3 Ways Guest Posting Can Help Grow Your Online Audience

These days, I’m writing guest posts like a madman. More than I ever have, in fact, in over six years of steady blogging. In addition to my commitment to regularly posting on this blog, it’s quite an investment of time. So why bother?

3 Ways Guest Posting Can Help Grow Your Online Audience

I believe guest posting is the single most important strategy for growing your blog readership and platform. Allow me to explain…

What is guest posting?

First things first: let’s define our terms. “Guest posting” means writing and publishing an article on someone else’s website or blog.

I offer this on my own site (occasionally) and do it quite a bit on other blogs with audiences that I want to speak to. It’s a great way to connect with new readers and get your name out.

But for the longest time, I overlooked this essential discipline for growing a popular blog. I wish I hadn’t. And I hope you won’t.

There are three reasons why guest posting is such a key strategy for every blogger to build their online influence:

Guest posting builds relationships

Bloggers need good content. By being a good guest blogger and adding value to someone else’s blog, you’re going to build relationships with other bloggers.

Bloggers make up a large percentage of conversations happening on the Internet, especially on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. They can be tremendously influential. Which makes them good friends to have.

By making friends with other bloggers through guest posting, you’re going to grow your influence in the realm of social media, which will ultimately lead to more blog subscribers.

Guest posting is great for search engines

The one non-negotiable you should have for guest-posting is this:

The host blogger must include a link to your blog in the post somewhere (usually at the beginning or end).

Over time, these backlinks will raise the value of your blog to search engines, making your content easier to find via Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others.