Guest blogging could be the new way of link building, but what is it for and more importantly, what are the pitfalls to avoid? We take a quick look here.

First, when it all goes well, it is a chance for you to expose your best work to potentially thousands of new readers on on someone else’s blog. Assuming you are picking a good blog that deals with the same general topics as you do, these could be ripe to pop over to your blog and join your RSS readership.

Of course, for the publishing blog, it is a free source of alternative thoughts and ideas. We always say that content is king – through having plenty of original content you generate more opportunities of the search engines sending your traffic. And at times it can be difficult finding new material to write about. Plus, as the publisher, you might just learn something new as well or be inspired to write about a new thought from what you read.

Also, guest blogging is spreading your writing not only on other people’s blogs, but also onto whatever social media they use, which could be different to yours. For example, a lot of bloggers will automatically post the new posts to blogger, facebook or their preferred social media network. So your posts are being exposed to these networks of followers. Not only this, but you are getting links from other websites, for free! And this is a great search engine benefit that you will want to take advantage of!

So guest blogging sounds great! Are there any problems with it?

Yes, you have to prepare and submit your very best of writing when you are asking someone else to publish it for you. It has to be excellent! If must be exciting enough to tempt the other blogger to allow you to guest on their blog whilst also interesting and saying something new so that their readers take note of what you are writing and then take an interest in your blog and visit it.

This means that there could be a couple of iterations of writing each post, as the blog owner asks you to make improvements. It could take quite a while to actually go from first writing the post to seeing it live. Plus, during this time you are being subjected to some what could feel to be quite harsh comments about your writing, either the style of the writing or the content or the way that you handle the subject. I have seen blog owners on forums complaining and naming guest bloggers that have written something that they do not agree with 100%.

And then, of course, there is always the chance of the blogger doing the dirty on you by rewriting it, removing your links and publishing it to other sources, without your links. Or even just removing your links after a couple of days or weeks and you never seeing the search engine benefits nor the extra traffic.

It is well worth guest blogging, just make sure that you choose your blogs carefully.

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