Am I perhaps taking this too far? Is it too much to say that a single technique – like guest blogging – is capable of changing your business?

Well, it might seem like so, but that’s actually quite true. And you don’t have to go far to find examples.

Just to give you two, my whole freelance writing career was launched by guest blogging, and as far as I know, Onibalusi’s as well. More than that, because of various guest posts of mine that I’m trying to get published every week, my business continues to grow, with more and more opportunities presenting themselves every month.

But okay, enough talking about me. Let’s focus on you, and better yet, on your business and why guest blogging can change it for the better!

1. It’s incredibly flexible as a business/marketing practice

The thing with guest blogging is that whatever business goal you might have, guest blogging can help you achieve it.

Guest blogging is proven to be great for generating leads, bringing in sales, driving traffic, building reputation, and loads of other things. The only limitations are the ones you set yourself.

On top of that, guest blogging also gives you extremely broad range of tools for tracking your results. Solutions like Google Analytics and others similar allow you to measure various things about your guest posts’ performance in relation to people coming back to your site.

2. The results are often immediate

One of the great things about guest blogging is that you can often see results of your efforts right away.

Note. That is unless you’ve chosen SEO as your main goal, which we don’t advise.

Inevitably, every guest post of yours will see most of its popularity in the first days of it being online. This gives you a great opportunity to evaluate those results right away and take notes about the things you should do differently with your next guest blogging campaigns.

3. In the 21st century, content is what makes brands grow

One of my personal heroes – Bill Gates – predicted the rise of content back in 1996. It’s in that very article where he even used the term “content is king.”

Although we had to wait a while before this prophecy became reality, on the web of today, content is what makes brands grow and expand their businesses. Nowadays, people – the audiences – simply don’t care for advertising or any other forms of forced marketing messages. They want something organic and valuable. And that’s where guest posts come into play.

The whole idea of guest blogging falls perfectly into the modern content marketing game. When your guest post gets accepted, you’re getting in front of an audience that is interested in the type of content you’re offering (filtered by the blog owner) – an audience that is also likely to respond positively to the message you’re delivering.

4. It gives you qualified traffic

If you make a wise choice regarding the website where you want to get your guest post published, and pick the topic and the angle of the article right as well, this will allow you to drive extremely targeted traffic back to your own site.

Here’s the thing, as long as you can find a blog where your target audience hangs out, you can use guest blogging as a marketing tool to drive those people back to your site.

Of course, not all of them will follow your links, but some will, and with enough guest posts being published on a regular basis, the results will only multiply over time.

5. No up-front investment required

Well, okay, if you don’t want to do guest blogging by yourself, you will have to hire some help to do it for you. But apart from that, there are no other costs you have to consider right from the get-go.

You don’t need any expensive software or hardware. Everything is available out there for free. Writing guest posts in Notepad and then editing images through Paint.NET is more than possible, and it will deliver you results just as good as using expensive word processing software and Photoshop.

But what this means most of all is that you can get started with guest blogging right away.

6. It strengthens your credibility and expertise

Having articles published on popular sites around the web is one of the best methods to strengthen your credibility and expertise in the niche.

These days, people no longer believe obvious forms of advertising, so they are much less likely to respond to a standard banner or text ad. But if they see you being talked about on some of their favorite blogs, they are sure to pay attention.

Those effects can be multiplied if the articles in question are created around a specific problem that your product solves. Of course, everything needs to be genuine and bring actual value to the reader.

7. It’s great for building connections

Networking can become quite challenging if you don’t have much to offer to the other party. But with guest posts, you can build new relationship on a very good foundation – the foundation of content that brings value.

With your guest posts, you can not only build relationships with the bloggers who are publishing your work, but also with their audiences and followers.

8. Your online real-estate accumulates over time

Over time, some of your past guest posts will go down. That’s inevitable, and there’s not much we can do to prevent it. But most of them will stay online for years to come. This means that with every new guest post, you’re growing your online real estate and spreading the word about your business.

More than that, if the sites where you’ve landed your posts are popular and well-respected in the search engines then the posts will grow along with those sites, and more and more people will be seeing them every year.

9. It grows your social media channels

Social media has become an important part of the online landscape for countless brands and businesses. These days, it’s hard to imagine an online business with absolutely no social media presence.

And it just so happens that guest blogging can be a powerful tool in the world where follower numbers seem to matter all that much.

By linking your guest posts with your social media profiles, you can make them grow at a surprisingly fast rate. On many popular sites, the average article can get 100 or more shares. So if the default share button features your @mention, you will get a nice number of re-tweets all including your brand name.

What’s also worth mentioning here is that the social media growth happens alongside any other goal you’ve set for your campaign – it’s a bonus thing, so to speak.

What are you waiting for?

I hope I’ve managed to convince you that guest blogging is something that can present some great benefits to your business and its online presence.

Of course, there are some downsides. Chief of which is the amount of time it can take to get a successful guest blogging campaign rolled out. But with skilled people working for you, the project is very likely to bring good results.

So here’s the question, are you planning to do guest blogging by yourself, or are you looking for some helping hands?