Writing guest posts isn’t easy, but it can be a great experience, as it was for me when writing my recent post for Six Revisions.

I would like to share a few lessons I learned from guest posting:

Ideas for guest posts

Coming up with ideas for guest posts is not very different from coming up with ideas for your own blog.
However, there are a few characteristics that might need adjustment for writing successful guest posts. For example, if you tend to write short posts, it might not be suitable for other bloggers to publish in their own blog.

guest post

Listing potential blogs to guest post in

This is the fun part.
As an enthusiast blogger, I visit blogs in my niche regularly, and I’m also subscribed to their feeds.

Here is what I recommend to do next:
Besides filtering out blogs that do not except guest posts, narrow down that big list to 3-5 blogs by the following criteria:

  1. Filtering out blogs that are not in my sub niche – in my case, my top level niche is web design, and my sub niche is web development. Therefore, strictly design inspiration blogs (although interesting to me) would be irrelevant for me to guest post in.
  2. Filtering out brand new blogs that have not received recognition yet – The main reason to write guest posts in the first place, is getting more exposure and recognition among bloggers. Therefore, if there are not enough people that will read your guest post, you might as well publish it in your own blog.
  3. Focusing on popular blogs that have decent traffic and many loyal visitors – the reason why these blogs are your best choice is already explained in the previous step, but how do you track down those successful blogs?
    • Look for number of comments (not including trackbacks and pingbacks).
    • Install the useful Quirk SearchStatus add-on for Firefox and check out PageRank, Alexa and Compete ranks while visiting you candidate blogs. Even though they cannot provide an accurate indication of blog popularity, they can give you an idea about it.
  4. Filtering out blogs that have discussed my topic thoroughly before. Simply run an internal site search inside each of the blogs left in your list, for your main topic and some related keywords.
  5. Once your list comes down to 3-5 blogs – prioritize them. First contact the 2 blogs in top priority, then if they don’t answer after a couple of days or do not accept your post, contact the others.

Contacting blog owners

When contacting the bloggers, remember to reveal only the general idea and maybe a little more, just enough to make your post attractive to them.
Do not send your article immediately (trust your instincts in this one, to determine whether the blogger seems like a person you can trust not to steal your content).

Be prepare to be ignored or refused, but hopefully you will receive at least one YES.

Before writing your guest post

Make sure to receive the requirements from the blog owner before sending your article to them (e.g. image dimensions allowed, the format in which your post should be sent to them – Word or HTML, etc.)

In addition, send a nice image of yourself and write a short bio with your blog link and twitter profile to appear in the author box (you can check out how other guest authors appear in that blog).

Did you find guest posting helpful for your blog? Did it increased your blog’s traffic? Share your own experiences of writing guest posts.

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