Unleash the Power of Guest Posting

Alone In An Empty Room?

What if you threw a party and no one came?

That’s what a lot of professionals feel like when they start blogging. They post, and post, and post, but no one knows about their niche blog and no one ever finds it. It’s like standing in the middle of an empty room, music playing, drink in hand… but no one’s there.

If people aren’t coming to your party, why not bring your party to where the people are?

Bring Your Party to the People

I’ve had my own personal blog for almost ten years now. It doesn’t get a ton of traffic, and I never really had any reason to look for huge traffic to a personal site. But last month, I decided to run an experiment… what would happen if I submitted guest posts for publication on some other popular blogs?

After doing a little research, I wrote a handful of posts to submit to a handful of highly-respected blogs I had in mind. I was able to get three posts (plus this one) published:

As you look at each one, notice the About the Author section – each post has a link back to one or more web sites I want to draw traffic to. So, did my strategy work?

Hell, yes!

Look at these graphs. The first, for my personal site, shows a spike when my Problogger post went live. That’s a ten-fold increase in traffic. The second shows the spike to the Florida Foreclosure Fraud weblog when the Copyblogger post went live. That spike is MORE than ten times the normal traffic the site gets. As a bonus, this isn’t some lame “blogroll” style traffic, it’s the good stuff – organic linking.

Traffic via Problogger.net

Traffic via Copyblogger.com

I don’t have a graph for my post on davidrisley.com because that post linked to a part of the site that I don’t track. (Make sure you provide a pre-formatted “About the Author” section every time you guest post!)

As you can see, I not only brought the party to where the people were, I was able to bring some of those people back home with me after the party was over. The experiment was a complete success.

How To Be a Good Guest

There are two elements to having an outstanding guest post experience:

Write a great article.
Find a great host.

Not necessarily in that order. Let’s look at it from two different angles.

1. Find a site first, and write an article for that site. What makes a great host for your guest post? Ideally, you’ll want to find a site that has good visibility (traffic) on its own. You’ll want a site that has a history of accepting guest posts or seems likely to accept a guest post submission specifically from you. You’ll also want to find a site, if possible, where you have a relationship with the site’s owner.

If you’re not already a member of that community, you may want to do some advance work by contributing substantive, useful comments to the site some days and even weeks beforehand.

Once you have found a likely host site, write your article specifically aimed for publication there. You’ll want to pick a topic that matches the site you’ve picked, ideally a topic you know something about and have a passion for. Your topic should be something that hasn’t already been covered by the host site, unless you can find an interesting new angle. Once you’ve got your article written, contact the author of the site and see if they’re interested.

2. Write your article first, then find a site to place it. It’s often easier to write your article first – especially if you’re already got a burning topic you want to write about – and then find a site that’s a good match for your article. Why? Because you’ve got one, two, maybe even a handful, of good ideas for guest posts, but there are millions of potential sites that might be able to host your article. You just have to find them. This allows you to write to your passion, and then find a partner to bring that passion to the public.

Once you’ve written your article, find some highly visible sites that are likely candidates. Submit your article exclusively to your first choice. If you don’t get accepted, work your way down the list. All the previous caveats apply: make sure your post is well-written, is a good fit with the tone and style of your desired host site, and fills a need that site has for content. Offer something of value.

What Makes a Great Guest Post?

If you write a crappy post, the odds of anyone accepting it are low. But if you write a compelling article about an interesting topic, your odds of getting your guest post accepted increase dramatically. How to write a compelling article is beyond the scope of this post. But if you want a great guest post, the most important thing to keep in mind is making your article a good fit with your desired host site. Fit in with the style, tone, and viewpoint of the site. Pick a topic that’s relevant to that site’s readers. Make sure the article is not a throw-away – you want to submit some of your best writing. Do those things, and your chances of landing a successful guest post will skyrocket.

What To Do With All Your New Readers

When your guest post goes live, and you suddenly find your house flooded with partygoers, what do you do with all of them? Ideally, keep them entertained and keep them coming back for more. The most important question for you to consider: where will the traffic land?

Make sure the link you put in your author bio goes to a page of your choosing. It’s the first thing that all your new readers will see, so make it good. Here’s an example: this post was at the top of my blog when my Problogger guest post went live. It welcomed new readers, and offered suggestions for other parts of the site they might like. Alternatively, you might write a compelling article that you post on your own site, and make that the first thing your new readers see. Or you might send them to an older, but still awesome, post you wrote a while ago. Try different things and see what works. If you do it right, you’ll have yourself a ton of new fans.

About the Author

Michael Alex Wasylik is a Florida lawyer who first started blogging in 1999. He currently writes for the Florida Foreclosure Fraud weblog and his personal site, perpetualbeta.com.