Why I Wrote Under Another Profile
By: Ryan Fan
Tags: Freelancing, Marketing, Medium, Business, Writing

Why I Wrote Under Another Profile

I guest blogged under McGraw-Hill

From kalhh on Pixabay

As a 9th-grade special education teacher, I write about work sometimes. I do it less than I did when I started my job, but often, I’ll write about the intersections between work and mental health. On one of these pieces, McGraw Hill, the textbook publishing company and one of the “big three” educational publishers, reached out to me about whether I wanted to guest blog for their publication, and I graciously obliged.

I wasn’t paid for it, but I was glad to guest blog for McGraw-Hill. At first, when they reached out to me, I thought “McGraw-Hill? Like the textbook company?” and then weighed the pros and cons quickly before making a choice to do so. I took my time given a really busy schedule, and I’m very glad McGraw-Hill was understanding of my need to delay my submission.

I gladly took the chance to write a piece about encouraging active citizenship in the classroom, and especially in a virtual classroom during the pandemic. According to Dave at Content Development Pros, guest blogging is beneficial because it builds relationships with your audience, helps develop professional connections, and establishes yourself as an “industry expert.” As only a second-year teacher, I don’t really consider myself an industry expert, but having McGraw-Hill, a household name in education, reach out to me about guest blogging certainly raised my confidence. Plus, it looks really good on an education-related resume.

Of course, guest blogging helps build online influence and authority to the reader. For me, guest blogging was a break from writing for my own profile and own following. I’m well aware that I don’t make any money to avoid a possible conflict of interest, but guest blogging allows me to say “hey, I got published by McGraw-Hill,” which helps significantly for my credibility as an educator more than it helps my credibility as a writer and editor.

According to Vikas Agrawal at Search Engine Journal, guest blogging helps spread a brand message and wins the trust of a target audience. Although you’re writing for someone’ else’s site, guest blogging allows instant exposure to targeted traffic, so I might build an audience of people interested in reading education-related work. It also allows connecting with influencers and expanding a personal network, and helps me be more active in the education community.

Within the realm of where you’re guest blogging, you build more influence and authority, and you also build more social media following to who sees your content. After all, you are marketing yourself to a whole new network.

“By contributing to an authoritative blog, you are essentially getting them to vouch for your brand,” Agrawal says.

McGraw-Hill linked back to my blog profile, and writing for the site was a major exercise. It helped me build the skills I need to do research and write for a different audience than I normally do, and adopt a new voice in doing so.

It’s a cool thing to put that I wrote for the McGraw-Hill blog on my resume, but building connections is also a large part of guest blogging. It never hurts to have more connections. Guest blogging was simply something different to tackle, and I’m very grateful I did.

McGraw-Hill used more subheadings to improve my search engine optimization and working with someone else on the editing side helped improve my writing. According to Hallam, a digital marketing agency, the end goal of guest blogging is to position yourself as a thought leader in an industry, even if it doesn’t happen overnight. It also helps build brand awareness within a very crowded market, and promotes search engine optimization since publishing on a high quality and relevant website allows you to bring more traffic to your own website.

Before you decide to guest blog, Hallam emphasizes only guest blogging on trustworthy and relevant websites. I mentioned McGraw-Hill to a couple of people to make sure they’d heard of it too — and everyone I talked to associated McGraw-Hill as an authoritative textbook and education brand. As such, guest blogging requires a targeted approach. We all only have so much time and attention to give, and we can’t give it all. I never sought out guest blogging opportunities, but have been approached a couple times, and only accepted an opportunity when an influential brand in my field asked me.

Of course, I did wonder whether the post would do better on my own blog, but I have a lot of content already that readers find value in. Branching out to a new audience is always a fun excursion — and guest blogging was the way to do it for me. I don’t seek out opportunities to guest blogging because writing for myself and my own readers always comes first — before you make connections and establish yourself as a “thought leader” in your field, it’s important to build your own brand.

Guest blogging is just one step in the process. For me, I published under someone else’s profile because it was a nice break from the norm and great to get out of the cycle of building my own following and brand and focusing on my own writing.