guest blog writer or even use a guest post writing service to put out one or two blogs a day. Don’t post them all on a single guest site. Write for various popular platforms and see where you go with them.
If there are many engaging, informative blogs from your business on multiple sites, they can help sway your potential customers’ opinion and ultimately generate more leads for your business.
Backlinks – The Real Strength of Guest Blogging
Just a few years ago, guest blogging was very popular for building backlinks from high DA websites. You could post a blog on a website with high traffic and then insert links back to your own blog/website to improve your ranking as well.
However, the practice was frowned upon and Google declared guest blogging for backlinks a black hat SEO strategy. They changed their logarithms a little and websites involved in this practice went down in rankings instead of going up.
While the strategy is mostly banned by guest posting sites, you are still allowed to insert a link in your Author’s bio. That means you can’t spam content and stuff multiple links to go up in the search engine. But if you are good at writing and offer high quality content, you can still get one link back to your website. This can still improve your ranking and DA, although the effect is not as significant as it used to be.
Any links that you gain from legitimate guest blogging websites are still going to help your search engine rankings as they fit Google’s criteria.
Conclusion
The guest blogging landscape has significantly changed in the last decade. Many new guest blogging platforms have sprung up, and guest post writing services have entered the industry to fill the need.
If you have a good strategy in mind and avoid making any blunders, guest blogging could be an awesome way to grow your business reputation and get leads very quickly.
Author Bio
Dave Brown is a Sr. Editor at Content Development Pros – a leading inbound marketing company that provides comprehensive content solutions, web design and development, SEO, guest blogging services, and blog writing services to small and mid-sized businesses. With more than a decade of experience and over 60,000 completed projects to their credit, they enjoy the trust of hundreds of regular customers from all industries and parts of the world