Benefits of guest blogging: what you get and what it takes

The benefits of guest blogging are links to your site, reach to readers you do not have yet, a byline and bio under your name, working relationships with editors, referral traffic, and subscribers. Guest blogging and guest posting are the same thing: writing an article that another site publishes. Some of these benefits arrive with the first published article, like the link and the byline. Others, like the editor relationships and the subscribers, build across a run of articles. Each of them depends on one condition: the article appears on a site with readers of its own.

This page puts the account behind each benefit next to the benefit itself: whose count it is, and what date it carries. It shows what publications say they give a contributor, taken from their own contributor pages. And it sets out what it takes to get the benefits of guest posting by the two routes, pitching the article yourself or ordering it from us, with the hours on one side and the prices on the other. Every figure below names the person or the publication behind it, so you can weigh each account for yourself. The only figures from us are the product facts in the ordering section, and they are labelled as ours.

The benefits of guest blogging and the account behind each

Each benefit in this table carries at least one named account: a person or a publication that states the figure or the term, with a date attached. The accounts are of three kinds: writers' own logs, an agency's own history, and publications' own contributor pages.

Each row is one person's or one publisher's own account, not a sampled study, so read each figure as what happened to that writer, with the date beside it. The sections below take the benefits one at a time.

Links and reach

Links are the SEO benefit of guest blogging, and they come first because a guest article normally carries a link to the writer's site, either in the body of the article or in the bio that sits under it. A link in the body sits inside the article's text; a link in the bio sits beneath it, next to your name, and both are links from a page on someone else's site to a page on yours. Google's page "Link best practices for Google", last updated 10 December 2025, says it uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl.

For what guest blogging can produce in link volume, Jenny Romanchuk's account on the HubSpot Blog, updated 29 July 2025, gives her own count: "Benchmarks show that 13-15 links per month is the average for link builders with 1-5 years of experience, using different tactics. I reached that number through guest blogging alone." Her team's volume for one year: "The total number of guest posts exceeded 200+ in one year." The benchmark she cites covers link builders using different tactics; her monthly number came from the single tactic of guest blogging.

Reach is the second benefit, and the clearest account of it comes from Orbit Media, a web design and development agency, in Orbit Media's history of its content strategy. The page is undated; the period it describes runs from 2011 to 2014. The agency counts its own output for those years: "During this era, we published 130 guest posts over four years, far more than we published on our own site." It also states what that output did: "We realized that guest posts had far greater reach than content on our own site. And the links were helping to build our site's Domain Authority." That is what reach means here: the articles sat in front of the publications' own readers, people the agency's own site had not yet gathered.

That last term needs one sentence of explanation: Domain Authority is Moz's own 1 to 100 score, not a search engine's measure, and our guide to Moz DA explains how it is worked out. For the wider case for links beyond guest articles, see the benefits of building backlinks.

A byline, a bio and an audience: what publications give a contributor

The byline benefit is stated most plainly by the publications themselves, on their own contributor pages. Smashing Magazine's contributor page is an older page, last updated 4 January 2021, and it sets out the terms: "We give you a byline with your photograph and biography, so readers can find out more about you and your work." BiggerPockets' guest blogger guidelines are undated; they say the publication wants to promote the contributor as the author of the article, and they offer a byline or signature on posts for that reason. The photograph and the biography are the publication's offer, not something the contributor has to ask for. With a byline, a photograph and a biography, every reader can attach a name and a face to the work, and can find more of it.

Publications also state the audience a contributor reaches, in their own figures and with no method given. realtor.com PRO's call for contributors, a page dated 20 September 2019, offers "Exposure to our industry audience of over 500,000 people." HubSpot's guest blogging guidelines, which are undated, state that "The HubSpot Blog reaches millions of business professionals across four properties:" the publication's own description of the room a contributor's article enters. These are the publishers' own figures, stated on their own pages, and they are the figures to use at the choosing stage: they tell you the audience each publisher claims before you write a word.

Contributor terms also cover the link itself. HubSpot's guest blogging guidelines allow one link to the contributor's company website in the body of the post, which is the link benefit, stated from the publication's side. Terms differ by publication: one offers a byline with a photograph, another a signature; one states an audience figure, another does not. The byline, the audience and the link are all set by the publication, and they are set in writing, so read the contributor page before you pitch. For the property niche, we list more of these contributor terms in real estate guest posting.

Relationships with editors

The fourth benefit is the working relationship with the editor who publishes you. Evelina Milenova's guest post outreach process, published in Search Engine Land on 6 April 2026, gives her own count: "Since 2021, I've worked on more than 350 published guest posts." A count like that is built on repeat contact with editors, and she writes that when an article brings meaningful traffic, it becomes much easier to pitch the next one. The relationship grows with each placement: the first pitch introduces you, the published article proves you, and the next pitch is a note to someone who already knows your work.

An editor who has published you once knows you deliver, so the second pitch is shorter: you skip the introduction and propose the next article. The same pattern appears in another first-hand account on Orbit Media's content strategy page, where the writer Henneke Duistermaat says guest posts helped her get known and start her email list, and that she was then asked to write for other businesses. Being asked to write for other businesses is the relationship benefit travelling past the first editor: the byline does the introducing, and the relationship does the rest.

