I recently had a guest post published over at Feel Gooder. You can read the article here: 6 Reasons Why You’ll Never Succeed.
The article was published on Wednesday, and to date there have been a grand total of 12 clicks through to Leaving Work Behind from it.
A lot has been said about “the death of guest posting”, and I tend to believe that it is far less powerful than it once was.
The problem is, if you look around many popular blogs, guest posting is now (and has been for some time) a regular occurence. My theory is that people have become accustomed to them, and as such, are more likely to ignore any outgoing links in the article, much like they would ignore advertising.
Having said that, I do think that guest posting serves a purpose – I am just not convinced that it offers great benefits in terms of promoting your blog.
How about you? What are your thoughts on guest posting?
Richard Scott says
Guest Posting isn’t dead. I believe it really is one the best ways to communicate and touch a new audience. If it brings you one or two new eyes to your site and they become regular readers, it’s well worth it.
Plus, your post over there right now has 7 comments… and you only left one comment back. If you had responded back to everyone, your post would have 12 comments… While the average number of comments her posts have (adding up the ten on the front page) is only 6.5 comments per post. So, you’re above average there now and you could have been WAY above what she normally gets if you got the feedback rolling. It’s all in how you look at it.
Some people don’t have a huge following, or a following that likes to get active and comment. But if you get some from that post, and some from another and another, you could easily gain 100s of new readers over the course of a month. It all adds up. 🙂
Personally, I dislike some Guess Posting on people’s blogs. But only for one main reason: it’s never as good as what the author does. When you get used to their tone, message and impact, getting that from someone else is rough and always under par.
I think people should study the author’s posts more and really see how they deliver to make a greater influence. I have found some awesome new blogs from following their leads though, like on Pat Flynn’s blog last week he pointed us to bloggeritus, and I loved it. You just never know… But you gotta keep trying! 🙂
Tom Ewer says
Hi Richard,
You’ve made a lot of good points and I’m really thankful for you coming forward with your viewpoint. 🙂
I tend to agree with a lot of what you’ve said. I think at the end of the day, you need to make a judgement call as to whether x amount of hours put into guest posting is worth the return in terms of exposure. That is of course difficult to calculate.
I would like to do more guest posts in the future, but at the moment, writing 6 articles a week alongside my fulltime job is proving to be demanding enough! 😉
Andrew says
Hi Tom,
I think guest posting along with commenting, is extremely powerful and also enables you to engage with a wider audience. Each day I read blogs and either click on a guest posters link or as in your case a comment link.
If your guest post appears on a blog with similar content, with good anchor links, then that is well worth your guest posting effort, regardless of clicks from human traffic.
Guest posting though is a time consuming experience and you are right you often might not get that many visitors for your effort, but then you hopefully receive other benefits and if your post does generate a good human click through rate, excellent and a lovely bonus.
All the best
Andrew
Tom Ewer says
Hello again!
I’m definitely with you on blog commenting – not only is it a great way to interact with other bloggers in your niche, it does attract traffic to your site.
Josh Sarz says
Hi Tom. I wrote a similar piece on my own blog on why no one reads guest posts anymore. It has similar points to what Richard Scott mentioned, like it’s never as good as the original author. One of the points I stressed out is that there are just too many guest posters now, and most people are accustomed to guest posts. What they do is just read them and rarely bother with checking out the guest poster’s site. Unless of course, it’s that good and you will get some conversions.
Tom Ewer says
Hey Josh,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I wrote this post quite a while ago, and my feelings are now that guest posting is a good strategy, but you have to do it well. A good guest posting strategy is well thought-out and calculated.
Cheers,
Tom
Halina Zakowicz says
I’ve been doing a lot of guest posting lately, so I don’t think it’s dead, but some bloggers are funny about accepting free posts that contain a backlink in them as compensation. If I’m providing content for free, I should at least be able to add a backlink to my site, right? I’ve also seen some bloggers charge people for posting content! Lately, though, I’ve gotten involved in a lot of blogs that pay pretty decent wages for a post- even if that post has a backlink.
Tom Ewer says
This post was written a long time ago – I am a huge fan of guest posting these days. I’ve even written a free guide on it.
I must say I have never heard of bloggers charging people for writing for them – that’s a new one on me! There are an enormous number of blogs out there for whom you can write.