The Only Way To Do Guest Blogging Right

Guest blogging can be another way to draw attention to your books and programs, and you can include a link in your bio to your website, blog page, or squeeze page.  This is an especially good strategy when you are starting out and getting a small number of visitors,  say less than 100 visitors for your posts.  But if you write for a blogger with many more visitors, say 500 for each blog, you’ve gotten five times as many visitors for the same amount of work, and you have used your bio to introduce new visitors to your site.

 

Guest blogging can be an effective way to start your own blog too, such as Jon Morrow did and PcMate.  He found it much more efficient to write for other bloggers as a “guest lecturer,” inviting readers to his coming soon page with an invitation to join his mailing list.

Then, when he was ready, he sent out a link to his new blog to 13,000 email subscribers to let them know about it.

 

For more information on doing guest blogging, you can find his course, and Publishers, Agents & Films can send a query for you to several hundred book bloggers, which include bloggers open to guest blogs.

 

How to Find Guest Blogging Opportunities

 

 A good way to get a guest blog is to reach out to other bloggers and individuals in your field with large networks to let them know about your helpful information, so they may share it to their readers.

 

One way to find these contacts is by looking for directories and lists of bloggers on the Internet.  For example, Jon Morrow has created The Big Black Book of Rock-Solid Guest Blogging Targets, which includes about 100 blogging sites he has found especially receptive in different categories, including business and entrepreneurship, career, freelancing, marketing, news, culture, and entertainment, parenting, self-improvement, social media, and the editors at the Huffington Post and Fast Company.

 

When you approach bloggers about being a guest blogger, think broadly about their potential audience, since their interests might not just be confined to a blogger’s topic, but to other subjects of interest to their demographic.  For instance, take someone is writing about gardening.  Beyond just pitching his blog to other gardening blogs, he might broaden his pitch to encompass the wider audience for his blog.  In this case, since the majority of gardeners are women with kids, and many are money and health conscious, they are likely to be reading parenting sites or health and self-improvement sites. So he should pitch his guest blog to bloggers with such sites.  Likewise, think of bloggers writing for audiences who might be interested in your subject, too.

 

Becoming a Blogger for the Huffington Post

 

If possible, write a guest blog for the Huffington Post, which has 95 million visitors a month and thousands of writers.  If you can write three blogs for them, you could be invited to be a columnist, so you have a regular link there, such as I have.  The post has to be reviewed by an editor, but as long as it meets their guidelines, it is usually posted within a day or so.  You won’t get paid, but you will gain credibility as an expert on your subject.

 

As a Huffington Post blogger, you can’t write an article that’s directly promotional, but you can include information about yourself in your bio, including a link to your blog, company website, squeeze page, or subscription form.  Your article should provide the reader with useful information on some subject.

 

For example, I have written articles on new trends in science, technology, business and society (which later got turned into a book called Transformations), on avoiding consumer and merchant fraud (which later became a book, Scammed), protecting oneself from Internet book piracy (later turned into a book, The Battle Against Internet Book Piracy), and some self-help topics.

After you write the article, you suggest the category for it.

 

When you write these Huffington Post articles, it’s best to include several links to related topics or to resources you used in researching your article, since this gives your article more credibility and the editors like having these links.  While I originally got connected through a publicist, Jana Collins of Jones & Omalley then got an invitation to become a columnist, and now can post articles myself, Morrison includes a list of editors you can contact directly in his Big Black Book.