The great guest-blogging debate
Today I’ve been weighing up the pros and cons of guest blogging. Almost all of the blogs I’ve read over the past few months have had at least one post saying something along the lines of, “Guest blogging is good”. The argument is that guest blogging is a good way to get traffic, get links and build up your reputation. If you’re guest blogging on a decent blog then it stands to reason that you will benefit somehow, but to achieve success it’s crucial that you write something out of the ordinary while still being on topic.
I personally find reading guest bloggers rather tedious. For whatever reason, guest bloggers often feel the need to assert themselves in a condescending, patronizing tone, as if talking to a bunch of primary school children. I assessed my own blog-reading habits and it turns out that I purposely overlook guest bloggers’ posts. I couldn’t work out why, but I think it’s just that I don’t care what another voice has to say on somebody’s blog.
When you get familiar with a person’s blog, if other people start posting then there is the temptation to ignore the new poster (by me, anyway). Look at John Cow as an example. Over the past couple of weeks there have been a multitude of posts by random people, and I can’t remember any of them.
I wrote my own guest post on John Cow, but I had no intention of writing a formulaic blog post about “the top five whatevers” or “the dos and don’ts of this and that”. I made up five stories about cows and posted it, and you know what; it didn’t do me much good. I’m of the disposition that until my blog is pulling in huge numbers, I’m not going to give my top content away to anybody.
This would mean that anything I write as a guest blogger would be substandard garbage and, as a professional writer, I’m not prepared to do that. Kumiko recently said that all guest bloggers must die. Her argument is that guest blogging is good only for the guest blogger and the blog owner, and I have to agree with this. From my perspective as a reader, guest blogging is like an advert in a magazine that doesn’t catch my eye.
Darren Rowse said this week that when he handed over his blog to guest bloggers in April last year, his traffic soared. That seems like a freak event. John Cow’s line on the Alexa Traffic Graph has dipped a bit in the past few days, but a similar thing has happened to Pro Blogger, John Chow and Cash Quests.
By Kumiko’s logic, guest blogging is still a good idea for the guest blogger. I think her decision to kill all guest bloggers is a bit extreme, but I know where she’s coming from.
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2 Responses to “The great guest-blogging debate”
I have a question. Do you have any of that “substandard garbage” on your site? Or do you consider every bit of what you post on your site to be “top content?” And isn’t there a happy medium? Just because it’s not “top content” doesn’t mean that it’s automatically “substandard garbage!” After all, whom do you know that allows their readers to rate their content only between a one and a two? There’s usually a few more digits involved than that! You can still keep the absolute #1 content for your site while writing guest articles on other sites that are a two or three as opposed to a flat out ten.
But what you’re saying is that the content is still second rate. Perhaps it’s not substandard garbage, but it’s generally not great content. Interesting discussion though.