Guest blogging – the audience you’ve been looking for.

Guest blogging is two-fold. One, you write something and it’s posted on someone else’s page. Two, someone else writes something and it’s posted on your page. Seems simple and by all accounts a win-win situation for both parties who get to expose themselves (metaphorically) to a whole new audience, ready to absorb their words and then come visit the holy land that is your site, and on the flip side you get content to further your mission to take over the world or become some kind of messiah one follower at a time.

Your main aim here is to widen your audience and draw traffic to your site, thus getting you one step closer to total world domination.

There are all sorts of ways to build up relationships and kick start your guest blogging odyssey.

A good place to start is my guest blog, a site just for such purposes and an ideal way to also research who and what would be a good fit for you. This will help you effectively weed out the chaff and go straight for that sweet sweet candy.

Then there’s the About.com Blogging Directory of Blogs That Accept and Publish Guest Posts (quite a mouthful), where you’ll find blogs who except guest writers will post ads, and you can do the same. However, before you go advertising your contact details on an open forum, consider that not everybody is as conscientious and passionate about what they do as you are; there be trolls in these woods.

Like so many other ventures onto the interweb, the best course of action is to contact the people out there who you like to read, the people who have similar content and quality, and most of the all the ones who you think will write to you as an equal, not as a blog bug to be ridiculed and then crushed under foot – you deserve better, so do your research. Make sure you’ll be getting into an even relationship not an ‘I’ll scratch your back you steal my wallet’ arrangement.

Now a self-preserving warning or maybe a selfish one – you decide. Something to consider in the information void is content is queen (or king). Seriously think about whether you want the gold that is good content to end up on someone else’s page – drawing traffic to them like a moth to a flame – yes, you will get backlinks but they’ll get more.

Now most people don’t care about the above because basically you need to gain an audience and established blogs will give you that start and exposure; so how do you do it?

Here’s my 5 point guide to approaching the blog behemoths.

1. Research the blogs you approach – know their content and appeal to it.
2. Provide your page stats – they need to know your content is a winner as well.
3. Provide links to what you’ve done before.
4. Give them your best stuff (I know I’ve contradicted my own advice but if you’re going to do this than don’t go half assed).
5. Promote, promote and finally promote. Never stop promoting. Do this and people will come to you (then you can ignore them – oh the power!)

So there you have it, a comprehensive 578 word guide to guest blogging. Follow my advice and you’ll be wearing a white dressing gown, arms out stretched, shepherding your followers to blog nirvana in no time.