5 Reasons You Should Guest Blog + Call for Entries

This year will be seven years since I launched Genpink (and 3 since the launch of my food blog). In those seven years I’ve had over 70 contributors. A few of them are regular, ongoing writers but most have written just a small number of guest posts.

5 Reasons You Should Guest Blog + Call for Entries | Genpink
When I’m having conversations with other bloggers I often get asked questions about guest posting and the benefits, so I thought I’d share!

5 Benefits of Guest Blogging

1. Reaching a new audience

The first, and most obvious, benefit of guest posting is you automatically have a new community to talk to. Whether you have 500 monthly readers or 500,000 writing outside of your regular “home” exposes you to a new group of readers. There are several bloggers I’ve known virtually for years. We do have some overlapping readers but I always meet new people whenever I publish elsewhere. Genpink had close to 40,000 unique visitors in January so if you wrote just one guest post here that’s a whole slew of strangers who may become your new internet BFF.

2. Opportunity to Repurpose Your Existing Content

I recently read a great post from Sarah Von Bargen –  3 Clever Things To Do With Old Blog Posts. Spoiler alert: one of the 3 clever things is to offer up one of your best posts in a new package as a guest post. One of my most popular all time posts is 10 Ways to Upcycle a T-Shirt. So, if I were looking to write outside of Genpink a good starting place for me would be to approach some of my DIY blogger friends and offer a unique t-shirt upcycle tutorial.

3. Inbound Links

This one is the main reason most people (and spammers!) want to guest blog. Having links pointing back to your blog is excellent Google juice. Inbound links help with your Page Rank, organic SEO and general referral traffic. Particularly if the blog you are writing on is ranked well. I find it interesting when a guest post I’ve written in the past starts generating new traffic to either of my blogs. Keep in mind that whatever you’re writing about needs to be relevant to both your blog, and where you are guest posting. Search engines are cracking down on the random irrelevant back-link posts.

4. Social Media Love

Considering I work in social media, when a new blog post is published on Genpink it gets shared to Facebook, a few Twitter accounts, a couple Google+ accounts, and Pinterest. That’s a whole lot of opportunity for conversation around your topic. One thing I’ve also found, once I’ve shared a guest post on someone else’s blog they are more likely to share some of my future posts on their personal social media accounts. Some bloggers create Twitter lists of their previous contributors so they can easily interact with them again.

5. Learn from Other Bloggers

Every blogger has a different process from topic generating to ongoing promotion. Submitting a new post allows you an opportunity to learn some of their systems. With me for example, I tend to come up with blogger series prompts and then contact bloggers to submit. I’ve taken part of the guess work out of it by allowing the contributors to work inside a particular frame-work. I did one series ABC of Life in Your Twenties, where each contributor was given a letter of the alphabet. Another series was all Top 10 lists. With both sets there were more than 30 contributions so each writer made new friends, read unique content and got to see so many styles all in one place. It’s also interesting to see how many times the host blogger opts to share the post after it’s live. Everything is a learning opportunity!

Call for Entries

AND so, as you may have gathered by the topic I’m about to launch a new series! I have several entries already but I thought I’d open it up to Genpink readers this time. The series is “5 Things to Know About ____”.

So that could be:

  • 5 things you should not do when XYZ
  • 5 things you MUST try in XYZ city
  • 5 things you should never say about XYZ

It’s a pretty broad prompt, but I think it will be fun. I already have submissions about health, home decor and career. If you have a topic in mind shot an email to PR@genpink.com with your topic idea and a brief bio. If we can fit you in the schedule we’ll let ya know. The deadline to submit is 3/1.

3 thoughts on “5 Reasons You Should Guest Blog + Call for Entries

  1. I just started my blog in January–so excited about that BTW– and I just got a guest blog invite… even more excited about that!

  2. Great tips. Shared on Pinterest and stopping by from SITS! You’re going to have me looking through my posts to see if there’s anything I could offer your audience.

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