Guest Blogging. If you’re searching the internet for ways to deepen your impact and influence as a blogger, you are most assuredly going to come across the topic of guest blogging. In fact, that may very well have been what led you to this particular blog. You will have opportunities on these various blogs to read about the SEO benefits of guest blogging or perhaps some essential information about link building and more. These are all excellent and worthwhile topics, many of which you can read about in other articles on this very site. However, the purpose of this particular article is to talk not about the habits and patterns of a Google webcrawler, but of the essential element behind every blog ever to exist. Namely, a human.
Blogging has the opportunity to be an extremely relational activity if you allow it. Moreover, you may very well find that these relationships have the potential to expand your influence with quite little effort on your part. You see, I’ve come to believe that bloggers in search of an audience are very much cut from the same vein. They started out with very little and through persistent effort and the kindness of others, they were able to grow an audience that allowed them to deepen the impact of their voice. Consequently, many of them are quite ready to help out a new blogger if you have excellent and congruent content to offer. So let’s explore that.
Established blogs will typically have some plan of content laid out. However, if you talk to bloggers, they will often tell you that the length at which this plans extends out into the future can vary wildly. It is not uncommon for a blogger to feel that it is time for a new post, but upon drawing from their creative well they come up empty. Consequently, a timely guest blog can be a blessing to the established blog as much as it is to the emerging blog. However, this is where content must bring with it a certain value. A guest post is not the time to write out the junk that you wouldn’t think worthy to publish on your own blog. Rather, it’s the time to make a first impression in a relationship that can provide innumerable benefits down the road.
Some of the more established blogs have a fairly large presence on social media and this is an asset for the emerging blogger that can develop relationships that last. Again, you have to remember that many of these blogs with social media followers in the hundreds of thousands started out just like you. That is feeling like they had a voice to offer the world, but no real way for the world to hear it. Thus, when you develop a regular relationship through guest blogging, it is not all that uncommon or unheard of for these larger sites to simply share one of your articles from your blog directly to their social media account. Trust me, when a Facebook page of 400,000 followers shares your article on their feed, you will notice the difference. Occasionally this will even happen without them giving you the heads up. Thus, when you notice your real time analytic stats go from 10 viewers on the blog to over 200 on the blog in a few seconds, you quickly realize something has happened. What has happened exactly? A relationship is bearing it’sfruit. It’s always good to thank the site or page for sharing your article and continue to deepen that relationship. Their response is often typical and goes something like this. “No problem, I remember when I started and no one would help me out. So I just wanted to help someone else.”
Blogging is relational. They are people just like you and just like me. You could just guest blog in the same manner that many drive through a fast food restaurant for a quick dinner. Or, you could sit down to a steak dinner with a potential new friend. Ask yourself which one will be there for you 6 months down the road when you have top tier content in need or a larger audience. It’s relational. So start building those relationships now through guest blogging. There could be a future without precedent waiting for you.