A few years ago when article directories like Ezine stopped pulling in huge amounts of traffic, I stumbled upon another method that is more effective and produces more consistent results if you do it right – guest posting on blogs.
The idea is essentially the same. You write guest posts similar to articles for content syndication. Then, you find blogs to publish them on and contact the owners to see if they’ll accept your submission. Your guest post has a little bio blurb about you and that’s where you get the traffic.
If you’ve done article directory marketing, you know how easy it is to submit your articles. There are even software programs that will do it for you. Not so with guest posting. You have to do it yourself.
What I found is that the only real challenge is finding good blogs to guest on. Just like article directories, once you find a few good ones that are suitable, you can get into a regular routine of submitting work to them. Then it just becomes a matter of rinse and repeat.
The Blog Hunt Checklist
Since the process of finding good blogs was somewhat arduous, I’ve made a kind of checklist for doing it. These are the things you need to look for and how to look for them.
Relevance – First and foremost, it must be relevant to your niche. Actually, it needs to be relevant to your specific article. Don’t just think in terms of niches. For example, if you’ve got an article on how to meditate, you can submit it to blogs about working for yourself, anger management, health and well-being, and any number of other topics.
Guest Posts – For each blog that you find, check to see if they accept guest posts. They’ll have a page somewhere regarding submissions that will tell you who to email and how to do it. If they don’t, they may still accept submissions. Look at recent posts to see if there are contributing authors. If you don’t see any, they probably don’t accept submissions so I’d pass.
Ranking – Check their rank in Google’s page rank checker (http://www.prchecker.info/). This will tell you their page rank and this gives you some idea of how much traffic the blog gets. Decide on a minimum before you start checking out blogs.
Readership – Look on the blog for reader activity. What you want to see is a long list of comments after each post. This means it has an active audience and it will get the best exposure possible for you.
Ease of Submission – If the blog matches all of the above criteria, submit something them. You’ll see how easy or hard it is to do that. Most make it easy (it’s just a matter of, at most, emailing someone) but many take weeks to publish your post. Preferably, you want a blog that publishes your work within the week or so it’s submitted.
Getting into a Flow
Those are a lot of things to look for and it seems like quite a bit of work for each submission. Create an Excel spread sheet that includes all of the relevant information you need. It should include:
All the topics covered in the blog.
– Any specifications on word length or anything like that.
– A link to the page where you submit your guest posts or the email of the contact person.
– Google page rank.
– Some idea of how many comments it gets (you can make a scale of 1 to 5 or something along those lines).
– How long it takes them to accept your submissions.
– How much traffic you get from your submissions there.
You can refer to this chart for each new post you write. It will eventually have a huge list of blogs where you’ve been published before.
The cool thing is that this is a process you can outsource. You can hire a VA to scout out blogs for you and provide you with this information. They can even send query emails or submit for you on your behalf. Just create training materials that show them step by step the process outlined above.
Tony
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