Are You Guest Posting At The Expense of Your Blog?

Guest posting is awesome.

None of us disagree with the fact that guest posting is a great way for building a brand and driving traffic to your blog.

Lately guest posting has been such a rage that there are communities focusing on guest posting like myblogguest (it’s a great community if you want to find potential blogs that accept guest posts), as well as some free and paid courses.

While adopting guest posting is not something that would cause damage to your blog directly, it may be an indirect cause for the failure of your blog.

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12 Comments

This is a guest post about guest posting (ironic, huh?) by Adarsh Thampy.

Guest posting is awesome.

None of us disagree with the fact that guest posting is a great way for building a brand and driving traffic to your blog.

Lately guest posting has been such a rage that there are communities focusing on guest posting like myblogguest (it’s a great community if you want to find potential blogs that accept guest posts), as well as some free and paid courses.

While adopting guest posting is not something that would cause damage to your blog directly, it may be an indirect cause for the failure of your blog.

Just as with any other marketing methods, guest posting does have its disadvantages as well.

Problem #1: Guest Posting At The Expense of Your Blog

A lot of people make this mistake.

Just because guest posting can bring you SEO value as well as traffic, most people go on a guest posting spree. The problem is that most people ignore their own blog while they are busy guest posting on other popular blogs. The result is very few contents on your own blog.

That’s not acceptable.

Unless you want to give the impression that you are only interested in doing guest posts and getting people to your site, you’d want to spread your time evenly between guest posting and posting on your own blog.

Problem #2: You Tend to Post Low Quality Content on Your Own Blog

Recently while chatting, one blogger said to me that the absolute best content he can produce goes out as guest posts and the not so good ones goes to his blog.

Dude, seriously?

You think you should give out your best content as a guest post and mediocre content on your own blog? I have news for you. It’s not going to work for very long.

No matter how many people come to your site via guest posts, the people who’ll stick with you are those who find value in your posts. And you want to feed them with mediocre content?

Every article you put out must be the absolute best you can. Your readers don’t care whether you use it for guest posts or for your own blog. As long it has value, you’ll receive the love for your readers.

Problem #3: You Run out of Ideas

Here’s one big problem.

When you are guest posting on blogs, you’d need to come up with unique content. Unique does not mean that it must pass CopyScape. What it really means is that the content must be unique in the approach, point of view and idea.

So when you post a lot of guest posts, you run out of awesome ideas. All you are left with is content that has been covered to death in several other blogs.

If you are going to guest post about some awesome link building methods you just uncovered and then post about what is SEO on your blog, guess where people would prefer to follow you?

So, Why Are You Guest Posting?

You may wonder that if I am saying negative things about guest posting, why the hell am I guest posting about guest posting!

Here is my answer

  1. I am not short of ideas right now. If I feel that I’ll run short of great ideas for my own blog, I will stop guest posting
  2. Guest posting is great to build relationship with bloggers. It’s not just about the traffic. Since I have a pretty new blog, I’d like to make as many valuable relationships as possible
  3. I have time at my disposal. Even though I don’t enjoy a lot of free time, if I wanted to, I can squeeze out some time for guest posting without affecting my blog schedule

Over to You:

Are you guest posting for bloggers? If so, what are the challenges you faced? Let me know in the comments.

Adarsh Thampy loves talking about content marketing and helping small businesses drive traffic and revenue via content marketing. You can follow him @conversionchamp

12 Comments

  2. I think guest posting is critical for up-and-coming blogs and websites to gain exposure. As you said, as long as the blogger doesn’t neglect his/her own blog and it’s not a direct competitor, there shouldn’t be a problem.

  3. I’m committed to do some guest posting as long as it doesn’t conflict with my own posts..because I noticed when I 1st started guest posting that I could inadvertently neglect my own site.

    Good points..

    dee

  5. Guest posting isn’t simply a quick way to lure new traffic to your blog. Any post you write for other blogs should be of as high a quality as any you write for your own.

  6. a lot of people guest post to build links, you just have to set your self up so that you aren’t abusing the system. Make sure you have something to say when you guest post – otherwise don’t offer the service.

    1. Philip, you are right about many people abusing the system. It’s very bad for the whole ecosystem and Google will start devaluing guest post links if spammers are let loose.

  7. To tell you the truth, there’s another problem. A lot of people post about the same things all over again and when it concerns their own private tactic they sell you e-books.

    Which is why, these times most of guest-posted content steadily approaches the “Getting Backlinks”; not with comments, but with the posts. 😀 😀

    1. While I don’t think selling e-books is a bad idea, idea of using guest posts for links ONLY is bad. I do it (and so do most genuine guest posters) primarily for the community and the last in my list is links.

      1. Well, that’s the reason why I wrote “a lot”. Of course, there are always people who do a great job and it is pleasure to read their posts at any time. 🙂

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