Is Guest Blogging and Blog Sharing on its Last Legs in 2018?

There are varying opinions as to the effectiveness of guest blogging in 2018. There are some who will argue it to be a spam-esque strategy, while others will continue to emphasize the importance of collaboration online.

For years, guest blogging was an effective way to build relationships, build links, and gain some key SEO points, helping numerous sites we know and love rank and find audience. Today, guest blogging is not the phenomenon it once was however it is still used by many companies for the aforementioned reasons.

To dismiss guest blogging as being out of fashion or somehow ineffective in 2018 is not accurate.

Like any other strategy, guest blogging has a purpose. If there is information that is relevant and useful to share with someone else’s audience, writing a guest blog can help build traffic. For new sites that are struggling to increase their visitor base, strategies like this are key because it gets you in front of an audience. At the same time, to the site accepting guest blogs, it helps them by providing a piece of well-written original content.

There is a right way and a wrong way to go about writing guest blogs however. There is no limit to the amount of guest posts one can write though we recommend doing it sparingly and to select quality sites to write for. The most simple way we can put it is that guest blogging to build credibility and gain an audience is a more effective approach than guest blogging simply to build links. If a writer does their job correctly, it should build links, yes, however guest blogging is so much more than that. The links should not matter equal to or more than the quality of the article being written or the relevancy of the content. This is where guest blogging receives a bad name.

Some sites hire inexperienced writers to build content and send it out to anywhere they can find on the internet. This is completely the wrong approach for businesses because it does not build credibility, will not get the quality of links one wants, and is ultimately just a waste of money.

Thus, if one picks what sites to write for, and ensures the quality of content is high and relevant, guest blogging is a great practice. Just be weary of the low quality spam sites that promote guest blogging as a way to build authority. Connect with sites that matter and that have built-in audiences. Should anyone reach out to you to write a guest blog, proceed with caution. Consider the relevancy of the business and whether this is something appropriate for your brand. If it passes these tests though, there’s no reason not to use a guest blogger.

Guest blogging is a fantastic tool to build excellent, high quality blog articles for a site and should be used as such. Just remember that the person writing for you should be someone you can vouch for. If not, it may come across as spam and may threaten your brand reputation.

The future of guest blogging is no doubt one that leans more towards content-building and relationship-building rather than search engine optimization or link building, though guest blogging today can still help a site across these points.