The Importance of Guest Posting to Build an Audience

News

0

Guest posting, also known as guest blogging is the practice of contributing a post to someone else’s blog. It is done in order to gain relationships, exposure, authority and links. Guest posting helps build a relationship with the blogger and their audience whose website is hosting your post. It enables the author to tap into the blogger’s audience and increase backlinks to their website.

Guest posting is considered to be one of the best inbound marketing strategies. A survey conducted by Social Marketing Writing found that 62.96% of the people perceive blogs with multiple authors to be more credible.

Over the years, guest posting has developed and has become a source for reliable information. Due to various avenues available to verify information, integrity is crucial and competition ensures that. Evolution of guest posting has taken a change for the betterment of both the readers on the site and for all the guest writers, who use other websites and blogs as their platform.

Guest posting has various benefits:

• It helps attain Google authorship, which means, in simple terms, that a photo would appear next to your name, whenever searched, for each post that you write. Google authorship helps improve your rankings in Google search results, as well as, click-through rates.
• It also helps to improve your writing skills. The readers get to express their thoughts, views and opinions and those may inspire new ideas in you.
• The people who read your blogs may also turn into new leads for your business. When you guest post for a website, you network with new potential leads. The readers if impressed with your work may reach out to you for your services, thus turning to leads.
• And most importantly, it helps increase website traffic. A guest post brings together the audiences of the host website and the author’s website, thus increasing traffic.

How does Guest Posting actually help build an audience?

As stated earlier, guest posting ha a lot of benefits. Among them, one is building an audience.

Here are reasons, as to how guest posting actually does that –

• Guest posting on someone else’s website or blog and adding value to it, helps build a relationship with the host. Websites are considered to be highly influential on people. Having a post on someone else’s blog conveys to the audiences a message that you are a trustworthy source and it’s because of this, that your post has been included on the website or blog. All this would eventually lead to higher subscribers.
• Guest posting helps ‘up’ your game with the search engine. The host blogger includes a link to your blog in the post which eventually raises the value of your blog, or he would mention your name in the blog, if you don’t have a blog and this would encourage people impressed with your writing to look up on you through search engines, to read your other posts or blogs, which would create a “brand name” and eventually lead to Google authorship. The backlinks make a huge difference to blog rankings on the search engine.

(Though, the recent updates in the Panda algorithm of Google don’t just rely on backlinks to rate blogs or websites, but it still is an integral component of rating a blog or website.)

• Guest posting, as stated earlier introduces you to new people. The audience of the host blogger is introduced to you and your writing and if the like the content, eventually they would read your blogs or your other postings. That would increase the traffic on your blog, helping you build an audience.

Guest blogging or guest posting can also act as a doorway to gaining the status of expert in the field that you work in, the well-researched and comprehensive the posts are, the more they would be appreciated by the audiences and over time you would become the authority in the eyes of the target audience.

Guest posting needs to be done correctly, then only it helps reap rewards, which include organic and steady traffic, new leads and customers for many years. You can also look out to agency like Degions outreach for guest posting. To avoid situations where readers simply skip over the authors’ by-line and leave, the blogger must undertake steps to engage the audience in such a way that they are compelled and curious to know more about the author and encourage future traffic. For this, following may be done:

• Inclusion of visuals
• Backing up with data
• Inclusion of questions etc.

One must keep it in mind that only guest posting or guest blogging does not help build an audience. The author must stick around and engage with the audience. He must reply to their comments and queries and give out suggestions, wherever required. This creates a sense of belongingness in the audience and makes them feel valued. Once people see that their questions are being answered or their comments are being read, it encourages them to actively participate in discussions on the post, which helps it grow in popularity and attracts the attention of new readers. Communicating with the audience also helps you gain ideas. The readers may come up with suggestions or point out errors, which would help you improve your work.

In a nutshell, guest posting helps build audience in the above elaborated ways and not just that, it helps you enhance your work and increases credibility and also increases the traffic on your blog or website.