Is Guest Blogging still worthwhile?
When I first started this blog in early 2010 – at that time guest blogging was one of my main strategies to build exposure to the site, gain new traffic, build relationships, and admittedly build relevant contextual links.
I still to this day have these pages on my site inviting guest bloggers – Guest Blogging in Social Media | Guest Blogging.
But I often ask myself now, is guest blogging worthwhile? It is worthwhile to me as the site owner to receive such content? and as a blogger it is worthwhile for me to goto other blogs and guest blog?
In 2010 I had a good run with guest blogging by posting on other websites. I was building exposure and links, I was happy. Then I started inviting bloggers (from all around the world) to post on this site.
At first, all was good – I was receiving quality content, guest bloggers got their links, traffic and exposure in return. Then I started to realise these guest bloggers who promised unique content not to be posted elsewhere – started posting the articles from my site onto other blogs.
As I was learning SEO at the time and hearing all these stories about duplicate content, I kicked off all the guest bloggers, removed their links and deleted most of the articles they submitted. Basically I just wasted a fair amount of time for no real gain.
You may not realise but organising a guest blogger is time consuming:
- Emailing back and forth
- Editing and Proof Reading the articles
- Setting up their profile on the site (if required)
- Sifting through the guest blogging requests to find the genuine enquiries.
To this day I still receive a few emails every day from ‘Professional Guest Bloggers’ who ultimately are pushing a whole load of crap articles to just get links. The guest blogging ‘industry’ has really gone downhill in my eyes.
So this comes back to the question? Is guest blogging still worthwhile today?
Yes
But..
My strategy has changed. A new approach is required.
1. I will only post guest blogs on high quality websites, education, government, and related authority websites.
2. This website is Social Media News Australia – I will only receive guest blog posts from others in Australia (exceptions can be made), who have something to say about the digital/ social media industry.
I enjoy working with other writers and we have had many people contribute to the site, all of which I appreciate.
For me, the amount of guest blogging I do now is very minimal as I no longer actively go out and seek this (it’s just too time consuming to find the quality I am looking for) – I will wait for an invitation. Also, as this site is now established the only benefit would be to boost my personal branding in front of a new audience.
If you are a blogger, do you still guest blog? Do you find it worthwhile and what challenges have you come up against?
