The Guest Blogging Trade-Off And How To Guest Blog On Your Own Site

• Tweet
• Sharebar

• Tweet

Guest Blogging – you all know that writing great content and having it published on a more popular site is a great way to build your audience and extend your brand recognition, right?

And although the effectiveness of guest blogging isn’t what it used to be – it’s still an effective strategy.  My mastermind buddy Danny Iny of Firepole Marketing is one of the most prolific guest bloggers out there – last time I checked in with him on this the strategy was still working for him.

If you’re a new blogger you’ll have heard people talking about guest blogging as a great strategy that you should employ.  What you won’t have heard though – I’ve never seen it anywhere – is anyone talking about the trade-offs that you have to make when you guest blog.

The Guest Blogging Trade Offs

So what are these ‘guest blogging trade-offs?’

The first trade-off is time.  One of the activities that most popular blogs do is to have a regular publishing schedule.  So let’s say that you publish twice a week to your blog, then you’re going to have to find additional time in your writing schedule to write an extra post – your guest post.

Most blogs will also expect you to answer a significant proportion of any comments that are posted – and you should do this – and that’s another chunk of time you have to invest in your guest post.

So writing a guest post and answering the comments that go with it will involve an investment of time.

The second trade-off – and this is one I’ve never seen written or spoken about – is a potential loss of control of your writing.  Guest posting at most sites is a relatively informal business – those websites that do have a guest posting policy though almost always insist that the piece of writing submitted is original and unpublished elsewhere AND that you don’t publish it anywhere else subsequently.

Let’s say that the website you guest post for publishes their blog on Kindle – that means your guest post will end up ‘for sale’ on Kindle and you probably won’t see any revenue for that.  Some people will be cool with that – and some people won’t have thought about it.  With the rise of Kindle though I can foresee the day not too far in the future where Guest Posting will involve signing some kind of release form or permission form.  So by ‘guest posting’ you’re effectively ‘selling’ your writing in exchange for having it published in front of a larger audience.

(Paul’s Note – Brankica at Live Your Love wrote a great article on how to publish your blog on Kindle).

Or let’s say you write a great series for a big website in your market area – and then you decide that you want to bundle that together, add some extra content and sell it as an eBook, or give it away to build your audience, or whatever.

What if Mr Big at Mr Big’s Website decides he doesn’t want you to do that?  That great content you spent time creating is no longer yours to control.  Now this scenario is an extreme scenario – to guest post at most sites you normally build a relationship first, and then as part of that ongoing relationship you suggest a guest post.

And if you approached a site where you’d published three or four great articles and asked them if it would be OK to turn those articles into an eBook, most of the blog owners I know would be very cool about that.

But what if they weren’t cool about it?  By allowing another website to publish your article, you’re effectively transferring the copyright to those articles to the other website  – would you be willing to go to court to try and establish you own the copyright to those articles?  (I’m not a lawyer…but I’m guessing that if you guest post in the informal way that most people do  you’d lose that particular fight.)

The third trade-off you have to make when you guest post is that your guest post will be edited and presented in accordance with somebody else’s layout – most guest posts give you a small author box with a link back to your website.

Now you can insert a call to action in that author box – but everything else that surrounds your post is out of your control.   And it’s entirely possible that your Call To Action is diffused by this.

For example let’s say the host’s website has links to 5 more relevant posts immediately following your post and Author bio – it’s entirely possible that casual readers won’t click on the links in your bio box, but will instead go read some other articles by different authors.  And never click on your link and get over to your website.

So although there are positives to guest posting – and it’s a widely advocated strategy – there are negatives too.

But what if you could get the benefits of a guest post – having your content in front of someone else’s audience – without ever leaving the comfort of your (virtual) home?

How To Guest Blog On Your Own Site – A Case Study

Let’s start with a screenshot of traffic here on One Spoon from July 19^th to Aug 19^th:

Now I’m sure you can see an enormous spike.  That spike occurred around August 4^th and 5^th.  And you’re probably wondering what happened on that date for such a spike to occur.

