Blogging for business has generally been accepted as a necessary tactic, so it’s likely you’re already familiar with some of the business lexicons that are synonymous with blogging: thought leadership, authority, and content marketing. If you’ve begun authoring content, you may be seeing results but, at the same time, you also may be experiencing editorial fatigue and/or writer’s block. Guest bloggers are a good way to invigorate your content while you still benefit from the residual effects of keeping up a business blog. Hosting guest bloggers offers a wealth of advantages that basically fall into three categories.
Index
Benefits for guest bloggers
Building Quality Content
Adding authors to augment your content strategy helps relieve the creative strain of developing all of the articles yourself. It adds fresh minds and perspective to your body of work. A new writer can offer a different take on a subject that you may not have considered before. This helps enrich your site, while possibly creating a different conversation around a topic, stirring your audience to comment and share your posts. Since strong content and informing/entertaining the reader should be on the list of primary goals, a new voice can add variation and depth to your blog.
Increased Traffic
One outstanding benefit to having a guest blogger on your site is the audience they bring with them. An established voice with a guest spot on your channel can increase traffic and bring new eyeballs to your brand and content. Furthermore, the new audience that is there, because they followed the guest blogger, may lead to expanding your audience permanently, as they add your stream to their personal favorites. Another boon to your onsite traffic comes from the inevitable reciprocal effect of the guest blogger returning the favor. You may have an opportunity to become a guest blogger as well, situating your content on another site and in front of another audience, thus building thought leadership and authority, as well as expanding your audience.
Search Engine Optimization
All of the previous benefits quietly lend themselves to the biggest benefit of all, search engine optimization. Better, more diverse content aids in gaining authority with search engines as well. The guest’s writing style may add new keywords and phrases to your body of prose that help optimize topics on your blog. Increased traffic is sure to lead to more social chatter and links, which also lends itself to optimizing the search equation. The most important aspect of SEO is the backlink, and by having guest bloggers in your sphere of expertise, you are greatly increasing your chances of earning quality backlinks to your pages. You can even make that part of the deal for guest bloggers, as you both benefit from this exercise in building quality content.
