Have you heard of guest blogging? If not, let me explain what guest blogging is all about, and then I’ll give you a bunch of reasons why it’s such a great idea. If you want to increase the number of visitors that your Wordpress blog receives, you will be interested in guest blogging.

What is guest blogging?

In short, guest blogging is where you write a great quality and interesting article for another blog owner. In return, you have a couple of links at the bottom of the article, which go back to your website. These links help increase the number of visitors to your website, in addition to establishing a relationship with fellow bloggers in your niche.

The Approach: The process starts by approaching a blogger (via a contact form, by email, etc) and asking them if they’d be interested in you writing an article for them. Often it helps to tell them the idea of the article you have in mind for them.

Important: Ensure that the host blog is related to your website, so that visitors of the host blog will be interested in reading your article.

The Article: When the owner of the blog (that you’re interested in) accepts your offer, you go away and write a fantastic quality article on the agreed topic. Do spend lots of time working on the article to ensure that it’s top notch content. You want the owner of the host blog to be enthusiastic to publish your article.

The Results: Once the article is published, you’ll receive more visitors to your website and potentially more comments on your blog’s articles.

You can also reciprocate by offering the blog owner to write for your blog. You will also have expanded your network of fellow bloggers in your niche too, which opens up all kinds of opportunities!

The Benefits – More Visitors

Regardless of your motivation for having a website, you essentially want as many visitors as possible. More visitors might result in more clients or sales. It might even help you earn more from your advertisers. Writing a great guest article will encourage readers of the host blog to visit your blog.

The Benefits – Quality Links

From a search engine optimisation (SEO) point of view, links (aka backlinks) are the real backbone to getting top ranking positions in the search engines. You of course will appreciate, that the higher your rankings in the search engines, the more visitors you receive.

When you write an article for a high quality blog in your niche, you are getting links from a trusted and related website. The search engines have algorithms that place surprising emphasis on links from websites that are considered trusted and relevant. Therefore you’re not just getting any old link, you’re getting a link that has potential to really influence your search engine rankings.

The Benefits – Subscribers

Regular readers (aka subscribers, aka RSS subscribers, etc) are your committed followers. These are your visitors who love to return again and again to read the articles on your blog. Subscribers are the people who recommend your articles to their friends, the people who enjoy your articles, and potentially they may end up being clients, customers or friends.

Whenever you have extra visitors to your site, such as those gained from guest blogging, some of those visitors will become subscribers. Learn to love those regular readers!

The Benefits – Branding

Every time you mention your blog name at the end of a guest article, you’re imprinting your blog name (or business name, or your name) on the reader. Studies show that the more familiar a person is with a brand, the more they trust that brand.

With that trust, a visitor is more likely to refer you to their friends, subscribe to your blog, or buy something from you.

The Benefits – Free Content

Up until now, I’ve mainly focused on the benefits of being a guest writer. However, as a blog owner, guest blogging is a great opportunity for you to get some free content and give your regular readers a little diversity in what articles they can read on your blog.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve enjoyed this introduction to guest blogging! I also hope that the benefits I’ve mentioned have convinced you to give guest blogging a go yourself.

About the Author

This article itself is a guest article by Dan Harrison, who is the founder of a platform called Blog Synergy, which helps writers to find new guest blogging opportunities.

Blog Synergy is completely free during it’s beta phase. Even when the beta phase finishes, there will be a completely free basic account in addition to a fee-based account with premium features.