What is guest blogging?
A guest blogger writes articles to be published on someone else's blog.
Guest blogging is one of the best and fastest ways to drive targeted traffic to your site and position yourself in front of new audiences. The guest blogger benefits from someone else's audience, brand, and established blog and can get a significant number of visitors.
Guest blogging is a win-win situation for both the guest blogger and the blog owner. The guest blogger gets extra exposure and traffic. The blog owner gets good content without having to write it or pay for it.
Guest blogging provides many benefits:
- Get traffic. If your guest blog is interesting, people will click on your link and visit your blog.
- Expand your audience. When you post a guest post on another blog, you'll get exposure from a new audience. You get new readers and new connections.
- Build credibility. Be regarded as an expert and build valuable connections by showcasing your expertise and knowledge in your niche.
- Get more sales. Get more traffic, more readers, more leads, more exposure, and more sales.
- NOTE: In the past, Google considered links from guest blogs high-quality backlinks from contextual sites. Today, Google recognizes spammy links from spammy guest writers.
Tip for getting the best results from guest blogging
- Contact bloggers whose blogs you enjoy and ask if you can provide a guest post contribution.
- To get the most exposure, target established, popular, high-ranked and high-traffic blogs within your market to submit guest posts to.
- Provide high-quality, unique content that is targeted to the blog’s audience and your audience.
- Provide targeted content to get targeted traffic.
Update about the linking aspect of guest blogging
Matt Cutts says: “if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company ….. A high-quality guest post with nofollowed links can still be a good way to get exposure to a new audience, branding, etc.” You can read the complete article at https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/
Conclusion: Publishers should not don't eliminate all guest blogging. Just be careful who you're accepting guest posts from. If you're not sure who you're dealing with, make the links nofollow. If the links are nofollowed, then they don’t affect PageRank.
Writers writing guest blogs have to be aware that most publishers will now give guest writers a nofollow link so you won't get the link benefit of writing guest posts anymore. However, you can still get exposure and traffic to your site. You just won't get the link and SEO benefits anymore