The beauty of guest blogging is you get your posts on larger blogs than yours, sending traffic to your blog and hopefully picking up new readers and subscribers in the process. But much like being a guest in someone’s home, there is a certain protocol to making your host happy and your visit a smashing success for your host, your own blog and you.
1. Have the courage to submit guest posts to BIG blogs. It takes the same amount of time and effort to write a good post for a heavily trafficked blog as it does for a small blog, but the difference in traffic that you receive as a result can be phenomenal. Let’s say you write a post and really spend some time making it great, and you submit it to a small blog. What do you get in return? A trickle of traffic to your own website or blog. But if you had submitted that same post to a blog that gets a great deal of traffic, you could have several hundred visitors to your website and acquired many of them as list subscribers.
2. Get your own blog or website ready for this new traffic. You submit your article to a large blog and it gets published. What happens? A flood of traffic to your own site that lasts for a day or two and then trickles off over the coming week. If you don’t capture that traffic you will most likely lose it forever.
Instead of sending that traffic directly to your homepage, consider sending it to a subscription page with a very nice offer related to the article you wrote. For example, if your article is, “10 ways to make $200 this weekend,” then you might offer an e-report on another 25 ways to make $500 this coming week.
3. Write what you know and do it passionately. The number of visitors you’ve going to receive at your website is directly related the quality of the post you submit. If your guest blogpost makes people yawn, you’re not going to see much traffic. If, however, it engages, enlightens, educates and entertains, then expect a surge of traffic.
4. Write with clarity – you might get another pair of eyeballs to look over your post prior to submitting it, to see if it needs some touch ups or a total revamping. Yes, it’s worth it to spend the extra time getting it just right. Your guest blog post is really a sales letter selling you and your website, so make it count.
5. Make your author’s box count. Don’t just put in your little bio and a link – give them an irresistible reason to go to your website. Hopefully you already started thinking about this in #2 above. Give them something that is a direct extension of what they’ve already read. Your guest blogpost is the appetizer, and their reward for visiting your website is the main course, or perhaps a dazzling dessert.
6. Do your research. If the blog you’re submitting to only allows a certain kind of guest blogpost, then by all means give them what they want. If they allow anything that fits within their niche, then look to see which were their most popular posts in the past to get ideas of what goes over well with this blog owner and the blog’s readers.
7. Show your confidence. In writing your post, don’t make it sound like a third person Wikipedia entry. Instead, act like the subject authority you are. People want to hear from experts and that’s how you need to present yourself. Refrain from thumping your chest and telling tall tails of your conquests, but do give real life examples of how you’ve accomplished things and solved the same problems your readers might be experiencing.
8. Email your post as an attachment with a cover letter. You always want to format your blogpost so they can paste it right into WordPress, and you always want to send it as an attachment so that it doesn’t lose its formatting.
9. Of course you’re going to send an email to the person running the blog you want to guest post on. What to write? First, keep it short and polite. No long rambling letters, get to the point. And second, something like the following example is good and generally works quite well:
Dear _____,
I am Rapute Smythe from mywebsite.com and I’ve been enjoying your blog for some time now. I especially love your posts on ______ and your latest post gave me three good ideas that I immediately implemented in my own business.
Because of this, I have written a unique post for your blog that I truly think your readers will enjoy and find great value in. The title of the post is ___________ and you’ll find it attached to this email.
Highest regards,
Rapute
Of course you’re going to change it up to suit you, but you can see that nothing complicated is needed.
10. Never submit the same blogpost to more than one blog at a time. If the first blog rejects it, then you are free to submit it to another blog. Otherwise, do not duplicate content or the blog owners will not be happy and odds are will not publish a guest post from you again.
One last thing: THANK the blog owner as soon as your post is published, because they DESERVE your thanks. Plus, it increases your chances of getting published by them again.
