Should I invite people to guest post?

[SamCUK]

I'm a little confused about the benefits of inviting people to guest post on my site. I've just read http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-passive-link-building-to-build-links-with-no-budget which suggests that by inviting people to guest post on my site I can build a relationship with them and eventually ask them to post a guest post of mine on their site.

If both posts have a link back to the owners site doesn't this amount to reciprocal linking? Or am I missing something? Is a reciprocal link only classed as such if the link points to the exact page where the article is or can a reciprocal link point to anywhere on the site and still be classed as reciprocal?

[mytouchoftech]

Guest Posts should be unique content, so you may not get a huge response if you're site will provide little value to the writer of the content.  That being said, I agree with Anthony that the benefits are there for you.  If you get a really great writer that creates a viral piece of content, it will be associated with your site, and you'll get all the links for it.

[applesofgold]

Good answer.

The difficulty for me has been finding guest blog posts. We have some of the best writers in the jewelry, wedding, & fashion industries. But even so, we are having trouble finding blogs that will respond to our queries.

Do you know of any good services that will take on the recruitment process for us?

[anthonydnelson]

Hi Samuel-

There are a lot of benefits to allowing guest posting on your site. The key is to have a high standard for contributors. Doing so will result in great content on your site. Some benefits as follows:

• Great content made for your site. This will likely result in some organic traffic, social sharing and some links pointed at your great content. The great content on your site will help your site be recognized as a thought leader in your niche. Best of all, you didn't have to spend much time working on it.

• The guest author will likely promote their post on your site by linking to it, tweeting it and sharing it on other social profiles. This will expose their fans to your site and work. Increasing your brand's presence.

• The guest author will owe you a solid and very likely allow you to guest post on their site. This will allow you to promote a selected piece of content/keyword from your site.

There is nothing wrong with reciprocal linking if it is done in a way that is beneficial to both sites. The only problem with reciprocal linking is that it is often abused in a spammy way that is nothing more then a link exchange attempting to manipulate page rank. If you are doing a reciprocal exchange only for the link, you should probably avoid it.

[applesofgold]

Personally, I'd rather get a link to a guest post than provide a guest post, because as you said it's more reciprocal that way. But ... I think there's still value in it, because it's not just a link by itself on a links page, it's within valuable and diverse content, so I believe it would still provide good value overall.