What Is Guest Blogging and Can You Drive Traffic with It?

There are literally millions of new blogs that start up every year. Most will fail. Some will be successful in earning money. Some will argue that the success of their blog is not related to finances at all. Regardless, just about every blogger who is not producing content for just friends and family will want to see that their traffic is increasing on a regular basis.

Bloggers will do many things to try and draw additional traffic to their blogs. Some of the methods may be questionable and Google and other search engines will penalize these "black hat" operators. Most bloggers, however, will try to play by the rules as they attempt to drive that extra traffic that will bring in additional revenue and interaction. One of the more popular ways to drive traffic to a blog is through guest posting.

Guest posting is pretty much just want its name sounds like. It is posting on another blogger's blog. This may seem a bit counter-intuitive to people who want to drive visitors to their own site. Why post on another blogger's blog, especially when most of these gigs are freebies?

Guest posting can be a great strategy, however, even if the process does not pay off on the front end. One of the best things about guest posting is that it gives a backlink to your own work. Those who allow guest posts will usually note that the current post was written by author John Doe at www.JohnDoe'sBlog.anywhere. (Please note that this link was made up.) Those who are intrigued by the post might click on over to the author's blog and check it out. From there, theese readers can click on an AdSense ad or an affiliate link.

Because guest posting gigs are on actual sites that want traffic, it is important to give really good content to the owner of the blog. These folks want to provide value for their readers, so it is important to be knowledgeable on the topic.

Most guest posters will want to offer their services to one of the leading blogs in their niche, because they want to draw targeted traffic. For example, an expert on travel would probably not want to guest post on a computer gaming site. A travel-related site would be more appropriate in this instance.

Some bloggers will have a link that says "write for us" or "guest posting" or something similar. They will then go through the requirements that they will have for their guest posters. The backlink is the main payment. If you could get a link from The Huffington Post, FoxNews or some other mega-site, your post will cause a nice spike in traffic and will probably grow your blog because of the ranking of the host site.

The key to the game is to try and guest blog on a site that is a major player in a particular niche while adhering to the rules the site sets up. It does not hurt to ask any of these sites that accept guest posts. The worst they can say is no.

The answer to this question is, it depends. If the guest post is on ProBlogger, it probably will because of the reputation of the site and the number of readers that Darren Rowse has. It will also help in the long run because ProBlogger is a high-ranking page in the various search engines.

If the guest post is on BillyJoeBob'sThoughtsontheEndoftheWorld, the post will give a backlink and might send 10 visitors, unless Billy Joe Bob has managed to get a large readership. The backlink will not be as impressive as one on ProBlogger.

The amount of traffic will depend upon the reputation of the site and the value that the post provides to readers.