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

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.

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.

If you’re a blogger or blogger wannabe there’s a informative post by Ann Smarty about guest blogging at SearchEngineJournal.com that you should take a look at.

Guest blogging is a win-win situation. It provides already established bloggers with new, original (presumably well written) content. And it gives the guest blogger a platform to reach a lot of people he or she otherwise would probably not reach.

In another blog post from July 2010 Jeremy Bencken offers some suggestions for developing an effective guest blogging strategy. He suggests you should ask yourself three questions when getting involved in guest blogging:

1. What audience do you want to reach?
2. What’s your goal?
3. Is your content truly great?

The most important point is that guest blogging should be aimed not at building links but at building your profile and establishing your own blog as an authority. That means, first and foremost, writing good content that your target market will be interested in. Then find the blogs that help you target those people most effectively.

guest blogging, writing, link building, branding, blogs, blog strategy

If you blog, write articles or are into any of the other activities that involve writing original material you’ve probably thought it is a shame to use that material in only one place.

Just republishing exactly the same material in a number of places is generally considered bad form. There are exceptions to this of course, but we generally assume that creating, say, a Squidoo lense or Hub Page from a previously published blog post will not get the same impact as if those pages consisted of new material.

The solution is to “repurpose” your content. This involves cutting it up, rewriting it, spinning it, and so on so you can use it in a variety of places without having to publish “duplicate content” all over the place.

Here are 5 “repurposing” techniques that I find useful. Some of them are obvious. Others not so much.

1. Cut up long articles into smaller chunks

Say you’ve just written an 800 word masterpiece. Before you go ahead and publish it as an article or post it to your blog why not chop it up into 3 or 4 chunks. That way you can turn one article into 3 or 4 posts. Then apply some of the other repurposing techniques to each of the chunks and publish them elsewhere.

2. Cut up already published articles

Even if you’ve already published an original article you can still chop up the original, modify each section to make it fresh and original. Then use individual chunks or combinations of chunks for blog posts, Squidoo, and so on.

3. Give already published articles a new twist

You probably have articles, reports and blog posts you published two, three or more years ago. Pull out a good one – where the information is not out of date – and think of a new twist you can give it. Rewrite it to match the new twist, with a new title of course. Then apply some of the other repurposing techniques listed here: chop it up into individual chunks, modify each of them and republish the chunks in one of your blogs.

4. Recombine material from two or three articles

Say you have a number of articles about a similar topic. For example, I’m sure we have numerous articles about “Why You Should Use a Personal Injury Lawyer” (legal) or “Getting Your House Ready to Sell” (real estate) or “Curing Your Slice” (golf). You can take parts from different articles (with the same general theme), put them together to create a new article and then make modifications to the new version so it makes sense and is original.

In fact you can probably make two or three new articles this way – especially if you use the spin technique mentioned below. Generally you should not just copy and paste sentences or paragraphs without modifying them, but even if you don’t make substantial modifications the end result will usually be acceptable.

5. “Spin” your material

If you are familiar with “spinning” you probably have mixed feelings about this technique. Spinning involves entering a number of synonyms for words, phrases and sentences within the text and then letting a spinning program create different “unique” versions by randomly combining alternative wordings.

There are automatic spin engines that create the synonyms and alternative wordings for you. These usually create unintelligible gobbledegook. I’m not talking about (and certainly not recommending) this type of spinning. Rather, I’m referring to the systems that require you to write correct alternative wordings which result in a variety of perfectly acceptable and well-written versions of the original.

This technique is most often used by people writing articles and submitting them to a large number of article sites. They are trying to avoid what people (erroneosly) call the “Google duplicate content penalty”. The idea is to have each “spun” version of the article appear as a unique original version.

Regardless of what you think of this tactic, spinning can be useful for repurposing content – especially when it is combined with some of the other techniques mentioned here. With a good spin engine you can even randomly combine different paragraphs.

Say, for example, you want to use technique 4 mentioned above (“recombine material from two or three articles”). You can enter paragraph variations pulled directly from the different articles into your spin engine. Then you can add variables and alternative wordings to each of the paragraphs. Then every time you need a new version of the article you can have the spin engine spit one out for you.

The eternal question for web marketers is How do you get people to come to your website? It doesn’t matter if you are selling a product like cell phones, a service like landscaping, your own info-products like ebooks or DVDs, or your own original music. It doesn’t matter. To be successful online you have to get people to come to your website. You have to get traffic.

One powerful way is to build your web presence by spreading information about your products or services around the web. You have to reach people where they are. If people in your target audience are not at your website (yet), you have to go where they are and try to draw them in.

