You have a well-run website with lots of traffic. One day, you check your mailbox. Poof, there’s an email from a random person asking if he/she can post a blog on your website. Maybe you are considering guest blogging yourself. But is the time and energy it takes worth it? In this article, we dive deeper into this. We look at it both from the perspective of the owners of websites and from the side of potential guest bloggers.
What exactly is guest blogging? In short, it means that you publish an article on their website in consultation with the owner or manager of a website.
Nowadays you see guest blogging also in other forms. Take a look at the big Instagram accounts that sometimes pass on the content they have received from their fans. This too can be seen as a form of guest blogging.
Now that you know what guest blogging is, you may be wondering why you should write an article without getting paid for it. After all, you’re not a philanthropic institution and there’s just bread to be made. Yet there can be very good reasons to guest blog. In this article, we will discuss five of them.
In this article, we are going to delve deeper into the above points.
Owners and administrators usually give you the opportunity to include one or more links to your website in an article or in your bio. Did you know that the number of links to your website was Google’s first ranking factor ever? And although this ranking factor has become less important, inbound links are still important. Of course, make sure the links come from websites that have a logical connection to your area of expertise. Learn more about what SEO is and how to get started.
When your content is published on reputable platforms, it increases your expert status. By showing your expertise on those kinds of platforms, people start looking up to you. That can immediately bring in new assignments. But it can also lead to other opportunities that can further increase both your reach and your expert status. Think for example of giving lectures, presentations, or being interviewed for an article.
Let’s say you offer marketing services, and you posted a blog on Frankwatching. This article is seen by thousands of entrepreneurs and marketing professionals. People who otherwise might never have heard of you. The Frankwatching team even promotes your article via social media and in their newsletter. That gives a huge boost to your reach.
Have you ever noticed that some people leave a more lasting memory than others? The difference is usually not only in their expertise but often in their personality. By being visible, and also showing a bit of your personality and your personal vision of your field, people are more likely to remember you. That image of you that you consciously or unconsciously create in people is your personal brand.
Of course, owners and administrators are not eager to publish a blog on their site that is really just a sales pitch. But if you write an article that is valuable to specifically their target audience, you usually get to tell readers what you have to offer. For example, consider a website with blogs about taking care of plants. On such a blog, you might post an article with tips on how to know that your plant needs watering again. One such way could be to use the sensors you sell.
If you have your own blog, you can run ads on it and thus provide additional income. In addition, you can place affiliate links whereby you receive a percentage if someone clicks on such a link and buys something. What is less well known in the Netherlands is the generation of income from guest blogging.
For example, you can not only set requirements on the quality when someone wants to place a guest blog on your website, but you can also ask for money for it. If you want more certainty about the content, you can also offer to write an article on a subject to be agreed upon, where the “buyer” in consultation may determine which links are in the article. When it comes to publishing on your website, you can decide on your own requirements. Depending on your goals and wishes, you can either spend less time writing articles or you can earn money for writing articles on your own blog.
Whether you want to guest post on other websites or accept guest blogs, always keep the target audience of a website in mind. Ask yourself if the content you have in mind is valuable to the target audience. After all, both the reputation of the website owner or administrator and the writer of the article is at stake.
There are rumors that Google is working on adjusting something around authors in their algorithm in the future. Google is considering tracking people (authors) so they can see which author publishes what and where. Depending on where you then publish content on the internet as a person, the algorithms will hang a certain value on that.
So suppose you manage to get several reputable websites that have healthy eating as their theme to publish your articles. Then it is possible that Google’s algorithms will see you (as a person/author) as an authority. Because they see you as a source of reliable information, they may rank the content you publish higher in search results.
Placing guest blogs on websites that deal with subjects that are related to your area of expertise has several advantages. If you are considering guest blogging, make sure the content you publish is really valuable to the target audience of the site you are publishing on. And if you would like more content on your own site without writing it yourself, then you can also recruit guest bloggers for your site. You can even charge a fee for that.
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