What Benefits does Guest Writing Bring for Designers?

If you’re a designer like me guest writing may brings with it many advantages and should be considered as a great way to promote ourselves. Besides self promotions we will find that there are other great benefits. First of all guest writing can improve our writing skills significantly and be the starting point for our own blog or portfolio. Also connecting socially as designers is something we should all strive to be a part of, one of the first step in this is working to write on other sites as well as your own. The benefits don’t simply apply to the present but also towards your future growth as a designer and your website/ blog. In this article I share my thoughts on what benefits a designer may get from writing guest posts. Read on and promise that you drop a comment to share your 2 cents on this topic as well.

Guest writing drive traffic to your own blog or portfolio

If you have a guest post published on a high traffic blog the back links will be good for driving organic search engine traffic to your own blog or portfolio. Self promotion is necessary if you want to get noticed, no-one else is going to go out there and do it all for you. There are various ways in which to get noticed and writing as a guest author is one of these.

Guest writing broadens your horizon

Guest posting maybe dictated by the blog owners in what type of topic they feel that their readers would be most suitable to reading. If you are writing for a predominantly web design blog then you are unlikely to be speaking to the demographic when you put together a post on why Copic markers are the best choice when sketching.

Stretching out of your comfort zone maybe something you need, it can give you new aspects of thinking you have previously overlooked. Your going to be stretching into new places of research and this will certainly inspire you further. As an example take the task to put together a post on ‘the past, present and future in social networking’ and find out new and emerging technologies in social networking you hadn’t realized was going to be around. This new knowledge could then help you in rethinking your social networking strategy which may be old and frail in comparison.

Learning from Someone else

Working under someone else’s rules when producing a post for their site offers you a different point of view to how they work. They will have their ways in which they want things done, if you choose to ignore this and are too set in your ways you could see this relationship dwindle and future guest posting possibilities lost.

Your working under their wing, take all the advice that they give. They in all likeliness will have been working hard on their website and will know what works and what doesn’t, sure you can offer up your suggestions but do respect their experience and knowledge, and make sure you pick up the key learning for your own benefit. Learning from someone else with greater experience may let you take away ideas and ways of working back to how you write on your own blog, this in turn could improve your content and ways of working.

Earn Money with Guest writing

Of course, if you are lucky enough you can find that some blogs earn enough from advertising so that they can pay willing guest posters and contributors for their time. But in most cases especially when starting out in the big wide world of article writing and blogging you are more likely to find that guest posts will go largely unrewarded and you should focus upon the other none paying benefits.

Use Guest writing for promoting Yourself and reaching new people

Whether it be your portfolio, personal site or blog then guest posting will only serve to bring you more traffic to your online pursuits. Whether your guest posing brings you a hand full of twitter followers, these are people you may not have reached from your own site. Maybe these people go on to offer you further work? Who says they won’t go on to bring a further ten more followers, and if this multiplies further? Gotta think positively and working hard to produce the best posts that you can will strengthen your reputation in producing credible work and can only go to strengthen current relationships and bring more business your way.

Good quality guest writing may get you invited to more blogs

If you’re making good guest posts this is likely to be noticed by other blog owners and you may get invited to do more guest writing on other blogs. Creating more relationships around the design community, people will know that you are a solid contributor and can be relied upon. Guest writing will be another string to your bow in terms of skill set and could prove to be a strong area in which people will respect and admire your way of working.

Unfortunately bad guest posts work the other way and may prevent you from being invited and worst case accepted as a guest writer. You should work hard to have a good working relationship in your communications with the owners of sites you wish to post guest blog posts on. Ultimately they have the final say and can be the difference if further guest post opportunities, if you were to erode that relationship in could prove that future invitations and opportunities on other sites could be few and far between after your previous efforts and bad attitude. Treat your communications with the host with the highest priority and know that its their site so its their rules and opinions which you must adhere towards.

Get some fresh feedback on your ideas and work

Guest writing for a blog with a broader and larger community will make sure that fresh eyes evaluate your designs, your portfolio is your selling point to people who have not met you before. The larger community and visited websites offer fresh eyes of people who have not come across your work before, this offers a larger proportional chance that they will offer fresh feedback and discussion in regards to your design work.

With better and increased feedback you are more likely to soak up this information to improve and grow as a designer. We can all learn from each other, no one way is right but listening to someone else’s perspective may open and improve your concept thinking.

Guest writing may increase you personal credibility

Having posts published on large and respected blogs will not only go to pass your name around to large groups of people, they will see articles which have been attributed to you as an author. You could in the future build on this by being personally headhunted and sought out by the larger design communities online. Having a variety of ways in which you can be contacted will allow people to choose their preferred way in which to get in touch with you.

Guest writing will help you make conversation with new readers

Writing the guest post is just the beginning. If at all possible you should strive to get access to respond to readers comments, be a part of the conversation. If you write articles which is opening up an opinion or argument for a particular topic, then encourage the readers to respond with their comments and be a part of the discussion. Don’t leave a topic out their for one side of the opinion to be expressed and not to respond and discuss with readers both sides of the topic you are raising.

Are you a guest writer yourself? How often are you writing for others? What benefits have you experienced?…