Reader Comment: Guest posting is the blog-gold

Jack Gamble from Babeled sent me the following story about his success with guest blogging at ProBlogger and couple of other blogs. It is a great motivational story for any blogger that is trying to figure out ways to grow his or her blog:

A few months back, I stumbled upon HowToMakeMyBlog.com for the first time. One of the first articles I noticed was a post about how to land guest posts at popular blogs.

The article touched on a few simple steps Marko used to land two guest posts at Problogger.net, the king of the ‘how to’ blogs. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend you check out the article in which Marko describes step by step how he went about guest posting for the popular site.

His article made me realize that guest posting was one key ingredient to marketing my blog that I had been ignoring all this time. I immediately began a campaign of guest posting using Marko’s advice as a template. In the weeks that followed I was amazed at just how effective Marko’s advice was when I was able to land guest posts at several successful blogs.

First steps to the first guest post

My first guest post was at The Art of Manliness. This popular niche blog is the brainchild of Brett McKay and is all about the long lost art of masculinity. Brett publishes a series called “So You Want My Job” which is basically a series of interviews about different ‘manly’ occupations.

In this case, I wrote to Brett directly, and offered to do an interview about my job as a Nuclear Engineer. AOM is a very popular site and I actually felt that there was little chance I would be taken up on the offer but I figured “what the hay, give it a shot.” Needless to say I was delighted to hear back from Brett when he told me how excited he was to do the interview.

Going for the ProBlogger top

After my initial success with Art of Manliness I decided to swing for the fences and I took a shot at Problogger.net. Although I am new to blogging and very inexperienced, I did have something to offer when I wrote about gravatars and how they can add much needed personality to a blog.

Again I followed Marko’s advice and I wrote the post, sent it attached in an email to Darren Rowse, the author of ProBlogger. I began the message by thanking Darren for all the great advice he had given me and humbly offered my contribution to his site. Again I was delighted to hear back from a popular blogger who was interested in publishing my content.

Even more blog posting opportunities

Now I really had some momentum and I began combing the blogosphere for guest posting opportunities. I was searching through blogs on StumbleUpon when I came across a blog called My Supercharged Life.

Although I had nothing to offer this site personally, it did appear to be a good fit for my fellow Babeler, Andrew Blanco. Andrew is co-author at my blog and an aspiring Yoga master, the perfect fit for My Supercharged Life. In this case, I first approached Andrew with the opportunity, which he gladly accepted. Then Andrew wrote an article about his first experience with Yoga and how it changed his life.

Once I had the post, I acted as the middleman and sent a message to the author of MSCL, Jeff Nickles. Again, I was successful in landing a guest spot, this time for my coauthor.

The effect on the blog authority, traffic and RSS subscribers

Shortly after Andrew’s guest post, I decided to check Babeled’s Technorati authority and, wouldn’t you know it, it had doubled! Granted, it had gone from a meager 14 to a slightly less meager 30, but this was still a great improvement for our little blog.

We are yet to see any PageRank improvement because we began our campaign of guest posting shortly after the last PR update, but we expect to move from a PageRank of 3 to at least a 4 next time around.

Another benefit to Marko’s advice was to use the Referrer Detector plugin. In this case, anyone referred to us from the site we guest posted for will see a brief message thanking him or her for the visit with a link to our RSS feed. I am happy to say that since we began this practice, we have enjoyed a slow but steady stream of new subscribers to our site.

The traffic from these three articles was a modest but nice benefit as well. We have seen just over 500 visits from the three guest posts and the multitude of sites that re-posted the articles. Of course traffic should not be your goal when you set out to do a guest post. The real benefits come through increased visibility to your site, which is difficult to measure in the short term.

Guest posting is blog-gold

I was so pleased with the results of our guest posting campaign that I felt obligated to send Marko a message thanking him for the good advice. Wouldn’t you know it, after sending the thank you message, I received yet another guest posting opportunity when he asked me to write this very testimonial.

Clearly the benefits are many when guest posting. Networking, traffic, PageRank, Technorati authority, and subscriber count just to name a few. As far as this Babeler goes, Marko’s advice has proven to be blog-gold and I strongly advise any aspiring blogger to hit up his feed and frequent this site. As you can see, it has already paid off for me.

Image by Catalystrxn