If you’re a business owner, you’ve hopefully heard your marketing person mention that they have been working on a guest post strategy for your company. You agreed it was a great idea with a vague notion of what that means.

Were you left wondering why guest blogging is so important to your bottom line? We’re here to dispel your confusion and help you understand exactly what a guest post is and why it’s a critical portion of your digital marketing program.

What’s a guest post?

A guest post is a term that’s interchangeable with the term guest blog. Yep. That’s right; they are one and the same.

Guest blogging is the act of writing unique content that you will share on another blog to attain new, high-quality backlinks from websites in an industry similar to yours.

In exchange for the fabulous content, you should receive one or two do-follow backlinks to your site.

Here’s a peek at how this all works.

Let’s pretend you manufacture dog collars. You want to outsell all your competitors online and begin to build backlinks from relevant sites. Your marketing team should focus on guest blogging on websites related to pet care, pet rescue, dog accessories, or other relevant websites. On the other hand, blog websites about an unrelated industry, like a recipe website, will be irrelevant and could actually harm your efforts.

Why set a goal of one per week?

If you can obtain one guest blog placement every week for a sustained period, your website will begin to receive more traffic.

Setting an achievable goal is essential to succeeding. Guest blogging is not an easy business. It’s very competitive, and bloggers and website owners select only the submissions that they find the most interesting. It’s easy to get discouraged, and that is an attainable goal that will help you keep on track despite the rejections.

Let’s take a closer look at why it works.

5 Reasons Why You Should Guest Post

You build backlinks

As previously mentioned, backlink building is critical to your digital marketing strategy. Here is why.

Several factors determine your website’s placement on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

One of these factors is the number of do-follow backlinks that point back to your website. The search engines view sites with backlinks as they believe the popularity is driven by providing users with fresh and reliable information.

Once you start to build up backlinks, your domain authority will start to ease up the rankings.

Your site is looked at as an authority

Another factor that drives you up the SERPs is the authority of your website. This is called the Domain Authority or DA and is calculated by Moz. The DA scale ranges from 1 (lowest) to 100 (highest).

To give you some clarity, blog websites have a domain of 1 or 2 on the first day they are created. Google, however, has a DA of 100. While your site may never achieve such a lofty ranking, you can move it up by building backlinks.

This happens because your site will be considered more of an “authority” when you receive backlinks from other authoritative sites that are related to your industry.

Become a content matter expert

In addition, the more you write within your industry, the more your website—and you, as the writer—become viewed as expert in your particular content matter.

When you begin publishing guest posts, your company name will be in the author bio section. Users see your name across many channels. They view this as a company that is knowledgeable and a good source of reliable information.

Isn’t that precisely the impression which you want to make on users?

Address a new audience

Because you are guest posting on relevant websites, you should share similar audiences.

Let’s go back to our dog collar manufacturer. The company wants to build recognition of their brand, and they guest post on animal rescue sites. The people who are adopting dogs through the rescue will probably be very interested in learning about why your dog collars are innovative and in subscribing to your newsletter or purchasing your brand.

You could expand your site’s users when you expose your company to the host site’s audience. This is especially beneficial for newer websites which sometimes struggle to attract users.

Traffic surges

Your reward for all that hard work building backlinks is increased traffic to your website. As you guest blog, traffic surges come from two sources.

First, you will have users of the host site read your article and click over via the do-follow backlink if they enjoyed the content. That’s great because they are engaged with you enough to want to learn more.

Second, as you start to rise in the SERPs, you will begin to see more organic traffic making its way to your site.

Social event

Do you ever find it challenging to pen clever social media content day after day? You can use your guest blogs as fresh fodder for your social media channels.

Share the news of your guest post in a short post and link back to the post. Tag the host site in your post as a token of your appreciation. It builds goodwill in the blogging community.

The Bottom Line

Setting a goal of having one single guest post published each week is achievable. And, it’s one that can help you see surges in your traffic.

But, be sure to take advantage of that new traffic by having your website ready to convert those users into customers. After all, isn’t the ultimate goal of your marketing program increased revenue?

Deborah Tayloe

Deborah is a blogger and freelancer who often writes for EmailMeForm. When she’s not blogging, you’ll probably find Deborah working on DIY projects around her home in North Carolina.