Basically, the benefits from guest
posts are two. First, you get free exposure in front of a new
audience (i.e. the audience of the blog you are guest posting to) and
second, you get a backlink or two to your site. If you post on a
really popular blog, you can get substantial amounts of direct
traffic to your site and in the ideal case, when your product is of
interest to the visitors from the other blog, you can make sales.
The second advantage – the backlink –
is the main reason why guest posters submit content for free to other
blogs. If the site is a high ranking one and it is in your niche,
then this backlink is especially valuable.
Why Guest Posting Is Different from Article Marketing
One of the reasons why some people are skeptical to the power of
guest posts is that they believe this is just the good old article
marketing. While there are some similarities between the two, guest
posting is very different from article marketing. When you are guest
posting, you are submitting to blogs in a niche, while when you
submit to article directories that generally cover all topics, the
links and traffic you get are less relevant.
With guest posts, you can't submit hundreds of posts a month
simply because there aren't that many good blogs where you could
submit content, so article spamming is harder to do with guest
posting, if you are doing it right. You pick only relevant, high
quality blogs for submission and as a result, the backlinks you get
are valuable even after the Google
Panda update
.
With article directories you can have automated submissions that
blast your article with dozens of directories at once but with guest
posting this doesn't happen – you write an article exclusively for
one blog, contact each blog owner in advance and only after he or she
approves your post, it goes live. Very often you can publish only 5
or even fewer posts a month simply because not all suitable blogs in
your niche are interested in publishing stuff from other bloggers
