How Savvy Inbound Marketers Get Results From Guest Blogging

This is a guest post written by Bamidele Onibalusi, a professional freelance writer, copywriter, and guest blogger. You can learn practical tips on how to write online for traffic and money or learn more about his freelance writing services on his website.

When it comes to guest blogging, the dream of many marketers is to write for the most popular blog in their niche, generate a solid flow of traffic, get a big boost in subscribers, and maybe even achieve an overnight rise to stardom. Unfortunately, while that might have been easy several years ago, it is almost impossible today. Most people guest blog for referral traffic and subscribers, but I guest blog for inbound links; for good reason, too.

The idea of guest blogging these days usually consists of writing a guest post for a very popular blog, generating a lot of referral traffic, and repeating the cycle. Unfortunately, this method is so overused that it is hardly as effective as it used to be. The true benefit of guest blogging, rather, is inbound links.

Why Guest Blog for Inbound Links Rather Than Referral Traffic?

When people guest blog with the goal of referral traffic in mind, their thought process goes something like this ...

I'll get my article published on a blog that generates a lot of traffic, and as a result, people will click on the links in my post, driving referral traffic back to my website or blog. Through this new traffic, I'll generate more readers and subscribers!

Sounds logical, but the fact of the matter is, many people think this tactic will generate much more traffic and subscribers then it actually does, and they fail to effectively capitalize on the true benefit of guest blogging: inbound links. When you blog for inbound links, on the other hand, there's a much smarter thought process ...

I'll get my article published on a blog that aligns with my expertise, and through careful optimization of the anchor text and pages I link to within the post, I'll have control over a few inbound links that will help boost the search engine optimization of the pages I'm linking back to on my website. I may attract some immediate new traffic and subscribers in the process, but the true benefit will be from the long-term search traffic I'll generate!

A Personal Case Study

To prove how much more effective guest blogging is for generating inbound links instead of referral traffic, I conducted a guest blogging experiment 6 months ago. I’d always been a believer of the idea that writing guest posts for popular blogs is the way to go, and I’ve had a few highly successful guest posts in the past. The idea for the experiment was to write 31 guest blog posts focused on improving search (not referral) traffic to a few quality articles and specialized landing pages on my site. Of the 31 guest posts that were submitted, 28 were published, and a large percentage of them were published within a week of when I submitted them. The focus of the challenge was to see how effective guest blogging is for inbound links, and determine the impact those links had on search traffic. The guest posts were submitted to smaller blogs with an Alexa rank of 50k to 400k and a maximum PageRank of 4.

The Results

The result of the challenge was an increase of 100

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