You may have heard about guest blogging:

It’s where you write some (good) content and another website owner allows you to put that content on their website, probably with a link back to your site somewhere in the article.

Which when taken at face value doesn’t sound like much a good deal. After all, why would you want to help build up someone else’s site rather than your own?

The answer to that is actually made up of several parts:

• You get a link back to your website from a completely unrelated site. This is the kind of “natural” link that Google likes and gives good credit for.
• You get traffic directly from the other site – they likely have a loyal band of readers and also get regularly crawled and indexed by the search engines.
• You are either tacitly or explicitly acknowledged as an expert. After all, you wouldn’t be invited to write a guest post if you were just a nobody would you?

When you look at those points, the idea of writing a guest post on someone else’s site becomes more attractive.

The trick is finding places which will have a good chance of accepting your post without spending forever searching.

The best way is to do a search – search for a popular keyword in your niche and add “guest post” or some similar wording to the search. Then explore the sites that come up.

The next best way is to use one of the handful of sites that exist to glue together guest posters and blogs to host these posts.

These include sites like http://myblogguest.com, http://www.guestblogit.com and http://www.bloggerlinkup.com

They each have their own way of doing things and there are bound to be other sites out there that I haven’t found, so feel free to explore further if you don’t like the style of the ones I’ve mentioned.

The lower tier of guest blogging is to use sites like Fiverr.com

Some of the sites there will even write the article for you but most expect you to produce an article for them. The snag with Fiverr is that you’ll rarely know the domain name before the job is completed and, depending on the person offering the post, maybe not even the nature of the site. Some of them are specialist, others will take near enough any post so you could find yourself rubbing virtual shoulders with things like electronic cigarettes. Not necessarily the kind of company you want to keep!

So long as you are prepared to do a bit of research, guest posting on other people’s blogs can be a good way to build up your backlink profile and your credibility as an expert in your field. It’s definitely worth a look.

If you’d like more help with guest blogging or any other aspect of your internet marketing, contact me!