Guest Blogging Your Way to a Better Reputation

Some people try to “shore up” their online reputation management strategy by launching a bunch of really thin sites the moment a crisis hits. Once upon a time that might have worked well enough, but this is the era of Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird. It takes more than a few hastily launched sites to bury negative content.

Writing away on your own blog isn’t necessarily the best solution to the problem either. A blog fills out your site, but your site is only one out of hundreds that you’d need to make use of in order to dominate the SERPs for your name or brand name.

Guest blogging provides an answer. In truth, regular guest blogging for the right high quality sites could ultimately become more useful to you and your brand than blogging for your own website could. After all–which is more likely to be seen? Posts made on your own site, launched six months ago? Or posts made on sites like Business 2 Community, The Search Engine Journal, or right here on Project Eve?

Which is likely to offer you the weight of credibility? Content with editorial control on a high page rank or your own blog?

Sure, guest blogging might not provide the SEO juice to your own website that it once might have. Google is certainly doing its best to crack down upon or discount what they consider to be spammy guest blogging tactics.

But if you’re trying to control your name and are not so concerned with driving traffic to any one site then this method can be a godsend. As it stands, people who are truly interested in, say, hiring you because of an article you’ve written will click through to your bio to find your contact information anyway, even if your personal site doesn’t rank so well in the SERPs.

Guest blogging also provides some flexibility to people who are just too busy to regularly manage and update a blog of their own. The big sites are always updating, so there’s no particular penalty for posting infrequent content. You’re still a contributor, and it still helps.

Note that guest blogging really only works well as a proactive strategy. It’s something you need to do before something goes wrong. Once you have a negative reputation it’s better to get help from a qualified online reputation management firm so you can get rid of the content quickly and efficiently. However, if you’ve been proactively building your reputation for months you’ll find that such efforts go a lot more smoothly and cost you a lot less. In the meantime, your proactive efforts will open the doors of opportunity for you that might otherwise have remained shut.

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