Are you looking to increase your authority in your industry? If so, guest blogging is one tactic that will yield great results. In this post, we’re going to look at why guest blogging is crucial to building your personal brand as an authority in your industry.
The Authority Benefits of Guest Blogging
First, let’s look at the benefits that you will receive through guest blogging. Note that these are only benefits you will receive though quality guest blogging, which is what we will explain in the next section.
Gain Exposure with New Audiences
The biggest difference between blogging on your own site and blogging on others is exposure you will receive. When you stick to writing only for your own site, your exposure will be limited to the audience you can generate for your blog. When you guest blog, you will put yourself in front of the established audiences of the publications to which you contribute.
Let’s say, for example, that you have a steady 15,000 unique visitors per month to your site. When you blog for your own site, that is the audience size you are limiting yourself to. When you get a guest blogging spot at Entrepreneur, on the other hand, you have the opportunity to tap into their 3.9 million unique visitors. Some will simply see your name on articles they like, while others may click through to your site. Hence, you will get the exposure and traffic generation benefits of connecting with a new audience.
Prove Your Expertise
It’s easy to say that you’re an expert on a specific topic. It’s harder to prove your expertise beyond those you work with. Guest blogging can make proving your expertise much simpler. As you contribute content to more and more sites, you can use those as a part of your bio and introductions.
So instead of introducing yourself as a business expert, you can introduce yourself as a business expert who has been featured on Forbes, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, Inc, and other popular business publications. People will recognize the names of these publications, and they will know that only people with business expertise can be featured upon them. Therefore, you will be boosting your own authority by leveraging the authority of the publications you guest post upon.
Become Unavoidable
If you follow online marketing, you will likely know the name Neil Patel. Aside from being the founder of KISSmetrics, CrazyEgg, and QuickSprout, he is literally everywhere thanks to guest blogging. If you’ve read a blog post in the last thirty days from Marketing Land, Entrepreneur, HubSpot, Forbes, and Inc., you’ve likely seen his name on a few articles.
This is how guest blogging helps you become unavoidable. If you focus your effort on only one site, you limit yourself to only being seen by that publication’s audience. But if you expand your guest blogging efforts across many popular publications in your industry, you will be discovered by almost everyone interested in news from that industry.
In conjunction with being unavoidable, you will make yourself impossible to be ignored. If your name pops up on one article, it might be easy to dismiss. If your name pops up on a reader’s favorite blogs multiple times, they will not only take notice, they will likely want to learn more about the person creating valuable content across so many high-authority publications.
How to Guest Blog for Authority
So how can you boost your authority in your industry through guest blogging? Follow these tips.
- Start with content on your own site.
Before you can submit content to other sites, you will need some content to use as your sample pieces. The easiest way to create a great online portfolio of content is by blogging on your own site. Be sure to create content on your own site that is representative of the content you want to submit to others.
You will also want to promote your content so that editors see that your content is not only well-written, but also popular. The more social shares and comments you can get on your sample pieces, the better.
As you expand your publishing beyond your site, update your sample pieces to reflect the most popular pieces you’ve written on your own blog and for others. If you approach a new publication with samples from five others, they will know automatically that your content must be good.
- Look for opportunities where you have connections.
If you want to skip the smaller sites and contribute to large, authoritative publications in your industry, you will want to start with the ones where you have some connections. Do you know other writers at the site, or better, editors or site owners? Reach out to those people to see if you can get an introduction to the right person to talk to. You will be much more successful with this approach on larger sites.
- Apply to be a contributor, not a guest blogger.
Major sites do not want one-off guest bloggers in most cases, so don’t ask to be a guest blogger. Ask to be a regular contributor. Let the right person know that you have been a longtime reader of their site, that you love the content they create on a specific topic, and that you have some new ideas you would like to share with their audience as a contributor.
Your goal isn’t to sound like you are in it for self-promotion, but that you are in it to bring value to the site’s audience on a long-term basis. Depending on the site, a regular contributor could require occasional submissions, weekly submissions, or monthly submissions as defined by the editor.
- Create amazing content.
Go above and beyond when creating content to contribute to larger sites. After all, these sites are likely used to getting the best of the best content. You want your content to stand out even more than that.
A great approach is to do some preliminary research on what content does the best. Tools like Buzzsumo will allow you to quickly see the topics that have received the most social traction on a site within the last month or year. Once you know what topics have proven to resonate best with a site’s audience, develop topics similar to them for your submissions.
- Stay engaged with your content.
Guest blogging doesn’t end with the submission of your content. In most cases, you will want to stay on track with when your posts go live so that you can promote them to your own networks and interact with readers in the comments. Depending on the site’s popularity, you may get notifications about a few new comments here and there, or you may have to answer comments until the post dies down in popularity after a week or two.
By ensuring that post is a success with traffic, social shares, and comment engagement, you will ensure that your content will be welcomed in the future.
In Conclusion
Guest blogging is a powerful way to build authority by increasing your exposure to new audiences within your industry. If you haven’t already, start by building up some great sample pieces on your own site, then start aiming your sights on the best publications in your industry!
