Whether you’ve been blogging about your profession for ages or are just getting started, you probably already know that the secret to operating a successful blog is getting people to know that you exist. One of the most effective ways to get more eyes on your pages is to establish some mutually beneficial relationships with other bloggers who write about the same niche as you. By devoting a few hours to putting together some informative and engaging guest posts for blogs that you’ve grown to respect, you can give your own web presence just the lift that it needs to start attracting a following of loyal readers and subscribers.
Guest blogging is so effective because it gives your site a boost in four major areas: branding, links and traffic. Unless you’ve already established yourself as a major voice in your niche, most of the readers who stumble across your guest post will not have ever heard of you before. By aligning your name and brand with a blog that they’re already engaged with, they’re much more likely to take your brand seriously than if they had just stumbled across one of your posts in search engine results.
Assuming the sites that you are writing guest posts for have some legitimate authority and are relevant to your own site, the inbound links generated from these posts can really improve your site’s overall standing with the major search engines. Better still, a couple of solid guest posts should send a ton of new readers your way, many of whom will bookmark your site and subscribe to your feed provided that they like what they see.
So long as your writing style is up to par and you’ve actually got something interesting to say, you’ll find that most bloggers will be more than happy to include a guest post from your site now and then. The way the process typically goes is this. You begin by finding a few blogs that you’re already familiar with and have seen guest posts on before. Next, get in touch with the owners of the site and inform them that you’d like to write a guest post to their site, including a link or two to some of your better work.
After going back and forth a little with them regarding the topic and execution of your post, get to work and put together something that you’re sure you can stand behind. So long as they like what they see, it shouldn’t be long before your guest posts are up for the world to see, including those all important backlinks that are the lifeblood of just about every successful blog.