How to get your guest post featured at biggest blogs

I recently got my “Create A Media Kit To Attract Advertisers To Your Blog” article published at Problogger.net, which is arguably the biggest “how to blog” site online. I recommend guest blogging as the best tactic of getting high quality, inbound links for new blogs.

This article will take a look at why it is a good idea to guest blog and will look into how a new blog like mine was able to get a guest spot in the biggest blog in my field.

How can it be a good idea to give some of your content away?

• You get good exposure of your blog to your target audience
• You get quality inbound link from the relevant blog that featured you
• You get good volume of direct traffic
• You get new subscribers to your RSS feed
• You get several inbound links from other bloggers
• You get good amount of comments to your article

How does a small blog get a guest post spot at blog like ProBlogger?

1. Follow what is happening in your targeted community. Subscribe to the blogs in your field, follow what their write about and beware of discussions and trends. Beware of what people comment on these blogs, what is on their mind and what questions they seek answers for.
2. Write a relevant article to something you have read on one of these big blogs. It can be an article that goes in depth and answers some questions from visitors or can be a follow up to something the other blogger has written about.
3. It is important to have something important, useful, valuable, or original to say in your blog article. No one will feature your article if they do not believe that your article creates value to their blog and their blog visitors.
4. Contact the blogger and do your best to “sell” your article and the idea of it being featured as a guest post. Explain why you think your article should be featured and attach the article in the email.
5. This is my initial email to Darren, who runs ProBlogger. Notice how I incorporated one of the recent articles from his blog into my “sales pitch”.

Hi Darren,

I have written an article which can be used as a continuation of the video tip at http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/11/11/how-to-find-advertisers-for-your-blog/.

When reaching out to potential advertisers, it is very useful to prepare kind of a media kit of your own blog, to be able to easier sell your blog to the advertiser. The full article is below.

Let me know if you are interested in having this article in your blog as a guest blogger article. I can easily amend/add to the article if you needed me to incorporate your earlier tip into it.

Best regards,
Marko

http://www.howtomakemyblog.com

Hopefully these 5 steps will be enough to get a response from the blogger. If the response is negative, there is nothing you can do. You tried, you did your best but it was not the best time. In any case, you have nothing to lose by asking, so keep trying with other blogs.

What should I do if my guest article gets accepted?

1. Jump, dance and celebrate.
2. Make sure that your blog features good content to keep the visitors interested enough to browse around, read some of your other articles and subscribe/bookmark your blog.
3. Feature a welcome message to all the new visitors. Darren confirmed me couple of days in advance that my guest post was accepted, so I had time to make some plans. I used the Referrer Detector plugin to welcome the visitors of ProBlogger.net with the following message on top of my blog (note that message was only shown to visitors coming from ProBlogger):

Welcome to ProBlogger readers! If you’ve found my article useful, please subscribe to my RSS feed for updates on similar topics about blogging.

The guest post at ProBlogger resulted in HowToMakeMyBlog getting more than 280 unique and targeted visitors and 60 new RSS subscribers in first 5 days. See all the traffic details in my case study of ProBlogger guest post effect on my traffic.

Image by: Robert Nelson