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Successful Guest Posting Strategy in One, Two, Three

Ann Smarty — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 05:00:55 +0000

Like anything else, a guest post needs to be perfectly planned if success is to be achieved through it. Ann Smarty has written out what a successful guest post plan would look like, and does so in great detail. Want to write for us too?

Guest posting is probably one of the most unappreciated forms of marketing that I can think of. If you can use the proper strategies and have your mind set towards creating a quality guest post – you will be rewarded for it.

Because really, only the passionate bloggers guest post. The benefits are plenty and lack of time is no excuse, however, it is something that many bloggers just can’t get around to doing.

Some of the most important benefits of guest posting that I value the most are:

Get inspired by exposing your content to new audience and getting new comments, fresh insight, etc
Get more readers and subscribers, more promoters who will tweet and stumble your content.
Build your authority and reputation of the real expert in your niche;
You will be building new contacts with the blog owner, and the people in their community.

I hope that was enough to convince you to keep reading about how useful one simple guest post can be to your blog.

Finding blogs that accept guest posts

1. Start by contributing to your friends’ blogs. This way you will learn to “feel” another blog atmosphere and adapt to it.

The first place to start with is to look around your contacts. Your current blogging friends will be glad to accept your guest post and will help promote it. Besides, it’s a good way to remember your old contacts and remind them of yourself.

2. Search Google
If you are a new blogger (who doesn’t have a lot of friends who blog on the same topic) or if you have already blogged for most of your friends, head over to Google. I did a detailed post on finding guest post opportunities using Google. Read it thoroughly and try to apply the tips you’ll find there. Search queries you want to start with include:

“Submit a guest post” / “Submit post” / “Submit blog post”
“Add blog post”
“Submit an article”
“Suggest a guest post”
“Send a guest post”
“Write for us”;
“Become an author”, etc

3. Check (guest) blogging forums and communitie
Blogging forums that can be used for hunting guest posting opportunities are plenty. Some of them are general: Authority Blogger is one community to consider: it was started by a guest posting guru Chris Garret.

Another two places to be aware of are BlogHer (uniting blogging women) and 20sb.net (which unites bloggers aged between 20 and 30 years). Speaking of the latter, they regularly run guest posting events that encourage members to exchange guest posts.

Another place to find guest blogging opportunities is MyBlogGuest.com. That’s a forum (started by yours truly) that is meant to connect bloggers interested in fresh content to authors who would like to promote it.

2. Act now: write a killer pitch

Once you have found a couple of great guest posting opportunities, you may want to contact them and offer your guest post. Here’s how the process should look like step by step (also be sure to check this post by Alex on preparing a guest post in 5 steps):

Read the blog carefully. Think what type of a guest post might be interesting to the blogger and his readership;
Brainstorm a few great post ideas;
Search through the blog to see if there are any overlapping posts already;
Write the post (if nothing similar has been published yet). Don’t forget to link to related articles you found in step 3;
Contact the blogger and attach the post.

Note: there may be some intermediate steps. Some people prefer to discuss the post ideas with the blogger before submitting the post. It is really up to you. I can do either way from case to case.

Now to the ethics:

Spend some time on writing a good, personalized pitch: start with the blogger’s name and mention why you think the post is a good fit for his blog
Don’t send one and the same article to multiple bloggers. Send it to just one. This is very important. Don’t turn your guest blogging into article distribution. This is just plain wrong.

3. Now wait. Be patient

High-profile bloggers are very, very busy. Don’t be offended if they don’t respond to you for a week or so. I usually wait a week and then write a follow-up message and wait one more week. If I do not hear a response even after that, I will send them an email one last time to ask if they every plan on using the post. If there is still no response, I will submit it elsewhere.

Once your post is published, be sure to check back often, subscribe to comments and reply to everyone who comments. This is important, because writing the post is only about half of the job. Replying to comments and really engaging is the second part many do not take seriously.

Something else that can be useful to you is to track any Twitter mentions of the posts. Three tools I recommend you can use to help you track tweets around the post are:

BackTweets is a popular tool that tracks and aggregates Tweets linking to a particular page. It supports a number of URL-shorteners which makes the tool one of the most complete.
Twitter Reactions (for Google Chrome): shows the Twitter juice about the current page;
Topsy displays recent tweets for any given URL:

How do you do it all?

As I mentioned in the beginning of this article, guest posting is a very powerful, but often overlooked form of marketing. The benefits it brings in can be immense, but at the cost of a lot of hard work.

So, how do you do it? What drives you to write an entire article for someone else? Are you in it for the traffic? Or are you looking for something greater than that?

Time to Switch to Dofollow Comments

jitendraag — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:04:24 +0000

As a followup to a past post on Blogussion about the Google Algorithm change, “Jeet” from GetLinksPro has explained the impact of the change in his own words.

I have always advised bloggers to switch to dofollow comments and moderate the comments with a tight fist. This not only rewards the contributors it also brings a lot of traffic from smaller dofollow search engines and links from dofollow lists and directories.

I personally prefer and recommend using the dofollow plugins that can impose a limit of minimum 3-5 comments before a dofollow link is given.

But I sincerely believe that now is the time for people who are still nofollowing their comment links to switch to dofollow; rather it was an year ago when Google changed their treatment of nofollow links – but we didn’t come to know about it until recently.

