Guest Blogging : Guide to Leveraging Expertise & Influence

Establishing yourself or your company as an expert within a targeted niche has always been a cornerstone of marketing, both online and offline. With blogging, we are at a point where a business leader who can write, film video shorts, or build a Facebook presence; can also reach their core audience online. One form of increasing online visibility and positioning your company or company figurehead as an expert in your field is Guest Blogging. But establishing that relationship is the key.

There is an art to Guest Blogging, and it’s about building long term brand loyalty and reciprocity. Guest blogging is never a band-aid for link building, and will generate business for your company if done correctly.

This being said, guest blogging is one of the most effective ways to promote your brand and build a strong online presence. The benefits of guest blogging include:

1. Achieve Targeted Exposure

Exposure is no good unless it’s targeted. Guest posts should be published on highly-relevant blogs whose readers are most likely to be interested in the topic AND your company. Besides, visitors that click through to the author’s site are interested in learning more about you and your site. As a result, a much higher percentage go on to become RSS subscribers or customers- which will increase your site’s conversion rate and return readers.

2. Build Reputation of an Expert in Your Niche

By sharing your expertise with a highly-targeted audience, you will soon notice your opinion holds a higher value and your work is cited more and more often.

The enhanced reputation that it brings can help to increase conversions in product/service sales or when recruiting advertisers. Being seen as a “thought leader” in your industry certainly has its advantages. As an expert, you’ll attract the top-tier clients who are willing to pay more to get the services of an industry leader. You’ll also have an easier time earning the trust of new customers, which is a huge challenge for all online businesses.

Guest blogging builds trust and authority to your brand.

3. Influence the Influencers

Many of the top bloggers in your niche will be power users and writing a post for them is a fantastic way to bring your service or product to their attention.

Readers of these bloggers look up to them and follow them because they have already established long-standing authority. The fact that you are allowed (and welcomed) to share your opinion using these platforms make your brand much more trustworthy by association.

Let’s also not forget that blogs are SOCIAL MEDIA, and social media gives you the change to engage your audience and customers. So, publishing a blog post is only half of the equation, the other half is following up in the comments field and continuing the shaping and forming of the conversation. One of those commenters could be your next client!

4. Achieve Social Media Exposure

It is very difficult to achieve exposure in Digg or any other top social media network, especially if you own a commercial site. A high-quality guest post published in a popular blog is an effective “indirect” way to get your brand to the front page of Digg or other targeted social networks.

Readers are always eager to share great content that comes from a trusted source that they frequent on their own. Letting your content naturally pick up exposure because it’s highly targeted on a niche website will boost social media exposure through all channels that sharing occurs.

Here are some hardcore examples :

• One guest blogging spot we established last month got 2,900+ natural retweets in two days
• That same guest blog spot hit the front page of Digg 12 hours later.
• It now has over 250 incoming links, and according to Google Analytics (the publisher provided to me) is still seen by hundreds of users a day

5. Build Links

Guest posts are published on high-authority blogs- which means links from them are gold. You can’t buy them. You can only deserve them by bringing excellent content.

This datapoint helps to establish link differentiation from your competition. If you are in an industry where everyone depends on paid link networks or links from blogs no one reads, taking the time to put together quality content on top influencing blogs will make a massive difference in your inbound link and authority portfolio.

I have seen many companies and clients obtain such accounts on blogs seemed untouchable, but with a solid and transparent approach, and not trying to take advantage of the relationship with spammy links, they have set up reoccurring columns on Technoratio Top 100 blogs that are TOP INFLUENCERS.

NOTE: A blogger will only accept content from an author that is of the utmost quality. Their brand and reputation could be jeopardized, so you know your content will be surrounded by top-tier posts by other authors as well- thus keeping high authority status on the blog itself and your links.

6. Think of Long-Term Effects

Brand Loyalty is not only built with the audience of the blog you are contributing to, but also with the influencial blog itself. The networking benefit of guest blogging means that its value shouldn’t be judged on a short term basis. Building relationships with the bloggers, you ensure you have effective media and venues to spread your idea or help your projects go viral.

Blogs are the Magazines of the Web, and contributing to multiple influencial blogs within your niche is like having your brand across the entire newsstand.

Next time you have some important news to share, or a new promotion to get exposure to, you will already know which high-traffic blog owners will be happy and willing to help. You already have these relationships … now it’s time to leverage them. And VICE VERSA. Personally, I take about 5 to 8 hours out of my week helping out bloggers, to make sure that if I see an issue with their blog, I help them address it.

This is for two reasons :

1. The better their blog’s SEO and readership is, the better the Guest Blogging column will perform for my clients.
2. I’ve been professional blogging for 7 years since I created Search Engine Journal, and I have a lot of experience to share

It’s easy to push out average content on a one time basis – but eventually you’ll run out of those “average” blogs that are willing to accept “average” content. Building trusted and long lasting relationships with high quality content is absolutely key in the long run for your reputation. Seeing your name and brand on the same blog multiple times will allow your customer to view you as consistent and trustworthy.