How to be a Guest Blogger Other Bloggers Love

Guest blogging is one of the most popular content marketing tactics  to build your brand online. The benefits of guest blogging are numerous. The backlinks you earn as a guest blogger can help improve your search engine rankings and drive traffic back to your website. Additionally, regular guest blogging can help you to:

• Increase name recognition
• Position yourself as an industry expert
• Boost your credibility
• Connect with a new audience
• Build important relationships for growing your network
• Grow your business

Of course, a big part of guest blogging involves dealing with blog owners. If you’re not good at building and maintaining these relationships, you’ll have trouble getting your guest posts published. So, how can you be a guest blogger that other bloggers love?

Here are a few guidelines you need to try to follow:

• Be polite in your pitch — Sometimes, guest bloggers feel entitled. They think that other bloggers owe them the chance to post on their blog, and that’s just not true. No one owes you anything. So, when you pitch a guest blogger, always be polite as you ask to submit your guest post.
• Deliver your post on time — Many bloggers have a strict publishing schedule. So if you tell them you’re going to deliver a post on a certain date, they’re going to clear their publishing schedule for your post. That means you need to deliver your post on time so that you don’t mess up their posting schedule.
• Help promote your guest post — Blogs need traffic to survive. As a guest blogger, one of your unwritten obligations is to help spread the word about your post and to drive traffic to it. Obviously, the more traffic you’re able to drive to it, the more grateful the blog owner will be and the likelier they’ll be to have you back in the future. Promote your posts across the social networks, to your email list, to your friends, and through any other methods you find.
• Respond to comments — Blogging isn’t just about writing posts. Another part of blogging is dealing with commenters. As a guest blogger, you don’t want to submit your post and disappear. You need to stick around after your post is published to respond to any comments that might get left. This provides you with a great opportunity to start interacting with these new readers so you can build relationships with a new reader base.
• Thank the blogger for the opportunity — Finally, be grateful for every guest blogging opportunity you get. A simple “thank you” can really go a long way to showing the blog owner that you’re appreciative of the opportunity and that you’re the type of guest blogger they’d like to work with again in the future. So, after your post is published, just shoot an email to the blogger with a quick thank you.

Do you use guest blogging as part of your internet marketing efforts? What tips would you add to this post in order to help others be better guest bloggers? Have you read Common Blogging Mistakes: Editorial Guidelines for Bloggers?

Share your thoughts by commenting below.