Producing constant good content for your business website can be problematic especially if you operate in a niche environment. One way to add a touch a freshness to your site and boost your reputation is to use quality guest bloggers.

The Benefits of Quality Guest Bloggers

• They add a new dimension to your content, providing a fresh voice and value to your product or service by putting their own point of view across.
• They enhance your reputation by demonstrating that your business is a respected part of the industry in which you operate.
• They create valuable inbound links from good sites – most guest bloggers will either tweet or post on their own platform that they have an article appearing on your site, all of which enhances the search credentials of your business.
• It reduces the pressure on trying to write blog posts yourself.

How to Find and Attract Guest Bloggers

First of all you need to have good content on your site already – no guest blogger worth their salt is going to want to write for you if the existing articles or main content are poorly written. Secondly, you have to find people that have something important to say within your industry but also have the writing skills to put their point of view across. Guest bloggers can fall into several categories including industry leaders and experts, private bloggers who write about areas related to your business, and even customers who are vocal online.

A lot depends on the kind of industry that you are in. Your business may well be fairly niche and the number of guest bloggers to draw from might be limited. Other business will be lucky enough to have overlaps that means they can draw on expertise from a wide range of areas and industries to fill blog space.

Research potential guest bloggers and contact them directly with a request to write something for your site. Some will produce a post in exchange for a link and bio on the article you include, others might well want some form of payment or want you to write a reciprocal post for their site.

Some Pitfalls to Avoid

If you have chosen your guest bloggers well then you shouldn’t have much problem with the quality of the content but it’s always a good idea to have a few standard checks in place:

• Make sure content is not duplicated anywhere on the web – you can do this by employing a site like Copyscape to check the web for you and provide a list of sites that contain the content you are going to post.
• Any images or graphics such as infographics need to be the property of the contributor unless you want to be faced with copyright issues.
• Make sure any external links go to reputable sites which are relevant to your brand or industry.
• Don’t just accept that the content is good enough for your site – you will be surprised the number of businesses that post guest blogs without reading them first. Give the content a read over and raise any issues with the contributor if you find mistakes or contentious issues.

There’s no doubt that a good guest blog can add significant value to any website, enhancing your reputation as well as providing a new voice that can keep visitors engaged and informed.