Those that know me personally know that for better or for worse, my mind is incredibly mathematic and scientific; I approach my professional and personal life with a careful, calculating mindset. At the start of the New Year, like many others, I made some resolutions of both the personal and private nature. Like most things in my life, I test, take samples, and of course, analyze all of my resolutions. Today, I am pleased to announce that the first sample test for a professional resolution has recently finished, and I would love to share the results with all of you.

I am in Inbound Marketer, an abuser of the term SEO, and a passionate contact creator. Whilst I am in the camp of “any SEO that says X variable is KING for SERP success” is full of it, I do believe in honest engagement and superior content. However, I had been plateauing in my guest posting efforts near the end of 2011, and I decided that instead of approaching blogging with an analytical mindset; (Domain Authority, Keyword Density, Professional Voice) I would attempt to “humanize” my writing by being accessible at all times, writing in a more casual or even passive voice, and getting inspiration from my esteemed peers.

Being Human Part 1 – Be Accessible

I am not going to be talking about how to leverage twitter for sources, or what sites to go to for connecting with blog owners; there are a ton of tutorials out there waiting for your eyes if you need that information. I would like to simply encourage you to be more accessible to your peers, clients, and audience.

I started learning of the benefits of being accessible after my first contact with Gerald Weber at SEM-Group. I wanted to sponsor his 2nd Annual Bad-Ass SEO Contest, and I tried contacting him through Twitter, which was the only medium by which we were connected. What resulted from a few back and forth tweets was an exchange of Skype usernames, and a professional friendship that I have no choice but to describe as supremely enjoyable.

The key has not been professional collaboration or exchange of knowledge nearly as much as it has been keeping in contact with one another. I know that if I have a client that is killing my flow, Gerald is going to laugh it off with me, and if Gman wants to figure out how to get author attribution working on his blog, we’re going to work together on it. What comes out of that accessibility and socialization; essentially being more human than an email signature, is a professional relationship where in exchange for helping him promote some projects, he allows me to use his contacts to source guest posts.

I highly encourage everyone to take 15 minutes each day and dedicate it solely to speaking to your peers in a more conversational setting. That may mean deviating from the usual channels and 140 character limits and joining Google Groups, relevant forums, community sites, or simply logging onto Skype. If there is one thing that being accessible has taught me, is that many unexpected people can add value to your blogging persona or personal life.

I follow a comedy writer at cracked.com named John Cheese because to me, he is an embodiment of the phrase; “A lot of truth is said in jest.” He has obviously been through some trials and tribulations in his personal life, but through making his life transparent through the comedic medium, I’d be willing to bet that his motivation for self-improvement has been bolstered and supported. Making himself accessible, relatable, and funny is a perfect storm where we can live and laugh at something that would normally make us all cringe.

Being accessible is not just being active, it’s being relatable.

Being Human Part 2 – Writing Casually

When I first got into content creation, I thought that the articles had to have a formula to do well; Relevant and popular topic, keyword density, try to engage the readers near the end. What my experiments have shown me is that I have a lot more success guest blogging when I stop worrying about format, formula, or calls to action; and focus much more heavily on just providing useful content that is easy to read.

I would even argue that the more you deviate from the “normal flow” of most articles; you are almost assured greater social reach and active comments. I attribute this trend to information filtering; or the mechanism we humans have to ignore messages we don’t want to receive. As our society as grown more global, the amounts of marketing messages we receive have increased exponentially. For this reason, we have developed a filter that blocks out the messages we find irrelevant.

That image right there completely encapsulates how I feel surfing around the Internet. My job requires me to stay active and current on most social platforms, but in doing so, I subject myself to an incredible amount of advertising in a short amount of time. If you check your homepage in Facebook, you see 4 ads; if you look at your twitter feeds, almost every other link is some sort of ad; Google+ helps shape which ads you see when you search; and Pinterest is a place where images and their source are linked from clickable boards.

When you write casually, and bring that element of humanity to your blogging, you may be alienating the true professional personalities out there, but you will become relatable to a more widespread audience. I would argue, that the benefit of increased readership and comprehension far outweighs the risk of looking less professional; because if you don’t care about your readers, what are you blogging for?

Take some time and develop your ideas so you can relate them to anyone, and you’ll find more success.

Being Human Part 3 – Using your Peers for Inspiration

Once you start becoming more accessible, and you begin to write your blog posts so that they can be completely relatable to anyone, you’ll find that the inspiration will just come to you. By far, the hardest part about content creation is finding topics to write about week in and week out. The reason for this is because regardless of what’s going on in your personal life, if your job is to create, you just have to deliver.

