A Guest Post About Guest Blogging

This post was guest blogged by Matt Jones, the author of Blogging Fingers

Other than having a whole slew of pillar posts written before doing any promotion, part of my marketing strategy for my blog, was to have a number of posts prepared for guest blogging.

Brian Armstrong from Breaking Free has been using this technique to great success, except many of his guest posts are ‘re-hashes’/improvements of the same posts he submitted to anther blog. While this is an efficient strategy for him, it is not my style.

I like to have a completely different post for each blog I guest post on. This is why:

1. I am targeting specific blogs within the blogging niche for a reason. While the idea is to make as many bloggers aware of Blogging Fingers, many of the blogs I have chosen/asked to guest blog on have an over-lapping readership.

Imagine reading multiple guest posts on popular blogs (perhaps you have read my others), covering a wide variety of topics related blogging. It has a cumulative effect. I admit I often don’t click through to the guest bloggers site, but reading a bloggers posts on several blogs within the space of a week can arose a lot of curiosity. Chirs Garret did this and secured me as a loyal reader.

2. The blog I guest blogged on is more likely to ‘want me back’ if I give them unique content. Even if the post was re-written so it wasn’t at risk from penalisation by Google from duplicate content, a very similar post doesn’t contribute anything new to the blog. Especially if at the very same time similar posts are being posted by me on other blogs. This is very important for future projects and further promotion of Blogging Fingers. I also want to make the owner of the blog feel like I gave them a good deal, not just because I’m that nice… but because you never know when a favour will be needed.

3. I enjoy writing and find it boring to re-write the same thing again and again. Naturally we can’t have it both ways (easy and successful) but nevertheless it’s a point to consider.

Guest blogging problems

It can be a shame to write a post only to post it on another blog. My solution is to write a post that is on a slightly different ‘tack’ to my usual posts and so it hopefully suits the other blog better. The blogs I target are in the same niche but I follow each one individually and each one has it’s own slightly different focus.

Conclusion

Some bloggers think guest blogging is letting down the readership that comes to a blog to read an individual’s opinions. However, Performancing is a group blog and so the issues surrounding guest blogging do not apply.

What are your views about guest blogging?