Tips for making a mark in the community with guest posts

This is the first part of the two part mini series on how to leave a mark on another per­sons blog through guest post­ing. Stay tuned for Part II.

Guest post­ing is a great way to get social with other blog­gers. It allows you to write your own opin­ions, thoughts and ideas on another person’s blog in front of a totally dif­fer­ent com­mu­nity than your own.

We guest post for a num­ber of rea­sons. Some peo­ple are just inter­ested in get­ting a few links back to their blog, oth­ers want to share infor­ma­tion with another com­mu­nity and get feed­back on their ideas. There are numer­ous rea­sons why we want to guest post, but how do we leave our mark in our post so all of those good things hap­pen for you?

Keep the con­tent quality

Just as you would on your own blog, make sure you make all of your guest posts as great as you can. You can stick to your reg­u­lar writ­ing style on your blog, or you can switch things up a lit­tle bit. It doesn’t hurt to try some­thing dif­fer­ent every once in a while, but just make sure you keep your con­tent amaz­ing and enhance it some if you can.

Ideas for post enhancement

• Add links that will be ben­e­fi­cial to your read­ers. Keep link­ing back to any­where in your arti­cle to a bare min­i­mum. You will usu­ally get your link in the author bio at either the top of bot­tom of the page any­ways, so only link to your blog in your post if what you’re link­ing to is exceptional.
• Use an excel­lent image. Find or cre­ate a beau­ti­ful image and use it to your advan­tage. Take extra time to make sure the image you pick can relate greatly to the post. If pos­si­ble, find an image that has a metaphor related to the post. Images don’t always have to have a lit­eral meaning.
• Add quotes (using the <block­quote> tags) to your posts. Quotes are excel­lent ways to sup­port some infor­ma­tion you write, and there is never any­thing wrong with a lit­tle reassurance!
• Keep an orderly struc­ture. Make sure all of your infor­ma­tion is divided up and neat, but try to avoid adding spe­cific for­mat­ting. I will go over why later on in this post. You can take some infor­ma­tion from a past arti­cle, Stel­lar tips for styling your con­tent area, and apply them to your guest post.

Writ­ing about the right stuff

In a guest post, you are try­ing to bring about a NEW idea to a NEW com­mu­nity. You should def­i­nitely take some time and fig­ure out what you want to write about specif­i­cally. If you can come up with some­what of a unique post idea then you should see a fairly good response at the blog you post on.

Writ­ing arti­cles like “Your X favorite Word­Press plu­g­ins” wouldn’t make a great post because it has been done thou­sands of times already. You can how­ever take that idea, and come up with some­thing like “X best arti­cles for cre­at­ing Word­Press plu­g­ins”. It can be dif­fi­cult to take an idea and make some­thing bet­ter out of it. But if you try a tech­nique like Mind Map­ping, you can lit­er­ally dis­cover hun­dreds of post ideas based off of just one idea.

Keep­ing infor­ma­tion clear & straight to the point

Don’t go off topic too much in the post. It’s easy to do so with paren­the­sis, but keep all of that stuff to a min­i­mal. Also, try to avoid using those humon­gous words that no one knows the mean­ing of. Not that I’m say­ing you will be writ­ing to illit­er­ate peo­ple, I just think it’s best to always use sim­ple words in your posts.

Reply to every comment

Just as you would on your own blog, reply to all of the com­ments you get on your guest post. It’s impor­tant to do so on your blog, and equally impor­tant on some­body else’s blog. Show them you’re a friendly per­son, get involved.

Han­dling neg­a­tive comments

One thing you have to be care­ful about is get­ting neg­a­tive com­ments. I always say that neg­a­tive com­ments are good for you. But because you are a dif­fer­ent per­son, peo­ple won’t be afraid to strike you down. You’re basi­cally the “new­bie” of the com­mu­nity, and if some­one doesn’t like you then they may be less inti­mated to throw some neg­a­tiv­ity your way.

Never ever lose your cool though. Take what they say and find a way to bring out some­thing pos­i­tive of it. The com­ment could be totally hate­ful, but as long as you stay pos­i­tive and “thank them for shar­ing their opin­ion”, you will look like the big­ger per­son in the situation.

Write more than just a “Thank You”

While you should always thank what some­one says about your arti­cle, it doesn’t make for much of a com­ment dis­cus­sion wise by itself.

Some things you can do to make your reply great:

1. Add onto your arti­cle
Some­one may bring up that you are miss­ing some­thing from your arti­cle and start to write their insights on it. That’s great, and you can either keep adding on, or ana­lyze what they have said and write a response to it.

2. Have a friendly debate
If some­one doesn’t agree with you, a debate could hap­pen. No prob­lem, but remem­ber that you have to stay friendly about it at all times. There is a dif­fer­ence between an “argu­ment” and “debate”. Remem­ber that.

3. Link to some­thing
If some­one needs an expan­sion, or a link for fur­ther infor­ma­tion then you bet­ter pro­vide it! Hope­fully the per­son you are blog­ging for doesn’t mind links being posted in their com­ments, but as long as it is rel­e­vant then there should be no problems.

Final Thoughts

With guest posts being as impor­tant as they are, it’s only a sane idea to make sure the posts you do come up with are excel­lent. Have these tips helped you, or have you thought of ways to improve your guest post­ing habits? Do you have any­thing to add even?

In the next post of this “mini series”, I am going to go over how to leave a mark on the blog­ger who you guest post for so they will want to have you back again.

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