However, being a more human blogger almost takes care of that problem for you. The inspiration of this article came from a conversation with a friend about trying to increase communication between himself and other members of his organization. He tried using a Skype chat room, a Google Group, and was considering mass emails. While we still haven’t found a perfect solution, working through the problem with him gave me the idea to write this post. I could have waited a couple of more months and added a bunch of graphs and statistics about how humanizing my approach increased conversions; but the urge to create something overcame me, and you’re reading the result.

The moral of the story is simple, regardless of whether you think more with your mind or your heart, there is more to be gained by humanizing your approach to content creation and building relationships than being standoffish and professional. As of this moment, I’d rather risk looking too casual but honest than coldly calculating everything.

Author Byline:

Pete Wise is a Content Creator and Inbound Marketer. He works closely with the amazing community over at MySEOCommunity moderating the content that adds value; and the Magento Programmers of Customer Paradigm. If you liked the article, follow Pete on Twitter: @MySEOHeadache or check out his portfolio site for Denver SEO.

I have been (guest) blogging on guest blogging (I do know it sounds funny) quite a lot, so I decided to compile the most useful advice I have ever given into an eBook.

It’s the first draft – I plan to update it regularly with more useful tips and resources, so please subscribe to this blog (or to comments to this post), to keep track of new versions going live.

It was initially planned as a separate product but I never had time to develop it. However I will make sure to create updates and regular improvements.

The eBook is free and you do not need to register or subscribe to anything to get it. Just download it here and enjoy!

I am looking for your feedback as I’d really to turn this ebook into something truly useful. I also hope to foster our *high-quality* approach to guest blogging with it, so help me by spreading the word!

Thanks for checking it out!

*Download Your Free Copy of Guest Blogging eBook Here*

From an Internet marketing and SEO perspective, the concept of guest blogging truly is ideal for any small to medium size organization to succeed. It’s a common headache for many webmasters to achieve the same search engine rankings enjoyed by large, wealthy organizations whom are backed by media campaigns and other viral marketing strategies.

Search engine visibility strategies are evolving constantly. If you’re relying on organic search as your primary source of traffic, you’ll need to keep abreast of the Internet search technologies handed down by Google and Bing – for which you, me and everyone else simply must conform to.

The message of Google is not a new one and the recent panda update simply rams home the message for those who refused to listen. As of late, I have been receiving various spam emails containing numerous case studies from article spinning services and public blog syndicating networks claiming that their networks have not been affected by panda. Who are we to believe (or trust), the OFFICIAL word of Google or a bunch of case studies hashed together from slightly worried, low quality blog network owners?

If we take a look at all the SEO and link building strategies being utilized, it’s fair to say that most have become rather ineffective. Does a website deserve to be on the front page of Google simply because it has (mindlessly) built thousands of back links to forum profiles and directories? Certainly not. And what about syndicating hundreds or thousands of the exact same rehashed spun article to a blog network with the sole purpose of increasing in-bound-links? These kinds of practices do nothing more than pollute the Internet rather than BENEFIT SEARCH ENGINE VISITORS.

A website deserves credit for taking the time to undertake in-depth analysis and research about its given niche. Whether or not you’ve decided to conform to this process, you’ll have no choice if you’re to be a serious contender in a competitive niche.

The principle behind guest blogging goes hand in hand with the philosophy of Google itself. The concept is totally white hat, attracts real and genuine targeted visitors based on a unique search query and offers the author an authentic and permanent backlink for which the major search engines will give due and deserving credit.

Given that effective current SEO strategies are fairly limited compared to what previous or outdated algorithms would allow, finding ways to continually publish guest blog articles requires authors to think out of the box somewhat.

We are all well aware how relevancy weighs in on our content from a search engine perspective. Maintaining relevancy and composing relevant content worthy of publishing day-after-day becomes slightly cumbersome before too long.

Guest Blogging in a Difficult Niche – It’s all About The Angle!

If you’re into guest blogging and can see the tremendous potential by publishing or creating absolute unique content for killer back links or for search engine friendly content that’s exclusive to your website, there are many ways to keep publishers and search engines happy simply by expanding your angle.

Coming up with new ideas to write about that are still relevant is the trick. You could start this process by taking a pen and paper and draw yourself a basic web diagram and start to expand your thoughts into other related elements within your niche.

If you’re selling cushions, for example, the main topic is obviously cushions. However, you can start adding to your web diagram topics with cushion fabrics, colours, styles, trends, home furnishings, carpet, furniture, tiles – anything at all that might compliment a cushion – this could be the first layer of the web diagram, next, start working on a second layer that relates to your first layer and so on. Before you know it you’ll have many topics to write about that are still relevant to the main item – cushions.

