Even if your blog features the freshest, most useful content on the planet, your budget and readers could still benefit from outside voices. These guest bloggers help you attract a whole new audience, bring a new point-of-view to your typical blog content, and offer a host of other benefits.
In fact, our recent research on business bloggers shows that nearly a quarter of the best content marketers use outside teams for their blog content and more than half of this external content is from guest bloggers, as shown in the chart below.
Why Publish Guest Blog Posts?
Here are some of the benefits your blog could reap from a successful guest blogging program:
- Fresh Content: Many content marketers find that it's challenging to produce enough content to keep readers satisfied, but guest posts offer original (and hopefully high-quality) content that you don't have to create yourself.
- New perspectives for your readers: As useful as your content may be, readers want to hear other voices and ideas. Guest blogs expose you and your audience to different perspectives on your topic.
- New readers: Guest bloggers who promote their content on social media can help boost your traffic and bring in new readers. Be sure you include a clear call to action such as signing up for your email list or requesting a free demo so that new readers will stick around!
- Audience retention: Bringing new voices to your blog could help retain readers who might otherwise go elsewhere for information, because it mixes things up and keeps your content interesting.
- Higher frequency: Third-party content can help you update your blog more frequently without straining your budget or staff energy. Increased publishing frequency can help drive more blog traffic. In fact, 91% of the best bloggers publish weekly or more often.
- Relationship Building: Collaborating with guest posters helps you build relationships with potential partners who may connect you to other influencers, team up with you for a joint webinar or help create other opportunities in the future.
What Makes a Successful Guest Blogging Program?
1. Choose someone to manage guest posts: A single point of contact should manage all aspects of your guest blogging program, including communicating with guest bloggers and editing and scheduling posts. This person should have strong organizational and editing skills.
2. Create your guest blogging strategy: First, think about the main topics you want guest bloggers to cover (perhaps areas that will be relevant to your readers but aren't directly within your team's areas of expertise?) and make sure that these subjects fit your overall content marketing strategy. Next, identify content contributors who will bring high value to you and your readers. Also be realistic about the types of contributors who will benefit from publishing content on your blog. You may have your eye on the A-listers of your industry, but up-and-coming voices may be more eager to contribute and may still provide value to your audience.
3. Post your guest blogging guidelines: Get specific about your parameters for guest posts, including:
- The length of posts you will publish (give a range such as 500-700 words or 800-1,200 words).
- Parameters on backlinking.
- Your blog's focus. For instance, contributors may want to write about their products but you might stipulate that they focus on providing tips for your audience rather than self-promotion.
- An overview of the editing process. You should establish the expectation that you'll edit contributor's content as needed, but give them a final look at the post before it's published.
- A note that your blog will only publish original content, and the expectation the post will not be republished elsewhere to avoid duplicate content.
- A statement that all third-party pictures, statistics and other content will be attributed to their original sources.
Creating realistic expectations from the beginning will help you weed out contributors not willing to follow your standards and create a smoother process for those who are.
4. Improve contributors' posts: Your contributors want their posts to present them in the best possible light. You want clean, error-free posts that reflect well on your brand and leave a positive impression on readers. To achieve both ends, you need to invest the time in editing and improving guest posts. Depending on the original material submitted, this may mean condensing and tightening up run-on sentences, reformatting with bullets or subheads to improve readability, correcting grammar or spelling issues or adding visuals to break up the written content. Make it known that you will be editing guest posts and sending the final version to contributors before publication so that everyone understands the process.
5. Manage deadlines: Having an editorial calendar can help you produce a mix of different content types and topics over the next month or year. Be sure to schedule guest posts on your editorial calendar and agree to a timetable with your contributors including the date a draft is due, the date it will be reviewed by the editor and target publication date (or leave this open-ended and keep your contributor up to date on when it will be published)
6. Measure performance: Content marketing metrics is still in its infancy but you should apply whatever metrics you use for your own posts to the guest blog posts you publish. Which contributors are getting the most shares or comments? Can you determine the impact of individual writers on lead generation and influence? Be sure to invite your best contributors to write more posts and provide more value for your audience.
Want to learn more about guest blogging and other strategies used by leading business bloggers? Get your copy of Business Blogging Secrets Revealed, which includes survey results from 428 marketers, as well as insights into how the best business bloggers receive 10K+ page views per month.