Wednesday, September 05, 2012

4 Reasons to Utilize Guest Bloggers

Most bloggers are very interested in generating content that will interest their readers. While bloggers tend to discuss topics related to their expertise, passions and business industries, they also understand the need to change things up every now and then and provide their audience with new insight.

This is when they turn to guest bloggers.
Guest bloggers are exactly what they sound like. They’re a guest who writes a blog piece for someone else’s blog. Sometimes these bloggers are monetarily compensated. Other times these bloggers are rewarded by being able to promote their own blog, company or website in a small bio found at the end of their guest piece.

Aside from providing you with blog content, there are plenty of great benefits associated with having a guest blogger. The following are four of them.

1. It adds credibility to your blog.

You can try and make yourself appear as an expert in your field, but claiming to be an expert isn’t as beneficial as proving you are. If you can get a popular guest blogger on your site who truly is an expert, you’re going to improve the credibility of your own blog. Your audience will see the name on your blog and will assume that since you were able to snag such a notorious guest blogger, your blog must be important.

2. It shakes things up.

Every blogger has come across blogging fatigue at one time or another. You simply can’t think of anything to write and you desperately want to just give up. When you use guest bloggers, it relieves you from having to create all the great content on your own and gives your audience something new every now and then. If you post a blog once a week, and every four weeks you feature a post from a guest blogger, it continuously generates new and interesting content to your site, which not only keeps your readers entertained but can also improve your site’s SEO.

3. It generates more traffic.

When you have a guest blogger on your site, they are going to promote their blog post, which means that they will use their own promotional tactics, whether email, social network, etc., and send people to your website. Not only will this increase the traffic to your site, but hopefully these new visitors will take a moment to check out your past blog posts, and if they like what they see, will become a regular viewer of your page.

4. It allows you to build relationships.

When you search for a guest blogger, you try and find someone who is an expert in your industry as well as someone that you value, even if you don’t know them on a personal level. But when you reach out to an individual and ask them to guest blog, and through all the communication needed to generate the blog post, you will build a relationship with this person that could end up blossoming into something more than a blogger/guest blogger relationship.

If you have thought about using a guest blogger but haven’t yet done so, make sure you put it on your to-do list. Guest blogging comes with a wealth of benefits, and your blog could easily find value in the tactic.

Sarah Dunbar works for the online marketing team at SEOMap.  For more information about SEOMap, visit our website.

Creative commons photo by Jim G.

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