I’ve mentioned guest blogging in a few previous posts, but I admit I haven’t done much of it myself. For years I have focused on article marketing and it is only in the last year or so that the idea of guest blogging has really dawned on me as a really powerful marketing tool.

It is the interactivity of blogs that gives guest blogging so much potential to build followers and subscribers. This is completely different from article marketing (AM). AM is primarily for link building. And as social networking gradually replaces search engine marketing as the most important way to drive traffic to websites and blogs, many of the old techniques such as link building using article marketing are beginning to look flat and uni-dimensional. Getting links is great, but wouldn’t it be so much better if you also got readers, commenters, followers and subscribers?

This comparison between article marketing and guest blogging is what Ann Smarty looks at in the article “Guest Blogging Versus Article Marketing: What Really Works?” (see link below). As she says,

Do blogs have more people who are likely to follow and promote your brand in the future?

Yes, absolutely. Let’s face it: blogs and article directories do have different types of audience. People follow blogs while they only randomly check article directories (if they do that at all). Blog readers are much more likely to “stick” to you and help to grow your brand by spreading the word, linking, coming back regularly, etc.

This disctinction (between AM and guest blogging) is actually true of blogging itself, not just guest blogging. But the fact is, if you have a poorly trafficked blog you can reach so many more people by publishing in a major blog within your niche than by simply posting on your own blog. In other words, guest blogging is a way of reaching out and promoting your own blogs by building and enhancing your own online profile.

To read more about the comparison between guest blogging and article marketing see Ann Smarty’s article here:Guest Blogging Versus Article Marketing: What Really Works?

In a guest post on ProBlogger.net online blogger and marketer the Blog Tyrant tells how he turned an article rejected as a guest post into a successful list-building ebook. The rejected article became the basis for a free ebook that he gives away on his own site to build his subscriber list.

It turns out that this ebook was considerably more successful than any of the others he had tried – for a while getting between 100 and 200 subscribers a day.

Why did this happen? That’s the important part for bloggers, and the Blog Tyrant tells us why he thinks it worked so well. It was because of an unintended strategy that he had previously put into place without knowing it. The ebook that drew so many subscribers is called Capture 120% More Email Subscribers Overnight, and he realized that he had inadvertently pre-sold many readers through a series of guest blog posts he had done over the previous month or so. As he says,

I went back and looked at all the guest posts I’d written in the past few weeks which were still bringing in traffic. In every single one, I had talked about growing a mailing list, the importance of community, or something to do with that rejected-post-turned-ebook.

In essence, I had built a whole lot of hype around the ebook without even realizing that I was doing it. If I was a marketing firm I would have charged a lot of money for that strategy!

As a result he developed a strategy for replicating this success:

1. Research your ebook topic very thoroughly
2. Create guest posts that target and promote the topic of the ebook
3. Interact with people who comment on guest posts
4. Have a strong call to action in your blog where you give away the ebook

To read the complete post go to How a 30 Minute Reject Post Brings Me Hundreds of Subscribers a Week

Adding Ajax functionality to your WordPress blog can improve its performance, take fewer resources, speed up page loads, and let your users do things that out-of-the-box WordPress will not do.

An article called How to Ajaxify Your WordPress Site by Jeff Star on ProBlogger.net details some of the things Ajax WordPress plugins can do for you. As Jeff says,

Beyond the “coolness” factor, Ajax can also improve the responsiveness and performance of your site. Instead of loading new pages to leave comments, view posts, and share content, Ajax empowers users to interact with your site with greater intimacy and efficiency than ever before. By eliminating page loads, Ajax helps to save valuable server resources and bandwidth, resulting in improved performance for your site. And you can “ajaxify” just about anything: from logins and comments to navigation and updates, Ajax can speed things up, save resources, and make your site better than ever.

The article discusses numerous Ajax plugins for functions like faster logins, slicker commenting, and better navigation.

Resources:
How to Ajaxify Your WordPress Site
Digging Into WordPress

In this guest post on JohnChow.com the author called Lior offers some advice on finding guest bloggers to add content to your blog. As Lior says,

The advantages of additional, long-term bloggers on your site are many, including additional personalities to attract new readers, more content for your site and less pressure on you to produce constantly.

His top suggestions:

• Search your friends
• Look at LinkedIn
• Look at related blogs
• Check your comments

Read more – How to Find Additional Bloggers for Your Blog

I’ve been thinking a bit about blogging and the different ways blogs can be used. We can get really hung up on one specific model – and it might be useful to enumerate the different “models” available to bloggers – and forget that a blog can be used for other purposes you may not have thought of.

In this video Darren Rouse of ProBlogger.net talks of a couple of instances he is aware of where people have created “temporary” blogs. In one case the blogger wanted to use the blog for publishing stuff to impress potential employers.