For me personally, my niche is frequently depicted as somewhat controversial, so you might be able to appreciate the scepticism shared by site owners who are looking for content when they come across online dating articles in the articles gallery.

Articles relating to dating sites have seriously been done to death across the Internet. “Oh great, another online dating tips article, who cares” – delete – next! During the past three years, I can’t remember the last time I wrote an article about online dating sites tips.

Generally, I lean towards topics like social networking, dating applications, health and fitness to improve self image, dating cultures, press releases, dating statistics and news, online etiquette, relationships etc. These mentioned topics still relate to online dating indirectly (but without the repetition) and even though my bio links are pointing at an online dating site, if the content is creative and original, it will get published.

Thanks for taking the time to read my insights into guest blogging. You can follow more of my updates here – Matt Fuller.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by d.loop

As an SEO specialist and affiliate marketer, guest posting is a part of my marketing strategy. In the last couple of months, I’ve been fortunate enough to have several guest posts published on top blogs with many subscribers.

I was curious to see if there was a pattern behind my success so I looked back at the posts and tried to find similarities between them. I think its a good idea to learn from your successes. By examining the bright spots, you can discover effective principles and strategies.

When I looked at my posts, I found that most of them were based on my own personal experiences. They were based on things that had happened in my life. I came to the conclusion that my experiences added a lot of value and helped me get published.

Why Personal Experiences Add a Lot of Value

As I thought about sharing personal experiences, I realized there are many reasons for its effectiveness in guest posting. Here are the reasons I thought of.

Unique Content: Each human being is unique so our experiences will be unique.

Engagement: Your engagement will increase because personal stories tap into the emotions.

Stickiness: It’s a lot easier to remember a story or an anecdote than a principle.

Clarity: Experiences provide concrete examples to your posts, which helps the audience understand what we’re saying.

Fighting Writer’s Block: Your life is a vast source of material for content. I’m sure you have relevant stories that haven’t been told online.

Credibility: If you can back up your ideas with related experiences, you will gain credibility and be recognized as an expert.

Confidence: You can write more confidently because you’re writing about something you’re very familiar with.

Enjoyment: You will enjoy writing because it’s fun to talk about yourself.

Saving Time: The source material is already in your mind so you don’t have to spend time doing research.

Examples

I thought it would be helpful to share some of my guest posts that were based on personal experience. These posts were published on high traffic blogs.

10 Things I Learned From Doing SEO For Competitive Keywords

For this post, I wrote about the first time I did an SEO campaign in a competitive niche. I talked about what I learned from the campaign.

7 Surprising Things I Learnt on Reaching 1000 Daily Visitors Mark

In this one, I shared the things I learned in my journey to reach 1000 daily visitors.

Tutorial: How to Bluff in No Limit Texas Holdem Poker

This one was fun post to write because I was able to choose a topic I don’t usually write about. The blog where the post was published doesn’t really have a niche. Instead, it covers interesting or useful topics from a wide variety of niches.

I used to play poker full time so I recalled my poker playing days and came up with a guide to bluffing.

How to Create a Point of Difference (POD) for Your Internet Business

In this post, I talked about some of my sites and how I created a point of difference for them.

How to Leave a Great Impression on Your Next Job Interview

This guest post was based on my first job search out of college. I was able to get a great job offer by acing a job interview.

Is eBay Partner Network a Good Affiliate Program for Your Blog?

This guest post was based on my experiences making money with eBay’s affiliate program.

7 Reasons to Get to Know Your College Professors

For this guest post, I tapped into my college experience. I became friends with some of my professors and reaped benefits from those relationships.

How I Improved Productivity by Canceling My Home Internet Connection

In this guest post, I told the story of canceling my home internet connection to try to improve my productivity.

How I Reached 30,000 Visits Per Month With Less Than 2 Posts Per Week

In this post, I wrote about reaching 30K monthly visits with a post frequency of less than two weekly posts.

How to Create Facebook Page For Your Blog

This was a simple tutorial for creating a Facebook Page for a blog. You may not think of tutorials as sharing your experience, but in one sense, that’s what you do. Once I figured out how to create a Facebook Page for my blog, I shared what I learned using relevant screenshots at each step of the process.

Blogging Made Simple: Putting Windows Live Writer to the Test

A review is a great way to share your experience. If you’ve spent a lot of time using a product, your experience can be very useful to readers.

