What you need to know about contributing articles to other sites and how it can raise your profile online.
A friend of mine runs a web design firm and wants to increase leads and sales. My mother wrote a book about her dog and wants to sell as many copies online as possible. One’s an entrepreneur, the other a book author. Neither has experience with online marketing but both want to increase traffic to their websites.
You don’t need to be skilled in online marketing strategies such as SEO, paid search or social media marketing to gain visibility and website traffic. One of the best ways for business owners who are struggling to generate website traffic is to establish his or her self as a credible niche authority. One way to do that is to contribute blog posts to other sites — a practice commonly referred to as guest blogging.
The benefits of guest blogging can be numerous and significant. Some include:
- Building and strengthening Author Rank. Google factors the author of an article into how well it ranks in search engines.
- Generating inbound links. These are links from the sites you blog for — either in your author bio or in the body of the article itself — that point back to content on your site.
- Building brand awareness. Every article you get published will increase the opportunity for readers to find your content and associate your name with your company or brand.
- Associating your company with more well-known brands. By getting your articles published on websites that already rank highly in search results and have high traffic volume, Google should respect the links that point to your website as being trustworthy votes of confidence. It can also help your name become recognized as an authority in your industry.
- Driving high-quality leads and website traffic. If your articles provide advice or solve problems, you should get referral traffic and leads as a result.
- Generating social signals. Posts that get exposure on popular sites usually garner lots of likes, tweets and social shares, which factor in the ranking algorithm.
…to read this article in full, visit leading US entrepreneurial resource entrepreneur.com
