How to Write Guest Blog Posts Like You Own the Joint

Anyone who’s uttered the phrase, “My dream is to make money with my blog,” clearly doesn’t realize just how hard it is. For one, it can take years to build up a big enough following to garner livable income. For two, if a blog is ever going to be that popular, it takes hours of dedication every single week.

In order to drive up views, blog owners often ask for guest bloggers to contribute. This multiplies the number of people who are visiting a blog. Blog owners who know what they’re doing have high standards, though, and any ol’ post isn’t going to cut it. If you want to get in good with a blog owner, you have to treat the guest post you write as if it were for your own livelihood.

Thoughtful Headlines

There’s nothing more annoying to a blog owner than an amazing blog post that comes with a crummy title. Put some time and thought into creating the headline for your post. If you don’t, the blog owner is either going to publish the boring title, which won’t help either of you get more views, or he’s going to create a title that may not reflect exactly what your post is going for.

Building Backlinks

With the permission of the blog owner, throw one or two backlinks into your guest post. “But this is going to direct readers off of the blog and onto another website!!!” No, it won’t. First, you can link to another site so that it opens up a second browser page, which will keep the current website in tact.

Second, blogs get popular thanks to a tight-knit blogging community. Linking to other blogs is only going to build the original blog’s reputation, not shift focus.

Stick to Deadlines

Blog owners should know better than to rely on the flaky writing community to turn something in on time. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t make like an adult and submit a blog post when you say you will, though. Stand out from the crowd by actually turning in a post on deadline. A novel idea is to truly be one of a kind by sending it in a day or two before deadline.

Just don’t procrastinate your blog post about awesome winter sports so much that you turn it in at the end of August. Plus, if the blog owner is relying on your post for a certain day and they don’t have anything else on the back burner, they could end up losing visitors who are used to daily posts.

Ask for Feedback

Every blog post has a section for readers’ comments at the end. “Submit a Comment!” isn’t enough to get readers to actually weigh in, though. You have to give them something to say. You can do this by writing on a controversial topic, leaving your post open-ended so that readers want to give their final thoughts or flat-out ask for everyone’s opinion.

End each blog post with some type of call-to-action. This also plays into the idea that the best way to market anything is to interact with the public, not just talk at them. After you’ve submitted your blog post, check on it every few days. If people have commented, comment back to keep the conversation going.

Write Fresh Content

It’s amazing that “professional” writers still have to be reminded of this, but it’s illegal to plagiarize. It’s not just called “illegal” when you’re in college as a ploy to get you to write your own thoughts. It’s actually, technically illegal, by law, everywhere. That doesn’t mean you can’t research your topic and find ideas and inspiration from other sources, though.

To avoid accidentally plagiarizing a source, you should read over what other people are saying, walk away from your computer and then come back five minutes later to write about what you just read.

Chances are you’re not going to remember what you read verbatim, which means you’ll be writing your own, fresh content.