In this post, I talked about the benefits I enjoyed from using Windows Live Writer.

Over to You

Take some time to think of interesting experiences you’ve had and then figure out which ones could be related to your guest posts.

If you’re passionate about your niche, you probably have a lot of personal stories that will be entertaining and useful to many people. Good luck!

Which experiences have you shared already in your blog or guest posts?

What experiences can you share in future guest posts?

This is a guest post by Dee Barizo. He’s been doing SEO and affiliate marketing for the last three years. His latest project is The Best Degrees, a site featuring the top online degrees based on quality and price.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by bhamsandwich

This is guest post by one of our most active and most awesome members Heather Sokol.  She has built a strong presence at My Blog Guest and according to her own words the forum has helped her quite a bit. Her guest posting strategy and tips are below.

I have been using the My Blog Guest forums, successfully, for the last several months. It has been a blessing to me, both as a publisher & a writer. In addition to getting awesome content for my own site and building links & traffic through my guest articles, I am building relationships that extend far beyond a one-time guest post.

The secret to my success? Making just the right connections – and, it’s easier than you think!

The key is thinking outside the box a little bit. You know your niche and audience, but a guest blogger doesn’t have to be a part of it. They just need to be talented enough to tailor their content for your site (or vice versa). Be open to new ideas, and you’ll find interesting perspectives on your topic or entirely new audiences for your articles.

My own site is probably the simplest example – Inexpensively provides money saving advice on a wide variety of subjects. I’m able to invite writers on just about anything to share tips for saving money on their area of expertise. There are literally hundreds of personal finance blogs out there – it would be easy to retool your content to pitch one.

But, the concept isn’t limited to money saving ideas. The rest of you just need to be a little more creative.

Do you have a tech blog? Invite writers from blogs on sports, health or entertainment to share how technology improves their industry. Are you a realtor? Pitch an article on simple ways to spruce up a room to an interior design blog.

Putting a little extra thought & creativity into your content can help you find just the right opportunity. It will expand your online network or expose your own ideas to a completely new audience, which is more likely to result in traffic back to your own site.

Heather Sokol is a married mother of 3 active girls who create several, miscellaneous mom jobs and provide blog fodder on a daily basis. She’s raising them on a budget & sharing her secrets to help others live inexpensively.

Post image by by aloshbennett

A by-line is that short concise paragraph that tells the readers who authored the guest post (yes, short and concise are two keywords here).

The by-line often contains links to the author’s sites and this is why too many guest bloggers put too much emphasis on that paragraph.

The rule of thumb:

! Don’t even think about the by-line until you write the post. The actual post is what you need to focus on, a by-line is a secondary, far less important thing, simply because without a post there is no by-line So if you go too far to promote yourself in the by-line, the post has great chances to be rejected.

Now, I’ve seen quite a few guest posts throughout my blogging career, and here are a few types of a by-line to illustrate my point by examples:

1. The Bad By-Line: Author’s Biography (Literally)

I am not sure why some people think everyone may want to know when they graduated from school, which college they went to and what age they got married at.

I’ve seen guest posts where a by-line is like 3 or 4 paragraphs long (which often makes 1/3 of the actual post). The by-lines like this often make me feel stupid: how am I supposed to explain the author why I would like him to make the by-line shorter (it doesn’t link to any bad neighborhoods, it doesn’t break any rules but it just sounds completely off-topic)?

Frankly, I’ve always envied people who can endlessly talk about themselves. I am usually at a loss when asked to say a few words about myself.

2. The Ugly By-Line: Link Farm

Don’t be greedy: trying to stuff your by-line with links is just impolite. Being focused will both increase your chances to get approved and encourage more people to click (double win!).

Think about it this way: a blogger will find it easier to just ignore your pitch than to try to explain you the obvious thing: why he wouldn’t like to link to all your sites and social media profiles from his blog.

3. The Good By-Line: Short and Sweet

The good by-line contains no more than 3 sentences and no more than 3 links:

• Start it with your name and a short definition of yourself (Blogger, new mom,any words that best define you in your opinion ).
• Follow with your main blog (I know most of us run quite a few but you should choose one). I for one don’t mind keyword-based anchor text here but I often too humble to use one myself. I’d say, for a good work on a post, the author deserves one good link with the anchor text of his choice.
• Mention your area of expertise or your main interests and where readers can find all the necessary information about you (this can be your online resume, most complete social media profile or your portfolio)
• Invite readers to follow you on Twitter (or other social media network that matters to you most). Mention your tweeting style and topics (like “I tweet about search and SEO as well blogging in general”).

Post img by miyukiutada