Blogging for your business is a pretty standard tactic these days, so it’s likely you’re already familiar with some of the benefits attributed to blogging: thought leadership, authority, search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing. Positioning yourself (and your business) as a thought leader in your industry is rewarding when you start seeing results, but you may also experiencing editorial fatigue and/or writer’s block. One great way to invigorate your content is to bring in some guest bloggers. Not unlike indentured servants, they offer a wealth of advantages to your business that fall into a few categories.

Building Quality Content

Adding authors to augment your content strategy helps relieve the creative strain of developing all of the articles yourself. A new writer can add fresh perspective to your body of work, offering a different point of view on a subject that you may never have considered before. This new angle helps enrich your site, possibly creating a different conversation around a topic, stirring your audience to comment and share your posts. Since strong content and informing/entertaining the reader should be on the list of primary goals, a new voice can add variation and depth to your blog.

Increased Traffic

One outstanding benefit to having a guest blogger on your site is the audience they bring with them. An established voice with a guest spot on your channel can increase traffic and bring new eyes to your brand and content, always a plus. Furthermore, the new audience that is there, because they followed the guest blogger, may lead to expanding your audience permanently, as they add your stream to their personal favorites. Another boon to your onsite traffic comes from the inevitable reciprocal effect of the guest blogger returning the favor. You may have an opportunity to become a guest blogger as well, situating your content on another site and in front of another audience, thus building thought leadership and authority, as well as expanding your audience.

Search Engine Optimization

All of the previous benefits quietly lend themselves to the biggest benefit of all, search engine optimization. Better, more diverse content aids in gaining authority with search engines as well. The guest’s writing style may add new keywords and phrases to your prose that help optimize topics on your blog. Increased traffic is sure to lead to more social chatter and links, which also lends itself to optimizing the search equation. The most important aspect of SEO is the backlink, and by having guest bloggers in your sphere of expertise, you are greatly increasing your chances of earning quality backlinks to your pages. You can even make that part of the deal for guest bloggers, as you both benefit from this exercise in building quality content.