Question and Answer on Content Marketing – Guest Posting

[Question] If I’m trying to build myself as the authority, then having guest bloggers come to my site would not be a good option, right? My site has a lot of content. I guess my question is: is it better for me to continue doing the content myself as opposed to bringing other people in to do guest blogging to maybe bring their people in to see their posts and share it. Does that make sense?

[Answer] It’s all relative. If you want to have a website that’s just all you, then you don’t want to have other people doing the work, writing the content. If you have a website that’s all you, you’re probably not going to dominate your niche. It depends on your goals; do you want to dominate the whole world for the topic, and what’s it going to take to make that happen? It doesn’t mean that you can’t be the primary voice. For example, if you look at websites like, say, Dr. Phil’s website, or Dr. Oz’s site. Obviously those websites are centered around Dr. Oz, or Dr. Phil.

But the question is, do Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz put all the content on the website? I seriously doubt that’s what Dr. Oz does with an hour of his time every day. Because Dr. Oz is probably worth $30k / hr, and posting content on the website probably not $30k / hr work.

So, I can’t tell you that doing it all yourself and posting a lot of content on your website by yourself is the right way to go. If you’re really wanting to go big, you’re probably going to need to incorporate some other people. I don’t know what that’s necessarily going to look like.

[Follow-Up Question] Okay, so if I have someone do additional posts, how do we plan that? Normally I come up with all the content myself, and I write blog posts, I get the images. Could I also incorporate something that I read from Forbes, or something I’ve read from Business Insider, and just do a blurb on that, and have it link back to their website, just saying that this is content that might be relevant to what my readers want to see? Would that work?

[Answer] It’s possible that could work. Really, the other post is a seed. I want that to be an idea starter. If think you can use a bunch of 100 word blurbs on your website, and your website is just going to take off, it’s probably not going to happen.

Instead, that’s an idea of something you could use on your website – if it was sharable, and if it fits, and if you like it, then that’s an idea you could do a 100-word blurb on a post, or:

• You could do it on a comment.
• You could do it on a step by step.
• You could do a 7 step.
• You could do tip for the day.
• You could do a tip for the hour.

You could do all kinds of things. I don’t want to constrain it to say it’s just a blurb about something that somebody else posted, just to be sharing something on Pinterest or Instagram. It could be sharing an interview, it could be an excerpt from an interview. It could be a video. It could be anything.