Guest blogging can be an important part of your strategy for building an audience for your blog. It can also be an exercise in frustration when you consistently hear “Thanks, but no thanks” from other blog owners, or worse, hear nothing back at all.

Bloggers have long known that Pinterest is an effective tool to grow your blog. Pinning content from your own blog, as well as from other sources, can help build your brand, drive traffic to your site, and grow your audience.

Yet in many cases, bloggers aren’t doing everything they can to increase their followers via Pinterest.

Ask anyone involved in marketing and they will tell you that publishing content is a key part of any strategy. More consumers make buying decisions based on articles than ads. The digital age has turned everyday people into product researchers, testers, and reviewers.

It’s the question that plagues anyone who has ever published anything online: If a blogger has no followers, do they really make a sound?

Okay, so that’s a bit of a mixed metaphor, but you get the idea. Everyone who has a blog wants people to see it.

About two years ago, Google’s Matt Cutts sent shockwaves through the content marketing world when he said, “Guest blogging is dead.” Cutts’ based his assertion on a growing trend in guest blogging of low-quality articles and posts, which amounted to little more than spam.

In the world of digital marketing, it seems that everyone is talking about the concept of “relevant” content. “You have to post relevant content!” you hear the experts say. “If it’s not relevant, it’s just noise!”

The problem is, with all of their calls for relevancy, there isn’t a whole lot of explanation about what “relevant content” actually means.