Maintaining a company website and using that same website for internet marketing and subsequent sales is very important, now more than ever. Anyone involved in any kind of e-commerce know that site traffic may either make or break your marketing strategy, and, for online sellers, the ladder that clinches that seemingly unreachable sales quota. Online business owners are good about throwing lots and lots of money at online advertising, but without a respectable traffic to their websites, owners might as well go back to more “traditional” marketing mediums.

The same can be said for budding authors and new bloggers. Without a stream of followers, writing one’s blog becomes a tedious thing to do, and over time, you can’t expect to maintain it even though you started with a high level of enthusiasm for the thing.

A lot of site owners know that maintaining fresh content is easily said than done. It’s not always possible to write great posts on a regular basis, while maintaining quality articles in one’s site is not an option but a necessity. To pass this requirement is to find ways to make one’s site constantly attractive, a “people-magnet” so to speak.

Fortunately for online businesses and bloggers alike, there’s a growing trend in not only legitimately driving traffic to one’s company website or blog, but having and maintaining quality content too. Many people oftentimes overlook the value of an article posted on the site at literally no cost, except one’s time. Partnerships may take a lot of forms, but this one is a one-off deal – no complex relationships needed, no lengthy “Terms and Conditions”, and a proven Win-Win situation for both parties concerned.

Welcome to Guest Posting!

Guest posting means writing and publishing an article on someone else’s website or blog. The author of the article essentially requests his article to be hosted on another person’s/ company’s site, free of charge, with the expectation that a well-written, informative, and/or entertaining post can spike a lot of traffic to both the author’s and the host’s site. Those who read the article would most often want to know more about the topic and/or the author, so they follow a link contained within the post itself to visit the author’s site. It’s really a great way to connect with potential clients; it’s a proven way of connecting with new readers and getting your name recognized in the blogosphere. As analysts said, “guest posting is the single most important strategy for growing blog readership” and “one of the best marketing tactics available today”.

In order for you to fully grasp the value of guest posting (we shall cover them in detail in subsequent articles), give us some leeway and allow us to define terms that you’ll find useful:

1. Branding – First off, we have branding – how you present your company and its products and/or services, the way your corporate logo becomes recognizable, or the appeal of the title of your blog to readers. Think of it as the most basic of marketing tools: “name-recall”. Guest posting helps a lot in making your company, product, service or blog remembered by people.
2. Links and backlinks – As one blogger put it, “links control the web”. You can earn “niche authority” via links. Google, via PageRank, prioritizes your site via number of backlinks in your webpage. Guest posting is one way of achieving these “goals” effectively and with the least cost, by way of having custom anchor texts and backlinks from “friendly” sites back to your website.
3. Website Traffic – We all know the value of the number of audience for a TV soap opera (it governs the way on how these shows are rated and, in effect, how many advertisers would that show get), and the same is true, more so if you ask me, for the internet. Website traffic can be viewed first among many important factors on why some online sellers generate great profits and why others are left in the red. It is certainly the reason why some bloggers have millions of followers and why others have only few. Guest posting addresses this one, and effectively again.
4. Subscribers/ Followers – Let’s see: we need links and backlinks, we need website traffic and we definitely need people to do something about those two. For not everything is about the “web spiders” and Google or Yahoo! or Bing. Your potential clients and your readers are people that need motivation to come back again, to buy your product, avail of your services or read your articles. They need to become “followers”, for they are the life and soul of your site.