Guest blogging is an important part of becoming a reputed member of the legal and accounting blogosphere. Guest blogging is when the owner of a blog features an article or content written by a guest contributor, like a lawyer or accountant, on their blog. It has benefits for both parties. The blog owner gets to post quality content. The legal or accountancy guest blogger gets to expand his reach among the blog owner’s audience.
Why is guest blogging trending?
Guest blogging is a form of online networking, building high-quality relationships that may help in developing new business opportunities and professional connections. There are some who view guest blogging as just another link-building tactic. Where there is this philosophy – they tend to write low quality content for submission. After all, any content submitted is a link irrespective of quality. It’s a discussion that’s become prominent; whether guest blogging should be seen as an inter-personal relationship development tool as opposed to a vehicle for link building.
Building relationships through guest blogging
Writing guest posts enables you to build relations with online audiences, blog owners and other popular bloggers. It helps you come across many industry stalwarts, professionals and experts. They may be from the legal or accounting industries, or, what could be even more helpful, is of they are part of the framework of your client industries and sectors. By building relationships you will be able to bring in credible links to your own site.
Submitting a single post probably isn’t enough. Forging relationships is about planning to interact with the audience post-submission and continuing to contribute to the community over time. This will prove that you are not just another link builder. This often opens up doors for you to a future of more guest posting opportunities and partnerships in other areas.
A philosophy focused on building relationships by guest blogging, combined with the right kind of content on relevant top blogs, could also lead to other benefits:
Becoming a thought leader in the industry
Although most content writers have immense subject knowledge, they lack authority and popularity. That’s the reason why placing your content on someone else’s blog allows readers to associate your name with quality information. The authority of the blog with which you are associated will be transferred to your name. The more popular your posts become, the more authority your posts gain. Guest blogging can act as your doorway to gaining status as an expert and thought leader in your field. It goes without saying that the more in-depth, well-researched posts you publish on authoritative blogs, the more opportunities will come your way. Over time, you can become an authority in the eyes of the target audience.
Increase traffic to your website
A great benefit of guest blogging is the quality traffic it attracts. Guest blogging is an essential part of SEO as it brings in potential clients to your site. The most important benefit from guest blogging is targeted referral traffic that flows into your site. Success of SEO depends a lot on the volume of targeted audience directed to your site.
While it’s true that popular advertising methods like pay-per-click bring in traffic, the fact remains that traffic from a legal or accountancy guest post comes from an interested audience. This interested audience is a set of people who are intrigued by your guest post and want to learn more about you. They may well indeed have a problem they will look to you to solve. Now that you have a group of people visiting your site, you should be able to convert these visits in to long-term relationships by making use of good content marketing strategies.
Building back links to your website
Guest blogging is a good method of building safe back links to your firm’s website. With guest blogging, you will get a natural, one-way back link to your site and, depending on the popularity of the blog you have guested on, traffic to your site may well follow. Usually you will be allowed to place a link or two pointing back to your blog with appropriate keywords as anchor text in your author bio that appears beneath your article. The back links from your author bio are one of the easiest and safest links you will get.
How to find guest blogging opportunities for the legal and accounting industries
The main goal for looking for places to guest post, is to find sites relevant to your niche or industry. Look for blogs that fit the following criteria:
The content of the site is focused on your particular expertise or industry
The audience of the blog has an interest in your industry
The blog has an engaged readership
The blog owner will activity promote the blog
There are a number of prolific bloggers in the legal and accounting sectors. These are good places to guest post. There will be just as many bloggers and guest bloggers for your clients’ sectors. Check competitor back links too. If you or your online marketing guys have ever created a back link analysis report of competitors there is a likelihood that they will have back links from guest posts they have done. If you have access to tools like open site explorer, you can look at the back links of your competitors and spot any blogs they have written for.
Our opinion
Guest blogging is a fantastic digital marketing tool, especially for professional practitioners like lawyers and accountants. If you are able to write high quality, relevant material then audiences will start to associate your name with useful and credible information. Authority from the host site will then flow through to you which will in turn help boost your site’s search engine ranking. However, remember these things take time.
Once readers see your post, they may continue to follow your work and share this with other like-minded social media subscribers. This is where Twitter and Facebook become useful as one tweet about your blog post or website can potentially be shared by thousands of viewers around the world.