Firstly, I published a post about lessons you could learn from Pat Flynn:

6 Lessons for Bloggers From Smart Passive Income

In the course of prepping that post I’d emailed Pat as a courtesy to ask if he minded me publishing this post.  And then I asked him a couple of questions to clarify two of the points that I wanted to share.

And I sent him a tweet when the post went live so he could check over the post – again this was done out of courtesy.  There were two things that Pat did that caused this spike.

Firstly he retweeted my post.  As he has around 50,000 followers this resulted in some extra traffic.  A couple of days later though I was checking my analytics and found that I’d had nearly 300 visitors via Facebook.

As I don’t have a Facebook presence for One Spoon I thought this was strange and dug into it.  And found that Pat had posted a link on his Facebook wall:

That link was responsible for doubling my traffic for that post!  Plus I got a slew of subscribers as well.  And both of those are known as primary benefits of guest posting.

Pat tweeted too that he thought the concept of the post was good (analyzing lessons for bloggers from successful sites).  And he suggested a couple of sites that could be analyzed – ThinkTraffic and ManVsDebt.

And that gave me the idea that the ‘guest post’ effect could be repeated  – and it’s something I’ve been thinking about, and specifically formulating ideas of how you could do it.

How To Guest Blog On Your Own Site

To make this work for your site you need the following circumstances to align:

• (i) To connect with a bigger blog or website in your market area and write about that blog or website.  (As with guest posting, your content needs to be exceptional.)
• (ii) You need that bigger blog or website to publicize your article.

Now I got lucky with my post – because I never asked Pat to publicize it.  Being honest, I half hoped he would – but the post itself contained some great lessons, so I was happy for my regular audience to see it.

So sending Pat a courtesy email and asking if it was OK to publish the post worked for me in unexpected ways.  Because most people on the old Interwebz are NOT so courteous, it sets you apart.  And it also alerts your ‘target’ blog/website about what you are doing.

Human nature being what it is, if you write a good post that’s complimentary I’d say that most bloggers or website owners will link to it.  (After all, who doesn’t like posts saying nice things about them?)

There’s one big caveat – there’s no guarantee that the blogger or website you write about will link to you.  If your primary goal is to write a great post for your readership, then it doesn’t matter.  If your primary goal is to position yourself in front of someone else’s audience – then it does matter.

Trying to think of ways to overcome this hurdle has delayed this article several days – but I found the answer yesterday over at The Sales Lion!

How To Get The ‘A List’ In Your Market Area To Link To You

Here’s a screen shot of the intro to the post Marcus published at the Sales Lion yesterday:

The paragraph of text I’m interested in is highlighted in red.  This is how you get bigger players in your market area to link to your blog – you interview them!

Again, human nature being what it is, people will want to share those interviews with their own audience.  Interview enough people and you will grow an audience of your own.  A great example of this is Rise to The Top and David Garland.  And if you actually follow the link in Marcus’s posts to Ending the Grind you’ll see that Steve has been interviewing a bunch of great people – and I bet it’s building his traffic.  (In fact, I’m going to ask him for a mini-interview;))

Going the ‘interview’ route isn’t easy though – there’s a lot of competition.  But do it right, and the benefits in terms of traffic and spreading of your brand will be positive.

Summary

Guest Blogging is an effective way to expose your brand to someone else’s audience – but it does have some trade-offs in terms of time and potential loss of control of your content.

You can get similar effects by posting strategically chosen posts on your own blog – either posts about a specific blog or website, or interview posts.

Your Shout

It’s your turn to shout out.  Here’s the question I’m most interested in seeing answers on:

• If you guest post regularly, what kind of results are you getting?
• Do you feel any positive effects of guest posting outweigh the potential negatives?
• For any of you who regularly interview ‘players’ in your market area, can you comment on the traffic spikes of those interviews?

Ok, over to you, and I’ll catch you next week!

Related posts:

1. The War Of Art – 3 Lessons For Blogging Beginners
2. Who Wants a Free Blog Post Critique? (Value $170)
3. F-Bombs, Blogging And Authenticity

Tagged as: guest blog, guest blogging, guest blogging trade offs, guest post, own site