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

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12 Responses to “Here’s a Secret Ingredient for Getting Your Guest Posts Published on Top Blogs”

  1. Yasser Teilab

    Nice Ann as usual, but believe it or not there is only one thing makes me hesitate before reading your posts or following you on Twitter, it is your picture, also you have a nice face but I don't know why I feel depressed every time I see it, what happened to the happy pictures experts used to use

    Reply
      • Yasser Teilab

        your reply picture is a happy one, first time to see it, I guess the Gray colour makes it a little bit unnoticeable. I used to see this picture in most of websites related to SEO http://www.seosmarty.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/
        anyway thanks for not feeling offended and I am just joking, you are one of the finest people in the industry I like to follow, and hear it from someone who live and work in Egypt, you my lady have a worldwide repetition.
        keep up the good work

        Reply
  2. Dee

    Glad you liked it!

    Also, I want to thank Ann for the opportunity to guest post here. I've had great success with My Blog Guest. If you haven't tried it out, I highly recommend it. Just make sure to share your experiences and you'll do well 🙂

    Reply
  3. Colin

    One small point i would add…..if you get the opportunity offer the webmaster the chance to include pictures in your blog post. So very few guest posts do this and in some ways this helps to make your post more "normal". I know there are many subjects where a picture might not be appropriate but always worth a try

    Reply
  4. Ryan

    It is the first time, i visit your blog which is very impressive and useful. I can find out the solutions for my problem to improve my blog. Thanks. Nice to meet you.
    Ryan

    Reply
  5. Francesca

    Ahh the anecdote technique. I used this a lot in college whenever I had to write a paper, and it got me a lot of A's! Funny, I never thought to use it in blog writing, until I read your post. Thank you so much for reminding me!

    Reply
  6. web design la

    Definitely i appreciate you and your experience. It is true that experience is the great teacher. Those things that you learn indirectly are less than those which you learn directly. And that thing i have seen here. I enjoy every single bit of your post because it seems me useful and i hope you keep posting such an inspirational post. Thank you guy for the nice post.

    Reply

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