There’s nothing more interesting for us working in the digital marketing space than getting a heap of assurance about what we‘re doing, to be specific guest blogging. Is it a good thing for business or is guest blogging bad for your site?
Earlier this year, Matt Cutts stirred the entire web with his odd decree that guest blogging is dead, done, decaying. The online community was resentful, of course. Who wouldn’t be when it’s Google’s head of search who’s giving the talk, albeit a mere personal blog post?
To give you a sense of Matt Cutts’ controversial statement, “stick a fork on it, guest blogging is done,” he decried that guest blogging is fast turning into a zombie, just kidding! He decried that many low-quality blogs are latching on guest blogging to get free links for the purpose of getting higher ranking over search engines.
Instantly, many fought back with rants using social media and tweets that a mistake has been committed. Sure the declaration bugged and divided the hell out of search engine marketers, until finally compelling Matt to issue some clarifications.
This time around, he clarified the type of guest blogging that’s the subject of his critical post – the ones aimed at earning links to get higher spot in search engines. In other words, for search engine optimization purposes.
As if really needing to get his reputation back, Matt offered a counter, with an elaboration on the good reasons guest blogging become a sound practice.His examples include what it can offer highly-opinionated bloggers: exposure, increased reach and popularity in any niche community.
Matt differentiated high-quality multi-author blogs with low-quality or spam sites. He said he favored the former, whose likes include BoingBoing, which can be pretty compelling, useful and relevant. The latter type, he said, are only existing because they need guest blogging for SEO purposes.
Benefits of Guest Blogging
Blogging as a guest on another site or guest blogging has some obvious advantages to get found. If you’re serious about building your reputation online, this practice shouldn’t be left out among your arsenal of digital marketing tactics.
While some of the cool reasons why to guest blog were already cited by Matt Cutts, in this section, I will try to elaborate on some and add a few more reasons to convince your boss about spending quality time writing blogs for another site.
Building Your Network
Like meeting new people from attending a networking conference or charity ball, guest blogging functions in pretty similar fashion, albeit getting your acquaintance or new audience from a different blog page.
With guest blogging, you get to introduced with new audience since your bio and social links are attached. Meanwhile, the publications or blogs you write for will obviously get to share some traffic when you promote your post to your own constituents.
What happens after this is more important – connecting and building relationships with a new audience.
Increasing Your Credibility and Authority
When people Google your name and find you on various third party sites or blogs, you create a reputation of being trustworthy or an authority in your field. Perceptions that you are credible because of your multiple writing gigs help a lot in drawing more invitations from other publications and blogs for you to write for.
A bonus benefit that comes along is that you get branded as an expert in your chosen topic or endeavor. There’s a big opportunity that awaits you – being an expert of a specific topic to various audiences.
Giving You New Traffic
Consider this a bonus you derive out of guest blogging. Every time your work gets published somewhere, you receive a little link back to your website, and that bring along new traffic.
The Disadvantages of Guest Blogging
Time-Consuming
Writing great, quality content is not done in a haste. Often, the amount of time required to produce engaging content takes time only because you need to do your homework, particularly research. There will also be a great need to edit and proofread your work.
And if the publication requires that you submit your own artwork or images, it will be another aspect to consider. So you will have to weigh the amount of time you consumed with the benefits you and your organization will benefit before pursuing any guest blogging gigs.
Get Easily Abused
Guest blogging, like writing, has started great and positive reason. However, as marketers and SEO practitioners get hungry for inbound links and traffic from the community, the practice get abused and exploited, as in other marketing tactics that preceded these efforts.
Guest blogging for the sole purpose of manipulating their search results, after marketers found the loopholes to exploit, are perfect way to get penalized by Google.
Write Quality Guest Blog, No Matter What
There’s no denying what your brand or your organization can achieve by guest blogging – exposure, credibility, added traffic, and new audience, among many opportunities. And if you’re doing that, you’ll prove Matt Cutts wrong.
Guest blogging is not dead. And while there may be some serious disadvantages like being time-consuming and the vulnerability of the practice to be exploited, this SEO practice is absolutely an important effort to increase your reach and grow your social media exposure.
If ever people complain about guest blogging as either illegal or crappy, these flaws only exist because of the very ones who are greedy to manipulate search results. So look at it this way, you’re only screwed if you screw the hell out of guest blogging.
What’s nice is that there are very few golden rules or SEO tips to keep in your heart: focus on quality and resist the temptation to be writing crappy posts. https://staging.bigoutsource.com/blog/is-guest-blogging-bad-for-your-site/Adhere to quality standards and do ethical blogging to win new audience and loyal followers in the long run, until they pay attention to your brand and your business.
When you regard your writing or blogging with high regard, you benefit out of the incredible value you offer to your readers and the publications you are writing for.
So to our question if guest blogging is bad for your site, the answer really depends upon you. The side you choose in employing guest blogging as an authentic way to reach people will determine the consequences for your site.