An Explanation in my Own Words

I will try to explain the changes in interpretation of nofollow links in my words, though you can use the original reference (Matt Cutt’s post and some excellent comments there).

Earlier, if a page had 5 links and page had a PR5, 20% of the PR juice flowed to these links. It was slightly below 20% because a decay factor was introduced to ensure that all pages don’t end up getting a PR10; but we won’t go into those details.

If you had a contact and a privacy page out of these 5, it was very easy to manipulate the PR flow by nofollowing the links to contact and privacy page. Thus, the PR“>PR juice was distributed among three pages only and these pages got 33% PR juice each.

PageRank sculpting or nofollow was a great method to increase the PR for internal pages by nofollowing links to external pages or to contact / privacy type of pages.

What That All Means

With the new changes, however, the effort of nofollowing is wasted completely and you won’t get the 33% PR juice on remaining three links even if you dofollow the 2 pages. It can still be argued that only 10% juice is leaked for each of these nofollow links (as compared to 20% earlier) and that leaves us with 80/3% ~ 26% PR juice remaining for the remaining 3 links. But that’s not for sure and I wouldn’t be surprised if the remaining links are still getting only 20% juice (with a decay).

So now that we have established that nofollowing links is not going to affect the internal linking much it’s much better to dofollow external links in comments, at least someone is benefiting from these links and that someone is a regular contributor to your blog.

So, rather than throwing away 20% of PR juice, it could be given away to someone who visits your blog regularly and makes it a point to write an informative comment.

How Did I Put That?

I tried to explain this new change in the flow of PageRank to a page using a different kind of example here. Let me know how I did, and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask!

Tips For Being At the Top of “Top Commentator” Lists Almost Every Time

Alex — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:00:39 +0000

Being at the most frequent commentator on any blog with the Top Commentators plugin always brings in a lot of rewards. Not only are you getting to become an active part of the blogs community, but you will bring in traffic to your blog.

Imagine being at the top of the list at a blog like John Chow’s, the amount of traffic you could receive. The only problem getting to that point is that you need to comment a lot, and keep commenting. It’s all about consistency, and it’s like a competition with you and the rest of the community to be at that #1 spot.

So, how can you always find ways to get to the top of those lists and stay there? It’s not always at easy to get to #1 and keep the spot, especially on popular blogs. Obviously it’s easy to stay at the top of smaller blogs, but it’s not always as beneficial.

Post Comments You Know Will Be Replied To

If you can start discussions within the comments section, the number of comments you have total will increase. Back and forth discussions between you and one person, or even better – you and multiple people. Sure, the people you’re talking to will also get higher numbers as well, but as long as you can do the little extra, everything will work out.

What are the best conversation starters? Here are the three best in my opinion:

Questions

If you ask a question, it has to be replied to. Hopefully the blogger is decent enough to reply to you, and maybe even someone else will. You can even know the answer to the question, no one will really know.

Additions

If you think something can be added on to the topic, then by all means go for it. You are probably teaching the blogger something they didn’t know about the topic and even the people who read the article too.

Feedback/Disagreement

Say something about the post, or even blog that could be improved. I get comments all of the time in random posts telling me that they love our design. Of course I reply with a “thank you,” and maybe a little extra to chat.

Even disagreement works. Hell, it works better than agreeing. Read their opinion the topic and share yours. Bam, an instant debate will start.

Reply to other comments!

One thing I have noticed a lot when I comment on other blogs that the time anyone comments is when they are posting their own independent comments.

I feel like instead of always adding our own opinions to the topic, we should expand on someone elses, or share our opinions about their opinion.

I think that by doing this, you can score some extra points with the blogger, and even the person who you reply to. You are doing the bloggers job by replying to the comments, and earning some higher numbers in the top commentators section.

Write A Guest Post and Reply to Every Comment

Guest posting is a great way to get traffic to your blog, and opens up a great opportunity for you to get a lot of comments out of the way.

I wrote a small mini series about the benefits of guest posting by leaving a mark in the community and how to impress the blog owner through guest posting, so you can see how guest posting is great for traffic.

My Past Experience With Guest Posting & Commenting

When Janith wrote his guest post at ThouShallBlog, 49 Tips to Become A Better Blogger, he was required to reply to all of the comments the post got. Well, that blog gets quite a few comments per post, and Janith needed some help from me.

The post probably got about 50 comments, so we had to reply to them all. Lucky for us, ThouShallBlog has a Top Commentators plugin installed, and both of us dominated the #1 and #2 position for the month that article was published.

Create a Bookmarks Folder Full of Blogs With “Top Commentators” Plugin Installed

This is something I have started doing for my new blog Asnio. I created a folder in my Bookmarks toolbar in Firefox and added a list full of blogs that have the top commentators plugin installed on the blog. I have about 5-6 blogs in it, and I consistently go to those blogs and comment on posts.

As a result of keeping an organized list of blogs to comment on, I can always know what blogs I should comment on and never lose track of them. As a result, I will get a high position on the top commentators list.

Organization is a great way to hit success. What better way to do that then make a list?

What Are Your Tips For Ranking High?

What are your tips for ranking high on blogs that use this plugin? I think the tips I listed here are pretty good, and would love to see you guys apply them to your comments for this post!

Photo by Giampaolo Macorig