Referral traffic and subscribers

Referral traffic and subscribers, the fifth and sixth benefits, share one account. Mia Elvasia tracked every pitch she sent for a year and published the log on her blog, Blog Recode, on 4 October 2025, with an update on 20 January 2026. Her 12-month counts: 47 pitch emails sent, 14 guest posts published, 4,858 visitors arriving at her site from those posts, 347 visitors per post on average, and 67 email subscribers gained.

What her log gives is a sense of scale for a single writer's year, and a reason to build a guest blogging strategy around sites chosen by who reads them. An average of 347 visitors a post is built post by post, and each post's count depends on the readers of the site it appeared on. The visitors who arrive through a guest article's link were the publication's readers first, and the subscribers are the share of those visitors who wanted more from you. That is why the audience figures above matter at the choosing stage: a post on a site your buyers read sends you visitors who can become subscribers.

What it takes: pitching it yourself or ordering it

Both routes end at the same place: a published article on someone else's site, with your name or your link on it. One route costs hours, the other costs money. Neither route ranks above the other; they fit different weeks and different budgets. The pitching route's counts come from two writers' logs; the ordering route's facts come from our own product pages. Here is what each route takes, with the counts attached.

Pitching it yourself means finding the sites, finding the editor, writing the pitch and then writing the article. Two logs show the work. Evelina Milenova, in the Search Engine Land account named above, sent more than 300 pitches between 2023 and 2025, mostly to content managers at B2B SaaS companies in the marketing and HR niches. Of those pitches, 19% got a reply and 18% ended in a published guest post. She puts a generic template at a 3% to 5% reply rate. Set the two reply rates side by side: 19% for her own process, 3% to 5% for a generic template.

Mia Elvasia's log, published 4 October 2025, runs from 47 pitches to 14 published posts, with 156 hours in total, 11 hours on average for each published post. For the finding and the pitching, see how to find guest post opportunities.

Ordering it means the article is written for you. With Guest Posts, our UK team writes an article of 750 words or more, and it is published on a real, independently owned website in your niche with one contextual link to your page. You supply the target URL and the anchor text, and you choose a Domain Authority tier at checkout; we price on DA and cross-check DR and organic traffic. The delivery target on the DA30+ tier is 7 to 14 days. Prices run from $75 at DA10+ to $400 at DA60+, and the full list is in guest post pricing. One plain difference between the routes: when you order, you do not write the article or set its headings; when you pitch, you write it yourself.

For the ordering route, the same checks run on every placement we deliver. Before a placement goes out, we check the HTTP status code your target URL returns, so the link does not point to a dead page or a redirect chain. After publication, we check that the page is live, that the link sits in the body copy, that the anchor text and target URL match the order, and that the page is indexable; only then is the URL reported to the dashboard. The order of the checks matters: there is nothing to report until the page is live and the link is in place.

Every delivered link has 12-month replacement cover. We use two indexing services as standard for every client, and between them we see roughly a 95% indexing rate; the sites are real sites owned by real people, so the pages would most likely be indexed without a service, but left alone that can take up to four weeks. That is our process, not a promise for any one link. The full standard is on our quality assurance page, and for the other format we sell, see guest posts vs niche edits.

Frequently asked questions

What are the benefits of guest blogging?

The benefits of guest blogging are links to your site, reach to readers you do not have yet, a byline and bio under your name, working relationships with editors, referral traffic, and subscribers. Each benefit on this page carries a named account with a date, from writers' own logs, an agency's own history and publications' own contributor pages. Guest blogging and guest posting are the same practice, so the benefits, or advantages, of guest posting are the same list.

Is guest blogging good for SEO?

Yes, guest blogging is good for SEO through the links it earns, and links are the part of guest blogging that touches search. Google's page on link best practices, last updated 10 December 2025, says it uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl. For link volume from guest blogging, Jenny Romanchuk's account on the HubSpot Blog, updated 29 July 2025, records 13 to 15 links a month reached through guest blogging alone. A guest article normally carries its link in the body of the article or in the bio.

What is the difference between guest blogging and guest posting?

There is no difference: guest blogging and guest posting are two names for the same thing, writing an article that another site publishes. A site may call its contributor articles guest posts or guest blogs, and the arrangement is the same one described on its contributor page. The benefits listed on this page apply under either name.

How long does a guest post take?

A guest post takes hours of your work or days of ours, depending on the route. Pitching it yourself, Mia Elvasia's 12-month log on Blog Recode, published 4 October 2025, averages 11 hours of work for each published post, 156 hours across 14 published posts. Ordering it from us, the delivery target on the DA30+ tier is 7 to 14 days. The pitching route's hours are your hours; the ordering route's days are ours.

How many pitches does it take to get a guest post published?

Two writers' logs give a pitch count each. Evelina Milenova, writing in Search Engine Land on 6 April 2026, sent more than 300 pitches between 2023 and 2025, and 18% of her sent emails ended in a published guest post; she puts a generic template at a 3% to 5% reply rate. Mia Elvasia's log on Blog Recode, published 4 October 2025, went from 47 pitch emails to 14 published posts in a year. Both counts come from the writers' own logs, in their own niches and years.