Hi there now for many of us, using a blog format to get started is pretty usual, certainly for me it was a great way to start our internet marketing activities and also it gave us the discipline of writing content to a schedule i.e. feeding the blog every few days.

So once you’ve done that the next logical step is to also become a guest blogger on other blog sites. Sounds daunting I know “who will ever want me to write for them?” kind of thing goes through your mind but listen up, read this post in detail and you’ll be surprised just how easy it can be.

Guest blogging is an incredibly easy and highly effective way to get traffic to your site.  If you’ve ever done article directory marketing, you know the drill.  It’s all about creating high quality content and posting it to other sites with a link back to your own.

It’s the same with guest blogging with just a few key differences.

1. The content has to be good (let’s just be honest with ourselves and say that the stuff we submitted to Ezine wasn’t exactly Pulitzer-Prize winning material!)

2. You need to spend a little time finding good blogs to post to.

3. You can establish way more authority and get way more traffic to your site.

With guest blogging, you write blog posts on topics related to your niche that your target market would like.  Then, you contact blog owners and offer it to them free of charge.  They publish it and you get a much higher quality backlink than you would with an article directory.  Let’s look at how you do it step by step.

Writing Content

As I said, the content has to be pretty good.  You can always sort of ‘stalk’ the blogs you want to submit to beforehand and see what kind of content they like.  They’re much pickier about grammar; spelling and punctuation (as well they should be) and blog posts are usually longish, like around 700 or more words.

Aside from that, it’s the same.  Your blog posts offer helpful advice, how-to information or up-to-date news related to your topic.

Choosing Blogs

The one thing that makes guest blogging trickier than article directory marketing is that you’ve got to find blogs to submit to.  And you can’t just keep submitting to the same blog.  You want backlinks from lots of different sites and not just one.  You also want to gain the biggest readership possible, and that means choosing a new blog with each post.

The best way I’ve found to find good, high-traffic blogs is to just do a Google search or Google blog search on your topic.  Whatever comes up at the top must be high-traffic!  You can always check out page rank and Alexa ranking on the sites you pick as well.

The most important thing is to make sure before you contact them that they do actually accept guest blogs.  They’ll usually say so on their ‘about page.’

Contacting Blog Owners

When you contact a blog owner, just tell them that you’ve got a guest blog post and you’re wondering if they’d like it.  Tell them in one sentence what it’s about, the title and the word count.

Some folks recommend that you not send the article at first just in case they steal it and use it for their own.  However, I always send the article.  The reason is that it’s just one less step to getting it published.  I also want them to read it and see that it’s good before they decide.

You don’t have to write a long email.  Just tell them you’ve got an article related to their blog and leave it at that.  As long as the blog post is decently written and offers something of value, they will pretty much say yes.

And that’s it!  If you get into a routine of doing that, you’ll have high quality links from lots of different blogs pointing to your site.  You’ll also have your content published all over the place to help establish your name as an authority in your niche.

Tony

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