We’re not talking about advertising here – although advertising is important and certainly works.

We’re talking about offering free information that people are interested in reading or listening to or viewing. This is what we call compelling content – stuff that people are interested in and that addresses needs or desires or interests that your target audience have.

But creating this kind of content has HUGE problems!

1. Many of us do not have the time or talent to produce compelling content.

2. Hiring other people to write articles or produce interesting, informative audio presentations or videos for you may be too expensive.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a simple solution to this problem.

Well, believe it or not, there is a simple solution and it is staring you in the face.

You can use other people’s (free) content to draw your prospects to your websites.

Using other people’s content

We’re not talking about stealing content and putting your own name on it. No, we’re talking about aggregating other people’s content and associating yourself with it – exactly the way Google does.

In case you haven’t noticed, Google doesn’t produce any significant content themselves. They take the stuff you and I produce and aggregate it in their search results pages. Then they run ads on these results pages and make billions of dollars.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could do something similar? Well, you can. You can aggregate content focused on your own niche to create a valuable resource that people interested in your niche will visit.

Sources for this kind of content are almost limitless. Here are just two of them:

- Articles from sources like Ezinearticles.com, focused on your keywords

- Videos from sources like Youtube.com, focused on your keywords

The trick is to select content (articles, videos, blog posts) that are focused on your target keywords. Make sure to punch up the titles and introductory remarks so they contain the keywords you want to focus on. Then build links to your aggregating site to improve its performance with the search engines.

Claiming Pre-Written Content as Your Own

Another common source of pre-written content is what are called Private Label Rights articles, or PLR. These are available from various sources on the web, usually at dirt cheap prices.

Unfortunately the quality of PLR articles is usually pretty bad. They are often old, rehashed and repackaged, and have probably been published many times on other sites. Unless you intend to edit them extensively PLR articles are pretty much useless.

Other sources such as BlogEasy offer regular installments of pre-written content for specific niches. The initial niche being focused on by

I have been working for years on different systems to make blogging easier and more effective. BlogEasy is the easiest and best system I have seen for accomplishing this goal. We wrote this program from the ground up, and are now beta testing it.

If you are a Real Estate agent, blogging on a regular and consistent basis is one important way to keep yourself in front of your customers and prospects. But coming up with original, interesting and relevant content for your blog is difficult and time-consuming.

BlogEasy solves the content problem

Subscribing to BlogEasy gives you access to regular, original and unique content that you can post in your blog.

Yes, that’s right. BlogEasy gives you actual articles, reports, summaries and even videos that you can publish in your own blog on a regular basis.

Content problem solved!

How do we do it?

It’s pretty simple actually. Our staff do the research and writing for you. Every month we create a number of new articles on a variety of relevant Real Estate topics and then we make those articles available to our members for republishing. Something like a “newswire service”.

Articles are available on topics such as:

• Real Estate Advice
• Real Estate News
• Green Tips for Homeowners
• Renovation Tips
• Real Estate Trends

These are not just any old articles. They are professionally written and edited by our staff. They are informative, focused on real estate topics and optimized for the major search engines.

See sample blog posts that have been created by BlogEasy.

Wait…There’s More…
BlogEasy Makes Your Articles Unique

Each article is also specially programmed so each published version of each article is a unique version. How do we do that?

First, we build in what are commonly known as spin variables – different versions of words, phrases and sentences. The program randomly chooses a unique combination of these variations each time it generates a new version of the article.

Second, we include what we call location variables. We make sure your location is mentioned in the article a number of times. For example, if an article is about “Home renovations”, and you are in Seattle we include keyword phrases such as…

Seattle home renovations
Home renovations in Seattle
Seattle homeowners

You can use this feature to target any location you want. You can even enter as many as three different versions of the same location name – for example…

Toronto home renovations
Home renovations in the GTA
Greater Toronto homeowners

This is a completely unique feature of the BlogEasy system. The combination of these two programming techniques makes sure that every article you publish is both unique and localized.

And that’s not all…
Remote publishing using BlogEasy

BlogEasy not only provides you with great original content, but it can publish that content directly to your blog without you actually having to go to the blog. In fact, if you have more than one blog, BlogEasy can publish a unique version of each article to each of your blogs. All without you having to go to each blog, log in, and post the content.

Did you catch the significance of that last point? BlogEasy lets you post unique, original, localized articles to as many as five blogs…all from one control panel.

BlogEasy makes it incredibly easy to finally get serious about maintaining a top notch real estate blog optimized for your local business.