4 Myths About Guest Blogging

Writing a guest post for someone else’s blog is considered one of the best ways to market your website and bring in additional traffic.

The theories behind this are:

1. Your link will be accessible to the readers of another blog. When they read your post they may follow the link back to your site.
2. Your blog, or website, will earn more of a reputation as an authority in the eyes of the search engines since there are more sites linking back to you.

I am certainly not disagreeing with either of these thoughts on writing guest posts. In fact, I encourage anyone who has a blog or website to write guest posts as often as possible.

Despite the benefits of guest blogging, there are some ideas that people have in regards to this practice. These myths often stifle the benefits that can be gained from having your work posted on other people’s blogs.

To get the most benefit from a guest posting campaign, it is important to dispel these myths so you can go into this task without hesitation.

Myth 1 – Guest posting will take content away from my blog.

This is a logical argument. Every time you write something for someone else it is taking time, and ideas, away from your own blog.

However, if you view a guest post as an investment you may look at things differently. For every quality guest post you write you may be spending content capital, but odds are your returns will be much greater. Isn’t it worth it to write a post that could bring a hundred new readers to your blog? That is a hundred that would have never seen your work before had it not been for that guest post.

Myth 2 – Finding places to guest post is extremely hard.

Not many of us want to reach out to people we have never met, If we were comfortable doing that we would be telemarketers and not bloggers.

But there is no reason to be nervous about reaching out to fellow bloggers. In fact, most of them welcome the chance to bring a new voice onto their blog.

Some make it really easy for you by publishing the exact guidelines

for submitting content to them. No need to email and ask shyly if you can post. They actually advertise their content needs to writers.

Myth 3 – The quantity of blogs you write for is more important that the quality.

There are some sites that let anyone post content. All you have to do is sign up, or send a post, and it goes live. These sites don’t pass on the authority that reputable blogs do.

It should also be noted that some guest bloggers make a habit of taking one article and “spinning” it so that they can have many different versions of the same article. Spinning the article takes certain words and replaces them with synonyms. The hope is that if the content is spun enough, the search engines, or copyscape, won’t pick up on the duplicate content. While this may give the blogger a high quantity of posts, the quality lacks to a point where some of the content doesn’t even make sense.

This may work at times to game the search engines into passing on link juice but rest assured, no one reading a spun article is going to give you credit as an authority on a given topic. And any blog that published quality guest posts will send spun content right into the trash bin.

Myth 4 – Use posts of lesser quality for guest blogging.

It is only natural that you would want to save your best content for your own blog. But do me a favor and try this. The next time you write something that is a work of art; use that as a guest post. Don’t publish it on your own blog, give it to someone else (with a back link of course) and see how much traffic you get as a result.

You see, when you publish a great article on a site with more traffic than your own you expose your talents to more people. Would you rather the first impression they have of you, and your blog, be your best work or something that would gone in the trash otherwise?

Guest blogging takes some time to get right, but once you have a feel for how to write for other blogs and a network of colleagues you can call on to publish your work your blog should start to see some pretty decent results.

If you have any questions about guest blogging, please feel free to ask them in the comment section or direct them to me personally.