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Guest Posting vs. Article Marketing: The Importance of Understanding The Difference

Guest Posting vs. Article Marketing: The Importance of Understanding The Difference

Guest PostingIn the last couple of years, guest posting on other people’s blogs has become a solid marketing technique. At first, the idea of letting some stranger post their content on your blog seemed ludicrous. However, many bloggers realized the benefits of more fresh unique content, and the wheel has been rolling ever since. I have personally guest posted on many different blogs, and I have noticed that guest posting is sometimes clumped together with article marketing as if they are “basically the same thing.” They are NOT the same thing. There are many differences, and that is what I want to explore. Let’s start with the similarities of the two:

  • Both article marketing and guest posting involves writing content that will be posted on someone else’s website.
  • Both an article and guest post will almost always have a back link to a URL of the writer’s choosing.

Hmm, not too many similarities now that I have thought it through; even less than I originally thought. However, I can think of plenty of differences:

  • There is a big difference (at least in the eyes of the search engines) between an article directory, and a frequently updated blog. Blogs are not seen as content farms, but article directories are. That means that the link juice from an article submission will carry less weight than a relevant guest post on a blog.
  • 99% of the blogs that allow guest posts will not allow a post that has been posted somewhere else beforehand. Some don’t care what you do with the post after they publish it on their blog, but I am yet to meet one that allows duplicate content submission on their blog.
  • Guest posts are almost always of higher quality than articles; mainly because guest blog owners want content, not 500 word advertisements for your product. If they allow links in the body of the post, the link usually needs to be worked into the content well. The strictness varies on this from blog to blog, but overall it is safe to say.
  • Guest posts almost always provoke reader and writer interaction; but how often do you see in-depth discussions in the comments sections of article directory articles? Most of them don’t even have a comments section. This provides the writer with a chance to enhance their credibility with a new audience.
  • Article marketing has been plagued with spamming since the day it started. The advent of automatic submission software, article rewriting tools, and article submission services, created a small army of wannabe Internet Marketers spamming directories with 6 billion copies of a rewritten article, that was rewritten from a master rewrite of an Ezine article. Guest posting has far less spamming, and hopefully it will stay that way.

Ultimately, at least from my experience, guest posting offers far more benefits for a writer than article marketing does. For someone who is ONLY looking for traffic to an affiliate link, and nothing more, then I would say article marketing might be a better way to go for that particular objective simply because they are far more likely to get an article published with affiliate links in it than they would a guest post. Guest posting definitely wins out in all the other areas though, for sure.

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