(Attrib: Flickr/opensourceway)
Guest blogging took off in a big way this year. It’s an increasingly popular way to spread brand awareness and an excellent adjunct to other inbound marketing strategies.
That said, the answer to the question in the headline is ‘No’. You should not be guest blogging.
That is, you shouldn’t be guest blogging if you think that any of the following are true:
- Article banks are a great source of guest blog content.
- Guest blogs don’t need to be of the same quality as the content on your own blog.
- The same article, or a spun version, can be used for multiple blogs.
- Guest blogging is a cheap way to get inbound links.
Take a look at this video from the estimable Matt Cutts if you’re curious why we have such a downer on guest blogging.
We can sense that your fingers are itching to hit the comments to tell us foolish we are, and that guest blogging is the new panacea for SEO problems everywhere, but we’d ask you to indulge us for the minute or two it takes you to read the rest of this article.
As with all things, quality is the key.
Some of our readers are going to dismiss this as mere snobbery. Surely, quality is in the eye of the beholder, and to insist on the worthlessness of your 300-word article in broken English on the esoteric secrets of tooth whitening products and how they will help your love life is to be overly picky.
Let’s consider for a moment what the potential benefits of guest blogging are:
- Exposure and brand building to a wider audience.
- Demonstrating expertise to that audience.
- Publishing on high-authority sites.
- Contributing something new to the discourse in a niche.
- Building relationships.
- Getting the link.
We don’t need to be subjective in our definition of quality. Quality content is simply content that best achieves these goals. All of them. Not just the last one.
Getting an inbound link is awesome, but it’s super awesome if it’s from a site with high authority, and high-authority sites don’t take crappy articles. They take articles that are well-written, incisive, are not obvious marketing copy, and have something valuable to contribute to their readers. That’s how they got to be high-authority sites in the first place.
Exposure is worthless if the only thing you get exposed to is Googlebot. Brand building is pointless if it isn’t targeted at an audience who are likely to share their new-found admiration of your brilliance with people who matter. That means you must make an impact on smart and influential people, and the content that does that is high quality.
Establishing expertise and building relationships is essential for anyone who wants to succeed in almost any niche these days. Social media makes building and interacting with a community part of every inbound marketer’s job. Achieving that takes requires demonstrating value to other people, and guest blogging can be one of the best weapons in our arsenal for achieving that, but only if it’s of a decent quality.
So, should you be guest blogging?
Absolutely, but take the time to write content that achieves the goals we mentioned above.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments below
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