4 Ways Guest Blogging Grows Your Blog Audience Quickly Guest blogging is basically getting an influencer to introduce you to their audience.
By Syed Balkhi Edited by Dan Bova
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At first glance, guest blogging doesn't seem attractive. You put a lot of work into developing a great piece of content, then give it away so someone else can publish it on their blog and benefit from it. That sounds a bit weird, doesn't it?
Even though it may sound a bit strange, many bloggers, authors and entrepreneurs still guest blog on multiple sites. Watch the experts such as: Richard Branson, Seth Godin, Neil Patel, and many others. They are all guest blogging.
Does blogging make sense to you?
It doesn't make sense to you? Why would someone publish an excellent article as a guest post when they could publish it on their own blog to drive more sales and generate more ad revenue?
Related: Welcome to Guest Blogging 101
Well, there's more than one reason why guest blogging is so popular. And, by the time you're done with this article, we're sure you'll also get to work on a guest blogging strategy as well. Keep reading to find out why.
Even though it doesn't cost you any money to get in contact with a blog to get permission to publish a guest post, it will still cost you your valuable time to write a quality blog post. And time is more valuable than money. So, is it worth investing your time on guest blogging? The answer is: "Yes, it's worth every second of your time."
The founder of Mob Is It, Silvio Porcellana managed to grow his website search traffic by 20 percent using guest blogging and even got his domain authority boosted by five points. All he did was publish 44 blog posts in 41 separate websites. Here's how guest blogging help grows your blog audience.
Related: Five Lessons Learned the Hard Way for Building an Authority Website
1. Reach specific audiences.
To develop a successful blog, you need have a target audience. Your entire blog will be built around this audience when you publish content targeting them. However, just posting blog posts and hoping for your audience to discover your blog will never work. You need to reach out to this audience and promote your blog.
One of the best benefits of guest blogging is that it gives you the opportunity to reach specific audiences through popular blogs in your industry. This lets you leverage the established audiences of these blogs to get the word out about your own website. In other words, guest blogging allows you to steal an audience for your site from other established blogs.
Related: Five Ways to Build an Audience for Your Blog
2. Improve SEO with free backlinks.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another important strategy that helps grow your website traffic. The number of backlinks you have on your website plays a crucial role when it comes to ranking your blog on Google.
Whenever a high authority blog links to your website, Google considers it as a positive signal toward your blog. Your blog becomes more important and it gives your site a boost in search rankings. The more backlinks you have, the higher you rank on Google Search.
Brian Dean of Backlinko managed to grow his blog traffic by 110 percent by building backlinks. He used a strategy called the skyscraper technique, which involves a ton of work. Guest blogging, however, is much easier. So, even if you don't get a ton of referral traffic from your guest blog posts, it will still help improve your website SEO.
Related: 10 Smart Ways to Earn or Build Backlinks
3. Drive traffic to landing pages.
Without a doubt, guest blogging will bring a lot of visitors to your site. Having a proper strategy in place to direct this traffic to the right place on your blog will allow you to make the most of your referral traffic.
Just driving traffic to your homepage is not going to do you any good. Instead, you can create landing pages on your blog and link to these landing pages from your guest blogs to direct referral traffic and turn them into leads and customers.
Related: 17 Ways to Immediately Improve Your Website Traffic
4. Build authority.
Getting published on a high authority blog is not easy, but it's possible. This is, in fact, a great way to build authority for your blog as well.
When you get published on a reputable blog, your audience will also see you as a professional and an expert. Once your authority improves, more people will recommend your website to their friends, share your articles without hesitation.
You will begin to get more opportunities to do interviews for other blogs and podcasts. You may even land yourself a public speaking gig -- which really boosts your visibility.
Even though you're publishing guest blogs for free, always focus on creating high-quality content. This will ensure the best outcome from your guest blogging efforts. Guest blogging is about reaching bigger audiences and expanding your horizons. It's also an effective marketing strategy that will bring you results over a long period of time.
