Why Writing Guest Posts Is Good For Beginners Thursday, November 6th Daily News, Money Making

I had a revelation recently about guest posting on other blogs, and am very thankful for it – so I thought I would share the experience with you.

When starting out in the blogging world, you might not know what to expect – some may own blogs for fun, others to educate, and a few(!!) to make money. Yet whatever the reason, the blogger always wants readers to come and read their posts, join their feed, and hopefully be entertained / learn something valuable. Yet how do you know what your writing is actually of any worth to these people? Why would they come to your site over others? More importantly, how are you going to know without any actual visitors?

Guest posting allows you to extend your ‘reach’ onto another persons blog - by writing up a post and sharing it with the readers of that blog. The benefits of guest posting have been outlined many times, in that they can provide you with a new source of readers, and possibly more guest post requests. The larger the blog you guest post on, the larger the possible surge of traffic.

Yet in order to be allowed to post on anothers blog, what you write must be worthy of their standards. You can’t write up a simple ‘i make teh monies lolz’ post and expect it to be placed on some of the high standard blogs that are out there. At the same time you can’t write up an intricate piece on a blackhat technique and try and get it posted on a whitehat blog – just ain’t ganna happen. You need to know a bit about the blogger themselves, and what they like to post about, only then can you make your first attempt to provide them with a post – and this is the advantage for new time bloggers.

You see, when you post on your blog, a few people may read it – a few may even comment on or about it – but you won’t get yourself essentially ‘a review’. By submitting your ‘work’ to another human being to show on their own blog, they will have to judge if it is worthy enough to be submitted. This allows you to get a real review of your writing capabilities, and possibly some helpful hints into how to improve your work in the future. If your post isn’t written well, they’ll tell you; if the subject isnt covered enough, you’ll know – and it will be much more useful than just the ‘post and see’ attitude. A persons’ blog is very personal to them, and therefore you will be able to get a real opinion.

A possible arguement to counter-act this view could be that you could simply ask your commentators to tell you what they think, yet if you look at various other blogs you can see what most comments boil down to. People can happily say ‘Good post man, I really enjoyed it’ because its not on their blog, and they have nothing to essentially gain from it – whereas in creating a guest post you are creating a piece of work that should benefit both you and the blog you are posting to.

Another argument could be that the blog you apply to guest post to might have low standards, yet simple matter to sort out, as you only apply and send your guest posts to ‘worthy’ blogs, bloggers whose opinion you value in this big ‘ol wide world. If you have what you think is a ‘quality’ post, try sending it out to a couple of the big timers out there and see what they say about it!

Now its possible that you could get a response back criticising your work to pieces, and saying that it is awful (its unlikely, but it might happen). Don’t respond out of anger, but rather ask what was wrong with the post (if they haven’t stated) and maybe try to make some improvements. Maybe they will highlight on some real issues and it will help you to learn this, or rather maybe they will say that the post is ‘unsuitable’, in which case you can thank them and approach another blog. If the latter is the case, you can even ask what posts they might be looking for, as if they can give you a post that they want, its more likely to be accepted!

Now I’m not going to get into how you should go about sending your guest posts out and convincing people to show them, as Adam over at Creadiv has already done that for you, so you can check out his rules of guest posting and increase your game to the higher levels!

In summation, I believe that your blog can, and will, grow from writing guest posts – not just in the terms of readers, but in the quality of what you write. Having someone giving you advice and help for ‘free’ is something that should never be frowned upon.

Dan