Guest blogging is a great way to generate fresh traffic to your blog and website, provided you make the right moves and you have crossed a certain threshold level. I repeatedly talk about this “certain threshold level” because unless you have crossed it, nobody is going to bother with approaching you for guest blogging opportunities.

Guest blogging has two sides:

1. You offering guest blogs to other high traffic-blogs
2. People offering to write for your blog to get exposure for their own website or blog

As rightly mentioned in this Copyblogger blog post on the power of guest blogging and how it frees you from the clutches of search engines like Google, guest blogging can be a double-edged sword. To understand this, you first need to understand

Why do people guest blog and invite guest bloggers?

Why do you want to guest blog on other blogs and why do people want to guest blog on your blog? You can achieve the following by guest blogging:

1. Get more direct traffic by publishing your blog post on another, high-traffic blog and getting your byline included.
2. Expose your ideas to a different, wider audience.
3. As a person or as a brand become known to more people.
4. Get fresh content for your own blog by letting others write for it.
5. Get yourself some respite by not having to continuously write yourself and instead, allowing others to generate quality content for your blog.
6. Increase search engine rankings.

Unfortunately, it is the last, 6th reason for which people mostly guest blog and this is how you can become a victim of spamming if you are not careful about for whom you write and from whom you accept content. If you can take care of both these aspects guest blogging is one of the greatest ways of getting access to a wider audience as well as continuously getting new content for your own blog.

How do you generate more business with guest blogging?

Yes, ultimately you want to generate more business. How does guest blogging contribute? Here is how…

1. You get exposure: If yours is a relatively new business or if you are looking for a bigger audience you can either wait for your search engine rankings to improve and your social media and social networking audience to increase or you can guest blog for more famous blogs. A good thing about guest blogging is, provided you use the right sort of blogs, you can gain massive amount of traffic in no time. How does this help you grow your business? When you are guest blogging you are mostly targeting highly focused, niche blogs, read and viewed by people who are already interested in what you have to offer. Suppose you are in the business of producing biodegradable building materials. Which blogs would you choose? Maybe architecture? Alternative lifestyle? Green living? Regular visitors to these blogs will be more eager to check out your website and become your customers.
2. You expand your influence as an expert:
   Suppose you make a living off advising people how to do a particular thing. For that you need to establish yourself as an expert. You want to be known as an expert in your field. More and more people should know about your expertise so that when they need the expertise that you can provide, they remember that you can provide it. The more you are known as an expert, the better are your prospects.
3. You get more targeted traffic to your website:
   Generating more business from your website and blog is all about getting targeted traffic. Most of the websites face this problem that although they get lots of traffic, they are not attracting the sort of traffic that turns into business. When you are guest blogging you carefully choose the blogs. As I have mentioned in the first bullet, if you are producing biodegradable building materials you will naturally be guest blogging for blogs that attract an audience interested in nature-friendly architecture, green living and pursuing alternative lifestyles. This will send your way lots of targeted traffic and this in turn will improve your conversion rate and hence, generate more business for you.
4. You get quality content for your own blog: Just as you are providing quality content to other blogs as guest blogger, when you invite other guest bloggers to write for your blog, you are engaging more and more people to generate content for you. As a small business it might be difficult to produce lots of quality content on an ongoing basis over a sustained period of time. But once your blog has crossed a certain threshold level of popularity and traffic, greater number of people will be interested in writing for you. Just imagine, a single person writing one blog post every day and a slew of writers writing multiple blog posts every day. Wouldn’t that be marvellous for your content quantity and quality? The more content you have, the more content is indexed by the search engines, the more content of yours is exposed on social networking websites and the more targeted traffic you have to your blog and website, getting more business to you.
5. You strike up new business partnerships: It is not just about traffic and exposure when you use guest blogging to generate more business. You can strike up direct business partnerships with people who get involved with you and with people you get involved with. Many of the guest bloggers may turn out to be your customers and clients later on. Similarly you may end up doing business with people you are right now writing for.

Guest blogging is a great networking opportunity because when someone allows you to write blog posts for his or her blog he or she is allowing you to enter his or her space. This is a great opportunity for you to get close to that person in terms of establishing a mutually beneficial business relationship. The same is applied to people who want to guest blog for you.