One of the fastest ways to gain exposure for yourself and your online business is by leveraging the Audience of other people.  You can do this by offering them great content that will be of value to their audience (providing its relevant to yours).  This is called Guest Posting.  They can use your content in many ways such as emailing it to their mailing list, mentioning your on their social media accounts and including the post on their own blog.

This is a huge opportunity for you as you could get a lot of organic traffic back to your own website, plus attract new readers to your own blog.  So let’s talk about guest posting and how you can use it to help grow your online business.

How to find blogs to guest post on?

The first thing you’re going to need to do is to find blogs that are in your niche and already allow guest posters to Write for them.

The best way to find these blogs is to google one of the following keywords below

• “submission guidelines”
• “guest post guidelines”
• “accepting guest posts”
• “contribute an article”
• “submit content”
• “guest post”
• “want to write”
• “write for us”
• “add a post”
• “become a contributor”
• “guest post by”
• “submit your post”

What should you write about?

Once you have found a blog that matches your niche and has an audience that is relevant to your own, take a few minutes to look through their current posts.  What are their most popular topics?  Which topics get the most response from their readers?  Are there any topics that they aren’t covering but are relevant to your own audience?

Take some time to go through these blogs and put together a list of post ideas that you could write about.  If you’re not sure what to write about, then email the blog owner and ask them if there’s a specific topic they would love to see included on their blog.

Remember, the more you interact with the blogger that you’d like to guest post for, the more likely (as long as you’re not an arse) they will want to include your post on their blog (providing that it is well written and fits in with their niche).

So don’t approach bloggers with an ‘ME ME ME’ attitude.  Ask them how YOU can help THEM, you will have much better success and a much higher chance of getting your blog post on their website.

Maximise the value of your Guest Posts

Link back to your stuff:  It’s silly to write a blog post without sending people somewhere to learn more about you.  Always have a direct response element to your guest blog posts, so that you can direct the visitors to your own blog.  The best way to do this is to link back to other relevant blog posts inside your guest post.

Write well:  The easiest way to NOT get your guest post accepted is to submit a poorly written article.  Make Sure that you have correct grammar, spell check everything, and really spend some time making sure everything things sounds good and makes sense.

Write with Personality;  Be your self, try and include your personality into your writing.  Don’t be afraid of letting your personality show through your writing.  This will help you and your guest post stand out from the rest.

Respond to reader comments: If your post gets a lot of comments and questions, make sure that you respond to them!  Interacting with your readers helps build rapport between you and them, but the blog owner will also appreciate this as it goes beyond just writing the post.  If you provide the owner and audience of the blog with a better experience the more likely they’ll ask you to write for them again.

Write a badass headline:  Spend a good amount of time coming up with an awesome headline for your blog post.  Seriously headlines will do most of the dirty work when it comes to how many people end up reading your post.  For some inspiration look at publications with a large readership like Mens health, Huffington Post, Wired Magazine, Smashing Magazine.

Be Persistent:  No matter how many setbacks you get never give up.  If your guest post doesn’t get accepted on a certain blog, just keep writing good content.  Keep submitting new stuff (not spamming the owner) and your persistence will pay off eventually.

Get started today

I have been guest posting for Entrepreneurs blog for about a year now and it has helped me find an audience in which I can share advice to help them grow their own online business.

If you too are an online entrepreneur or an online business expert looking to grow your own audience, then why not submit your own guest post to Entrepreneurs blog.  You never know, you could be reading your own article on this very blog your self.

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