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Customer Engagement & Retention

5 Reasons Why Guest Posts Help Your Blog

I talked a few weeks ago about how to guest post on other blogs.

To give you some real life examples of how this has gone, here are a few links to recent guest posts I’ve done (including readership, # of Comments, & Page Rank (PR) )

Blog Post Title
Readership # of Comments PR
How to Get Started Blogging (Podcast) Unknown 0 2/10
Simple Ways to Monetize a Blog (Podcast) Unknown 0 2/10
Making Your 1st Blog Post (Podcast) Unknown 0 2/10
Do I Really Need a Blog for an Ecommerce Business 920 29 4/10
5 Blogging Basics You Can’t Live Without 920 8 4/10
The 2010 Goals Challenge – Can You Do This 3509 15 6/10
6 Consistent Keys to eCommerce Blogging Success 3509 9 6/10
Have You Ever Thought This About StumbleUpon? Unknown 2 4/10

It’s one thing to guest post on a blog.

But what is the real VALUE to guest posting?

Here are a few things I’ve discovered after guest posting more aggressively:

5 Reasons Why Guest Posts Help

  1. Building Business Relationships with Fellow Bloggers: This is probably the best reason to guest post on other blogs within your industry. As the saying goes, “It’s not always WHAT you know, it’s WHO…” Industry connections do so much to get your name out there, help you establish credibility, and build your brand online and off.
  2. Increased Subscription to My Blog RSS Feed (Email Updates): Guest posting has increased my RSS subscription numbers by about 50% so far. To some, RSS feed subscribers may not be that big of deal; but to me, having a dedicated readership who get updates only helps me be a better blogger and keeps me accountable to blog consistently. RSS Subscribers are important for a variety of reasons. Hidden Goal: I want to have 100’s of Thousands of subscribers and then sell advertising to businesses that value these types of numbers.
  3. Increased Traffic to My Site: Yes, this is one reason I guest post; but really I don’t care as much about the one-hit wonder traffic that is curious and follow my links to my site. The traffic I really care about is related to the Search Engine Traffic I’m seeing. One way I see this is by using Google Alerts to notify me when Google finds MollerMarketing.com or Nate Moller.
  4. Link Building on Quality Sites: Another reason to guest post for sure; but again, the link building is mostly for SEO purposes. This is why it’s important to look at Page Rank as you guest post. If the PR is higher, the “link juice” is much more sweet!
  5. Increased Comments on Blog Posts on My Site: According to Darren Rowse, only 1 of every 100 readers comment on your blog. So what can you do to get more comments? Guest posting on other blogs has helped me get more quality comments on my own blog posts, which to me creates much more credibility on my site overall. My recent post about an end to SEO got comments from people I really respect and added so much value to my initial research.Comments are a big deal to me. If I make a blog post that I feel has merit and then I get NO comments, I begin questioning if I should tweak the article, be more controversial, or completely erase it and start fresh. Comments are part of the community a blog creates. If your blog posts aren’t getting comments and you’ve been online for a while, guest posting on other blogs that have readers and comments is a great way to get your name out there and attract readers who comment.

How has guest posting on other blogs helped your online business?

UPDATE: Found a great article from Ann Smarty about How to Find Places to Guest Post via Google.

11 replies on “5 Reasons Why Guest Posts Help Your Blog”

Nate, Thank you for your guest post on my blog – it generated a lot of interest. I wanted to let you know about BloggerLinkUp.com where I find opportunities to guest post as well as ask for guest posts from other bloggers.

In addition to guest posts I have regular posting relationships with Small Business Trends (which just got me nominated for a SAMMY award – see http://www.semmys.org/category/reputation-management) and other sites.

I have a big online PR push coming up – I’ll ask for guest posts around a topic. I’ll blog about how it goes.

Blog on!
Janet

Thanks for the opportunity. I’ll definitely check out BloggerLinkUp.com and see what opportunities I can find there.

Look forward to keeping in touch.

Nate

p.s. It was Janet (@newspapergrl) that introduced me to Twitter back when it was brand new – thanks Janet!

Great tips Nate. I now see guest posting is an important branding step. Kind of similiar to the networking on linked in and joining special interest groups and joining in on webinars.

Cheers

Tino

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