Our first guest poster of the week is Alan, of Zero and Up. Appropriately enough, the topic is about getting the most out of guest blogging.
Being a guest blogger at other blogs in a similar niche can have very powerful and positive effects on the traffic and readership of your website. However, if you don’t know how to do it right, you may end up no better off after making your guest appearance. With a little planning and creativity, you can get much more out of that 15 minutes of fame than some people have come to expect.
Casually Reference Your Own Site
If it’s cool with the owner of the blog your post will appear on, try and figure out a way to reference your own site. Be sure and make it subtle though – some people may be turned off if you shamelessly plug your site and ask them to visit.
Write Like It’s Your Own Site
Whether or not you are a well known blogger, be sure and write your guest post with the same flavor and confidence with which you would write a post on your own site. Don’t be worried with the idea that your site is too small – even the big guys started out small. If people truly like the style that you write with, they won’t care how big your site is; they’ll be hooked. Also, if you try and write with a different style when you do guest posts, people may be disappointed when your site doesn’t have the same flair your guest post contained.
Teach Something To The Readers
If people realize that they actually learn something from you, they feel like they are using their time wisely when reading your posts. Try and give a unique outlook on your lesson as well: chances are that someone else has taught it before. It’s not usually the lesson itself that will get you new readers… It’s how you teach the lesson.
Leave Them Wanting More
This aspect is hard to master. You don’t want to give your post any feeling of incompleteness, yet you want to make sure your audience feels like they can learn more from you in the future. Subtly let them know that you have much more to teach them and that you cover similar topics at your site.
Explain Who You Are
It’s always good to either start off or finish out a guest post with a couple sentences about yourself. Make the description short and sweet, and don’t forget to let people know where they can go to read more posts from you!
Some of these steps take practice, but be sure and put yourself out there. If you’re comfortable writing to a new audience, you’ll hopefully be even more comfortable writing to your dedicated readership back at your own website.
Thanks for having me here, and I hope you enjoyed this post!
In case you are wondering, my name is Alan. I’m the author of Zero and Up. I own multiple other sites, and currently earn between $100-300 per month from blogging between the two blogs I own. It just so happens that I love to blog too, so it’s great to be able to earn money doing it.