This guy ^ is overly excited to be a guest-blogger
(Source)

Contributing to blogs is a great way to build your writing resume and get your work featured in front of a larger audience. Guest-blogging can also be a great opportunity to drive traffic to your own site while offering meaningful content to another blog at the same time. You can build your credibility, create great references, and build networks all while improving your writing skills. If you’re just getting started, here are a few tips to become a successful guest-blogger.

Research: When guest-blogging, you need to do your research in order to find the right blog to contribute to. You will write more meaningful articles when you are truly interested in and knowledgeable about a topic. Research topics that fit into  your niche or industry and figure out which blogs would be a good match for the content you will be writing. When you focus your content on a specific topic that you know, your chances of becoming a well-known guest-blogger in that targeted field are that much higher.

Write your best: When you’re contributing to someone else’s blog, you are writing for their established audience, brand and voice. Adhering to the blog’s particular writing style and voice can also help you to become a more fluid writer by being able to adapt writing styles that are different from your own. If your guest post on the blog is successful and gets many viewers, you have boosted both the blog’s popularity and your own popularity as a writer.

Read the guidelines: This is extremely important to do before you start writing. However, if you’re a procrastinator, then it’s especially important to read the guidelines before you send off your finished piece to the blog. Failing to follow certain guidelines of the blog could make you appear disrespectful in that you did not do your research and read the rules. Always be mindful of the rules established for guest-bloggers. One slip up could damage your reputation as a guest-blogger, which will make it difficult to get more opportunities in the future.

Read the blog: This seems like a total no-brainer, but it still needs to be noted that it’s important to read the blog to white you’re contributing. Do not contribute to blogs you found five minutes ago just to get publicity and your writing out there. Follow the blog for a few weeks (if they post often) or a few months (if they don’t post as often) to really get an idea of the style, tone and viewpoint of the blog. If you’re not interested in the blog, how can you contribute your writing to it if you wouldn’t read your own article? Seems silly, right? So read the blog!

Establish goals: Before you decide to contribute to a blog or become a guest-blogger, decide where you want the guest-blogging to take you. Do you want more viewers on your own blog? Do you want your writing to be made available to a larger audience? Do you want to establish yourself as inventive or as a leader in your industry? Decide what you hope to gain from guest-blogging and set out to achieve those goals by finding the right outlets/blogs.

There’s a lot of different tactics that writers can use to ensure they’re sharing subjects of value with their readers. The best insights will always come from your users – as a rule, make sure to check your stats daily, and see where the traffic is going when it lands on your site. See what readers are looking at most, and pay attention to the bounce rates. It’s simple really, identify the content that’s getting read and generate content that relates to the subject at hand.

ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS

Consult Google Analytics (GA) when reviewing your content strategy. If you don’t know how to use GA, find someone who does – or email us to help!  The value of knowing how to operate and read GA is exponential, especially in today’s market.

LOOK AT TRENDS

Learn to love using Google Trends on a regular basis. Finding out what people are searching for most at a global scale, or at a more local level will help you formulate writing that people are looking for. Remember, don’t just write about a topic for the sake of writing – take a topic, and relate it back to your focus.

Check out what’s trending in Ontario, Canada right now (courtesy of Google Trends)

Writing and creating original content is much harder than it looks. Be sure to keep testing your ideas out, and remember that those tests mean absolutely nothing without fully understanding the data and results behind them.