Is Guest Blogging a Good PR Strategy?
Guest blogging has been a tactic used by many PR professionals to get their clients press. It's a great way to create online buzz and awareness for a brand or company. But does guest blogging really work? The answer to this question is "it depends on your strategy."
If your goal is to elicit referral traffic to your site, guest blogging might not be the best way to go. This blogger did a little study and found that he got very litttle referal traffic from the sites he guest blogged for. In other words, very few people clicked on links inside his article and were redirected to his site.
However, he found that traffic to his site was way up as a result of this experiement. The traffic wasn't coming from direct leads from his blog posts; rather, they were coming from general Search Engine searches on his keywords. In other words, he was successfully increasing the number of inbound links to his site and thereby making his site easier to find with search engines. Of the 31 guest posts he wrote as part of his experiement, he received 150 visits to his site in referral traffic, but he received an increase of 100 daily visitors in just 10 days after his 31 blog posts were published.
The verdict is that writing guest posts for other blogs can be a crucial way to build your inbound links - and thus overall traffic to your website. But the traffic may not come direct from your blog posts via referral links, rather they will come from an improved search engine ranking established by increasing your inbound links.
The next time I do a "blog tour" with one of my clients, I will keep this in mind. Here are some other tips I found useful in the aforementioned blog post (and some of my own tips too):
Why Guest Blog?:
- Bloggers love it. Smaller blogs focused on your niche will love having content that they didn't have to write themselves. It's usually welcomed with grand enthusiasm.
- Results get better with time. Blogging for inbound links vs. referral traffic will continue to boost your search engine ranking over time.
- Credibility boost. Guest blogging is similar to getting published in a magazine - and it boosts your credibilty ten-fold!
How to Guest Blog Strategically:
- Mind your Anchor Text. Remember, you want to improve your inbound links for specific keywords. If one of your keywords is "PR agency in Denver" then you'll want to link those exact words to your website or landing page (or specific sub-pages).
- Keep On Topic. You want to write about things that your audience cares about and that make it easy for search engines to find you.
- Be Useful. To successfully get your articles published, make sure they are useful, concise and easy to read!
Read this blog post to learn more insightful tips on how to blog for inbound links - as well as a list of tools you can use to identify top bloggers that you want to pitch to write for so you can get published and start building those inbound links from various sources.