Why Guest Posting Should Be a Part of Your Marketing Strategy in 2020

Find out why guest posting is still the most powerful strategy for building authority, backlinks and your audience, keep reading if guest posting isn’t a part of your marketing strategy.

If you write it, they will come. Right?

Wrong.

Content marketing isn’t the static and one dimensional task some people see it as. It’s not just about doing research, writing great content, using keywords and then waiting for the visits to roll in. Sometimes, you need to be a bit more proactive.

Building connections, generating high-quality backlinks, and expanding your audience are all key facets. Luckily, there is one content marketing technique that can do all of that and more: guest posting.

So, let’s look at why this is a technique you have to make part of your next marketing push.

Expose yourself to new and diverse audiences

If you’ve been able to consistently grow your site traffic only to hit a plateau, guest posting can be part of the answer.

Maybe you’ve exhausted the potential leads in your current circles. Or, maybe the whole industry experienced a downturn in interest. After all, it’s much harder (and more expensive) to convert new leads than to foster existing ones.

Whatever the case may be, having your content published on third-party platforms can open you up to new eyes. Medium has perfected this model. Each day, week, or month, it sends its readers a curated list of topics that are either trending or that seems relevant to them.

In this way, readers can be exposed to new ideas, brands, individuals, etc. they wouldn’t have found on their own.

Maintain control of your brand’s narrative

You might be thinking why go through the effort of guest posting in the first place? Why not just find or pay other platforms/bloggers to write about you?

The simple answer is narrative control. No matter what great content writers they are, no one knows your brand as intimately as you. Think of all that time you put into crafting a specific voice and the rapport you’ve built with your audience.

By coming up with your own content, but publishing it on another platform, you can get the best of both worlds. You can reap all these other benefits while still deciding on exactly what to say and how to say it.

Establish yourself as a niche/industry authority

Other publishing platforms are innately trusted and respected by their readers. That’s why they keep coming back or subscribed in the first place. When you get published, some of that trust and respect automatically get conferred onto you.

Having your guest post published on other platforms signals that these platforms trust you and view you as a valuable source of knowledge. Why else would they associate themselves with you and risk your content on their platform at all?

Keep an effective pitch in mind. Yes, this step is extremely important in reaching out to editors or bloggers, sometimes even more crucial than creating a superb content. Check this awesome guide on effective pitching by Luckyposting. One of the biggest takeaways may be that different kinds and length of the subject line does have an impact on the success of your guest posting strategy as it defines whether your email will be opened at all.

However, this effect is directly proportional to the authority and standing of that platform. If you guest post on a platform with a less than stellar reputation, it will also harm your image.

On the other hand, the more prestigious or exclusive a platform is, the better that will look for you.

Generate traffic to your website through backlinks

Of course, one of the most obvious and superficial ways you can benefit from a guest post is via backlinks. However, this has been abused in the past and one has to be careful on how you use them to stay on Google’s good side.

This is not an opportunity for a call to action or hard sell on behalf of your brand. This is an opportunity to create awareness and spread your wings. So, try and keep the backlinks to a minimum and not to use them in over-promotional contexts.

One or two throughout your article should cut it, and it should preferably take users to valuable content on your blog. For example, for some further reading on a point or topic.

In any case, the efficacy of backlinks are becoming increasingly skewed towards quality and not quantity. One or two links on a high-authority site are worth more than twenty on an low-authority one.

Many choose to put a backlink in the author bio, particularly if you have a personal blog or website.

Expand the topics you blog about or try something new

Google’s SEO algorithms generally reward consistency when it comes to how and what you write about. While this might make managing your own content easier, it can lock you into talking about certain topics in a certain way.

When guest posting, you can break free from the mold. Any professional publishing platform will undoubtedly have their own editorial policies which means you might have to adjust your approach anyway. You may even get a sales kit with their audience segmentation and other guidelines

Regardless, it can be a fun experiment to see how audiences respond to something different and to appeal to those outside your usual target market.

Give old content a new lease on life

There’s a common misconception that Google’s SEO algorithm unilaterally punishes duplicate content. That’s not necessarily true.

Google’s goal is to discourage plagiarism and laziness. With the proper disclaimers, you could repost entire articles on other platforms if it happens to meet their editorial requirements.

This will allow you to extract new value out of old content and to give it a second chance to be read by new people. The same goes if you want to put up a guest post you wrote on your own blog for your readers.

Guest blogging isn’t just a one-way street

If you flip this around, i.e. you become the guest blogging platform, it’s easy to see how you can still reap the benefits:

• The guest blogger will also promote their guest post on their channels and social media, earning you some extra traffic and quality backlinks.
• Seeing that other industry leaders want the opportunity to guest post on your site gives you more authority.
• You get to give your audience something new and exciting from a different perspective.
• Search engines reward frequently published new content and guest posting can speed up your publishing rate.
• A willingness from you to publish other’s content too will strengthen your connections and networks.

Online marketing doesn’t have to be you vs the world

If done right, guest posting can result in a healthy feedback loop benefiting all parties involved. It provides high-authority platforms with an opportunity to work together to create a network of trustworthy and valuable content.

With great power comes great responsibility and this only works if all parties involved commit to sound SEO practices and quality content with real value.

Google and other search engines are punishing the dubious practices that plagued guest blogging before. Keyword stuffing, abusing backlinks, and paying for links are a no-no.

That’s why it pays to do your research and only work with other platforms and brands that reflect well on yours. If we can all do that, guest posting has a strong future in the internet marketing business.