4 Things You Absolutely, Positively Must Do Before Offering to Write a Guest Blog

Guest blogging on an established, successful blog is a great way to get your name out in front of an audience that already is devoted to your niche.

But before you create your first guest blog, you need to put spend some time with Research and Development (R&D). The more information you can collect before the guest blog creation process begins, the more value your blogs will have for you readers and the easier they will be to produce.

The niche you work with is determined by the type of products you promote. Most Internet marketers have multiple niches. This provides them to flexibility to maintain multiple marketing platforms simultaneously.

Within the niche you choose, there are going to be leading bloggers who are established and have a loyal following of devoted readers.

Host Blogger Criteria

Identify the optimal host bloggers for your guest blogs by searching for blogs with a lot of:

• Subscribers
• Page views
• Niche-relevant comments
• Social approval signals such as Facebook “Likes”, re-Tweets and Google+ +1’s

Look especially for high profile bloggers with reputations as being authorities or experts in their field. Guest posts on these blogs will provide backlinks to your web pages that will cause the Google search engine to rank your pages higher on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for your niche keywords.

Check to see if targeted host bloggers have any guest blogging guidelines that prohibit submissions or apply limitations on the type of content you can include.

Host Blogger Research

If you are satisfied that the blogger can give you access a large pool of high-target prospective customers, the next step is to familiarize yourself with their blog content.

You don’t have to spend a lot of time reading through every blog they’ve ever written. A sampling of their most popular blogs will be adequate to get a feel for their writing style.

Check to see if they archive their blogs according to category and make note of the category keywords they write about most frequently.

Identifying a Content Vacuum

Then try to identify a few topics within your niche that they have not written about before, have not covered fully or where there is an obvious need for more content development. If you are familiar with your niche, these topics will become quite evident.

Topics that have not been fully developed by your target blog host will become the focus for your guest blogs. You can improve your chances of having your guest blog offers accepted if you can offer your target host blog’s readers interesting, high-value content that they can use and that the host blogger has not fully explored.

In many cases, bloggers within your niche have avoided topics because they are not familiar with them or lack the expertise to write about them authoritatively. This can be helpful to you when approaching them with your guest blogging invitation because you can “sell” them on being able to provide content to their readers that they can’t provide themselves.

Developing Great Content Ahead of Time

Research the niche-related topics that you identified as not being previously covered by your host blog target in the same way you would research any other subject.

Use online searchers to learn more about your topic and then organize it in an outline form. Create general topics then fill these in with sub-topics. Create a framework that drives your reader from start to finish, providing informative, niche-centric content they can use throughout your guest blog.

Getting an established blogger to say “yes” to your offer of a guest blog can only enhance your reputation and improve your online business. If you’d like to have access to even more powerful marketing tips, as well as a way to generate conversion-ready Internet marketing prospects each month, click here to learn about my done-for-you system.