[Today’s guest post is by freelance writer Erin Steiner.]

Blogging is important and a key factor in whether or not you can help your small business succeed. Blogs help you build your reputation, communicate with your customers (current and future), and can even be an additional source of income.

The problem is that updating a blog takes time, and as a small business owner, you (and your staff) might not have the time to update your site as regularly as you might like. Thank goodness for guest blogging, right?

Guest blogging is exactly what it sounds like: You accept blog posts from guest authors for publication on your site. Accepting guest posts can be a tremendous boon to your company’s blog. Here are just five reasons that is true.

1. Variety and Fresh Perspective

Guest blog authors are writing about the same subjects you are, but they are coming at those subjects with a fresh perspective. Freshness is good. It keeps your blog from becoming stagnant and repetitive. Freshness is part of why people choose to visit a niche site (like your blog) over and over again.

Accepting guest posts regularly also adds a great variety to your blog that wouldn’t be there if you tried to write everything yourself.

Dozens of perspectives, one blog—it works for everybody!

2. SEO Enhancements

Linkbuilding is great for your SEO. Fresh content that gets updated regularly is more likely to be linked to by other websites. Your guest authors might also know of sites to link to from their posts, which increases your outbound link count. A guest blog author is also likely to link to the article they have written for you from their own sites, which increases your inbound link count even more.

3. Publicity

Almost every guest blog author has a readership of his own. You can be sure that he is going to tell that readership about the content that he wrote for you and will probably link to it. Because his readership is loyal, a non-zero number of those readers are going to click through and check out your business’s blog and then, with any luck, your business. That puts your products and services in front of people who might not have otherwise been introduced to you and what you have to offer.

4. Time Savings

Publishing guest blog posts helps you keep your blog fresh but saves you the time you would have spent researching and coming up with great new content on your own. This leaves you free to take care of the other parts of your business so that you can be sure that the traffic those guests posts attract will have the best possible chance of converting into sales.

Time is money, and blogs from guest authors help you save both!

5. Money Savings

It is much cheaper to accept guest blog posts than it is to pay a freelance writer to write for your blog full-time. It’s a good idea to pay the authors who create content for you in both dollars and links, but the going monetary rate for a guest blog post is considerably cheaper than if you wanted to hire someone to write for you exclusively.

There are plenty of ways that publishing guest posts can help you build your business and your business’s reputation. These are just five of them!

About the author:

Erin Steiner is a freelance writer who has written for Reputation.com and other sites about a variety of topics related to the small business world.