The idea of the “temporary” blog is pretty interesting, and potentially very useful. However, I suspect that it would not achieve its objective if it wasn’t approached in the same way a person should approach any business blog:

- Plan objectives
- Create good content to achieve those objectives
- Promote, promote, promote

If you are an online entrepreneur or any kind of entrepreneur for that matter (offline, bricks and mortar, professional, whatever) you may have wondered if you should start a blog.

I’m not going to enumerate the pros and cons of blogging. Instead I want to suggest what an effective business-oriented blog is, and the attitude you should have when you consider creating one. This may help you decide if you should put in the effort to create a business blog.

Business Blogging is Marketing

For our purposes here I am using the term “business” in a fairly broad sense. As I see it when you start engaging in activities for some organized or focused ulterior motive you are engaging in a “business”.

If you have a shoe store, for example, you generally are not selling shoes because you enjoy it. Selling shoes is not like going to the gym, reading a good book, or watching a baseball game on TV. Selling shoes has a point – to make money, earn a living, or whatever else you want to call it.

So first, not to sound too dogmatic about this, people in business have blogs for some marketing objective – they have a “focused ulterior motive” – to “sell” a message.

That doesn’t mean your business blog has to continually hawk products or talk about special deals for your services. But it does mean that it should reflect your business objectives and offer relevant information to your primary target market – your customers and prospective customers.

Sometimes the “marketing” objective of a blog is not very obvious. To take a fairly extreme example, let’s say you are a writer or a “commentator” type – you know, the kind of person who likes to express opinions, “rant”, or just hear him or herself talk.

In that case having a blog gives you a platform for getting out your message and enhancing your professional persona. It doesn’t have to be your only soapbox – you may also want to post videos on Youtube or start a radio program on BlogTalkRadio. But a blog can be the focal point of your empire – the thing that ties it all together and helps you establish a consistent presence.

In other words, business blogging is about marketing. Which means you should figure out your business objectives before starting a business blog. And then fit your blog into those objectives.

Business Blogging is about Publishing

Second, business bloggers should view themselves as publishers. The distinctive thing about “publishing” as opposed to just writing stuff, is that it is done in an organized and focused way with the intention of appealing to specific readers.

Unlike a diary, or even a traditional blog (which is sort of like a diary) you are not primarily writing for yourself in a business blog. A diary is specifically meant not to be read by others. A business blog is the opposite. A primary objective is to give as many readers as possible something interesting to read, watch or listen to.

There is a parallel here with book publishing. Traditional publishers will only publish a book if they think it has a chance of recouping costs and (hopefully) making a profit. When you submit a written work to a traditional publisher you are subjecting your work to the evaluation of a somewhat detached third party. Their primary concern is not to spread your message, but rather to sell your book in order to stay in business.

On the other hand, when you self-publish you pay the costs up front and are not willing to accept some third party’s opinion of the marketability of your writing. This is often called the vanity press because people who self-publish are prepared to pay to have works printed that have no hope of making a traditional publisher any money.

Blogs have been compared to the vanity press because they are self-published, have virtually no cost of entry, and often have no chance of getting a lot of readers.

But business blogs – at least as I have described them here – are more akin to traditional publishing. You should not waste your time and effort on a business blog if it has no chance of giving you some kind of return.

In other words, as a publisher you should be prepared to do what it takes to make your business blog a worthwhile investment. First, that means evaluating your target market and coming up with a game plan. Second, it means creating content that has a chance of getting readers. And third it means promoting your blog because you recognize that without readers you are basically wasting your time and the resources of your business.

In a recent blog post successful internet marketer and blogger John Chow revealed one of the most important money making secrets about blogging in the “make money online” niche. His advice:

Don’t blog about making money online if you’ve never made money online.

He admits he and other successful bloggers like Shoemoney and ProBlogger may be part of the problem, since they focus on “how to make money by blogging”.

But what most get-rich-quick types don’t understand is that successful bloggers already have a serious leg up on newbies who start from scratch. They already know how to make money online, and they probably already know how to run a business. As he says:

If you look at all the big make money online bloggers, you’ll discovered that they were all making money online before they started their make money online blogs. Shoemoney was a search engine marketer making over $100K a month off Google. Darren Rowse makes far more from his Digital Photography School blog than he does from his blog.

Judging from the number of “make money online blogs” out there, this is not as obvious as it should be. Consider this golf instruction analogy: What are the chances of a “learn to play golf” website being successful if the person starting it doesn’t know how to play golf? Not very good.

Of course, it might be possible to teach golf fundamentals from a book, at least to complete golf newbies. But nobody who is serious about golf is going to pay someone to teach them about the game if the would-be teacher has not demonstrated that they actually know how to play it.

Why would we think making money online is any different?

I recently posted about guest blogging, explaining the obvious fact that it is a great way to get exposure for your own ideas, profile and blog. Here’s another good resource if you’re interested in this very powerful technique.

