Take Your Blog to Celebrity Status - 10 Guest Blogging Secrets

Hands down, one of the most effective ways to promote your blog these days is through guest blogging.

In order to make your guest blogging ventures a success, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

Follow the blogs you want to guest post for. Get to know them. What content do they publish? What is their overall tone? What seems to be of interest to their readers? As you follow a particular blog, you can keep an eye out for topics that you can write about to add value to that blog.

Look for and respond to requests for posts. Everyone gets busy at times. If you’re following a blog, you’ll probably hear about when the author might be feeling a bit swamped. By responding to a need and using your guest post to help out the blog’s owner, you’ll find more success in having your content published.

Write well. Send a post that is well written and clearly articulated. Check your spelling and grammar. The goal is to have your guest post need as little editing as possible.

Write for their audience. Write your guest post as if you are speaking directly to that particular blog’s audience. If you’ve been following the blog, you’ll know about previous discussions that you might reference or “inside jokes” you might be able to incorporate into your post. Show both the blog author and his or her followers that you’ve been in tune.

Promote their blog in your post. Find older posts that the blog has published and link to them in your guest post as appropriate. This will give readers a deeper experience as they’ll be able to see more information relating to your topic. It will also help the blog owner with their SEO and link building.

Ask! If you don’t submit your guest post to that blog you’re wanting to write for, you’ll never know if it would have been accepted or not. Remember, the worst that can happen is that you receive a “no” to your submission or you don’t hear anything back at all. You’ll be surprised, though, how many times it seems like there is no way a post will be published – and just that will happen!

Make it easy for your posts to be accepted - Include your post in your email contacting the blog owner about writing for them. Save them a few steps by NOT sending them extra emails that they need to respond to. Include your bio, too – give them everything they need to publish your post. That way, all they need to do is hit the reply button and tell you that yes, they will be using your work!

Consider your formatting - Look at how the blog owner likes to format his or her posts. If possible, make use of post styling, adding headers and such as necessary. Again, this makes publishing your guest post that much easier for the blog owner.

Check their “write for us” page – A lot of blogs are adding such pages these days. Reading the guest posting guidelines of a particular blog can help save you time and also help you write a guest post that has a better chance of being accepted and published.

Look at previous guest posts that were published - What were they about? How were they written? Are there any similarities between previous guest posts that you could use to your advantage in getting your guest post accepted?

Now that you have the guest posting tips you need for success, the only thing left to do is apply them.

Think of one or two blogs in your niche that you would like to be published by and start getting your blog noticed!

QUESTION: What is holding you back from guest posting? When will YOU be ready to submit your guest post to Traffic Generation Cafe?

This post is a stop along Tanya Peterson’s Blog Tour 2010. Tanya is the blogger behind Blogelina, where she writes about blogging your way to success.