By Joanna Latimer

Over the last few years, guest posting had been steadily gaining popularity both among business owners using it as a promotional strategy and blog owners who accept posts from outsiders. According to statistics, 76 percent of editors claim to post from 1 to 10 guest posts every week, and 94 percent state that they are going to publish as much or more of them the next year. Guest posting shows itself to be extremely effective and efficient for a variety of reasons; nevertheless, many entrepreneurs are still wary of this method and give preference to more traditional approaches to online promotion, such as paid ads and keyword-based search engine optimization. In this article, we will explain why focusing on guest posting in the coming year is the most sensible thing you can do.

You get quality targeted traffic

The usual problem with all online promotional strategies is that most of them attract people indiscriminately. Paid Adwords (especially if you do not spend day and night perfecting and optimizing them) are just as likely to bring you a visitor who will leave your website after spending less than a second on it as somebody who has any interest in what you have to offer. In case of guest posting, however, if you choose the blogs to deal with carefully, you decide from the outset who you are going to attract. If the blog's audience is similar to your target audience, the majority of incoming traffic from it will be relevant for your offer, and these people will be much more likely to convert than those who followed a link from search engine results.

It helps you establish valuable relationships

Less than a decade ago, guest posting had a bad rep because it was mostly built around so-called content farms and quantity dominated over quality. Running a guest posting campaign meant publishing dozens if not hundreds of low-quality posts across numerous third-rate blogs to increase the number of inbound links. Since then, Google came down on this practice with all its might, and today guest posting is all about personal contact and maintaining meaningful relationships with blog owners and editors. According to the guide by guest posting service, you have no choice but to pitch your posts individually to every blog you want to work with, and this makes it necessary to establish and maintain meaningful relationships with the people behind them. In the long run, you will expand your network and get many useful acquaintances in your niche.

You get honest feedback

By publishing content on another blog, you understand yourself exposed to the scrutiny and opinions of the audience that is different from your own. While the people habitually reading your blog are more likely to be supportive about what you say, in this case, you are dealing with readers who do not particularly care about you. Therefore, you can expect them to be honest when expressing their opinions, and by reading them, you can get valuable insights into what you are doing right and wrong.

It helps you build up your portfolio and credibility

If your content on a particular topic is all over the Internet, published across a dozen high-authority blogs relevant for the niche in question, it automatically makes you worthy of attention. When people see that your name appears multiple times under high-quality articles on your topic, and these articles are published in places they are used to trusting, it makes you trustworthy by association. If you offer a product or a service, having authority and trustworthiness of this kind can be extremely helpful, especially if you do not have previous experience of providing similar products or services.

It builds your domain authority and improves SEO

If you break into a cold sweat when you think of search engine optimization, guest posting can become a viable alternative. Of course, you are unlikely to fully compete with resources that actively invest in their SEO efforts. Still, even without using any specialized and expensive SEO tactics, guest posting can improve your Google Pagerank and increase your domain authority. It is still a good idea to boost your strategy with some SEO efforts, but you will not have to spend as much on them and tweak them as much. Guest posting is one of the most useful applications of content marketing these days. If you do not use it yet, starting to do so is the best thing you can change about your business in the next year.

Joanna is an experienced blogger and a passionate digital nomad. She currently collaborates with a guest posting service Luckyposting. Joanna has an extensive background in digital marketing. She now focuses on sharing her experience about how various companies can leverage digital tools to grow exponentially. Usually, she spends her leisure time reading books or visiting professional marketing events to keep abreast of the latest updates. Joanna's latest news can also be found on Twitter.

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