It’s a post by, you guessed it, a guest blogger, Onibalusi Bamidele on JohnChow.com and it’s called 5 Ways to Make Sure Your Guest Post Gets Published. Onibalusi Bamidele claims to have written more than 260 guest posts in the last year, so he should know what he’s talking about. His tips boil down to the following points:

1. Read the guidelines. This is especially the case with A-list blogs (the ones with a lot of traffic.)

2. Read previous guest posts to see what kind of thing gets accepted.

3. Write a good headline – even if your article isn’t that great the blogger may like the headline and either publish the post or ask you to rewrite it.

4. Give your best stuff in guest posts. Don’t expect they will publish just anything.

5. Go ahead and submit. You’re not going to get it published if you don’t submit it. The worst that can happen is that your post will be rejected. You can always submit it to someone else.

Following these suggestions is not going to mean your posts will be automatically accepted. It is very much like trying to get your newest novel accepted by a publisher. If your writing is not very good, or if your ideas are mediocre it doesn’t matter how well you follow the guidelines.

Many webmasters and bloggers think of “link building” as a difficult, boring, mechanical task where the objective is to pile up mysterious things called “links” for the sake of influencing the Search Engines.

This is an old-fashioned, outdated and increasingly ineffective way to tackle the job of putting yourself on the map. In the rapidly evolving world of social media it’s all about getting noticed by real people. And the best way to do that is by being strategic and creative in what you publish.

Link Baiting Revisited

One common practice, much discussed four or five years ago, is “link baiting”. The idea behind link baiting is to publish something so unique, compelling, funny, interesting, entertaining or valuable that others will simply link to it to tell their own readers about it.

Now in case you think this technique is outdated, consider how Youtube videos go “viral” (another concept that is starting to sound old-fashioned). Somebody publishes an outrageous, funny, disgusting, cute or whatever video and the chain reaction begins. Person A tells person B who tells person C and on it goes until a million or so people have watched it.

The same thing happens with blog posts (although usually in a less dramatic way). The trick is to say something interesting, original, or controversial and then tell people about it to get the buzz going. The buzz is helped along by people linking to you.

This article from way back in 2006 describes 5 different types of “hooks” used in writing articles and posts intended to get a buzz. The hooks are News, Contrary, Attack, Resource and Humor. See the article for more detail on each of these.

Strategy: Target influential sites or hot topics

The fastest and most effective way to make a significant splash is to focus on influential websites or blogs within your niche. Find a post or video about some hot topic that is getting a lot of exposure and feedback. Then use that atention – that buzz – to bring attention to your views.

Remember, your objective should not just be to “get a link” from these sites. It is more important to get their attention – make yourself visible – Expose Yourself!, by contributing to the conversation in a significant way. That way you may turn other bloggers into allies in your quest for online success.

Blog Commenting – also revisited

The most obvious and easiest thing you can do is add comments to widely read blog posts. Unless you want to become known as the local attack dog you should try to come across as positive and supportive. But don’t just agree with everything they say. Try to add something new and interesting to the conversation.

Unfortunately most well-read blog posts have many comments and yours will just be one among all the others. So you want to do what you can to stand out from the crowd. One effective way is just to write a longer comment than everyone else. This makes it look like you have something substantial to say about the topic, and it also looks like you have put some real thought into what you have said. Of course it helps to actually have something interesting to say.

Taking blog commentary to the next level

If you find an article or post that really warrants it, go ahead and write a review or commentary and publish it in your own blog. This works especially well for current “hot” topics – or blog posts that are getting a lot of attention.

Make sure you let the original author know about your review. Either send them an email directly, or mention your review in a comment on the original. That way you are exposing your own stuff to readers of the original.

The objective is to “piggy-back” on the success or popularity of the original. At the same time you can bring yourself to the attention of the original author, and gain an ally who can help you become more widely known in your chosen niche.

Other Resources:

Link Baiting & Effective Link Building

I stumbled onto a post by Diane Corriette in her blog Mindset of a Blogger about Amplify – Traffic Generation tip using the new Amplify plugin for WordPress blogs.

At Amplify you can set up your own blog where you post things that you clip from other sources around the web – blog posts, videos, news stories, etc. Your post normally includes a comment or two of yours. This gives you a chance to share opinions and ideas with other members.

The important action at Amplify (as it is at most social networking sites) is sharing with other members. You are encouraged to follow others, and hopefully some of them will follow you in return. You then comment on their entries and they comment on yours.

Who is Amplify for?

I suspect Amplify is best suited for bloggers, technophiles and people who want to express opinions on specific areas of interest. It has taken features from Facebook, Twitter, and Clipmarks but is more focused on somewhat more intensive conversation. At least that is my initial take on it. That’s on the conversation or “social” side.

But on the publishing side it looks like it would work very well for would-be bloggers who have a difficult time coming up with content (like the rest of us). You can create an entire blog focused on a specific theme – even a “local” theme if you’re a local entrepreneur – and just clip news stories about your theme.

Here is my Amplify blog – Rick Hendershot’s Amplify blog to give you an idea of the kind of content I’m posting.

Referring again to Diane Corriette’s blog post, it contains a couple of videos describing how Amplify works. Here’s one of them: