The Ultimate Guide To Green Guest Blogging

The Ultimate Guide To Green Guest Blogging

If you’re a green blogger, one of the best way to gain exposure and readers for your blog is to become a guest blogger. Guest blogging is the act of writing posts for blogs other than your own.

How Guest Blogging Helps Green Bloggers

For many new bloggers, especially those with outside jobs or other responsibilities in addition to blogging, the idea of guest blogging can seem strange. If you barely have time to write your own blog, why would you spend time writing for somebody else’s?

The truth is, though, that guest blogging is a mutually beneficial arrangement for both the guest blogger and the host.

For the host blog, guest bloggers offer the opportunity for a break from the regular grind of posting. As a bonus, guest bloggers bring fresh perspectives and new insights to the blog, and many hosts specifically seek out guest bloggers who are experts on aspects of the niche that the host is less familiar with, to offer a more complete and well rounded experience for readers.

For guest bloggers themselves, the benefits of guest blogging include:

• Links. Most host blogs allow guest bloggers to include one or more links back to their own blog in the byline or text of a post. This is a great opportunity to gain high quality, one way backlinks with custom anchor-text to your website, increasing both your Google ranking and your exposure to new readers.
• Targeted traffic. Writing high quality guest posts for related blogs is a great way to gain targeted traffic and new subscribers for your own green blog, because it introduces you to a new audience of readers that are interested in your niche, but may not have discovered your site on their own. The more you catch their interest with your topic or writing style, the more likely they are to check out your own blog or even subscribe to it.
• Branding. As a green blogger, it’s especially important to get your brand out there and start building its credibility. Guest blogging gets you exposure and offers an opportunity to establish your expertise and “green cred” to readers and potential customers.

Becoming a Guest Blogger

Before you become a guest blogger, it’s important to have some high quality content on your own blog in order to give visitors from the host blog something to read when they arrive. The better the content on your own blog, the more likely they are to subscribe to your feed.

However, you don’t necessarily need a lot of content before you begin guest blogging. Some successful guest bloggers have started with as little as five or ten high quality posts on their own blog.

Once your own blog is ready for a wider audience, start looking for blogs to guest post on.

As a green blogger, you have an advantage over many other niches because there are two excellent green blog directories to browse for guest blogging opportunities.

Other ways to search for related blogs include:

• Niche browsing. If you’ve done your market research before starting your green blog, you probably already have a pretty good idea who your main competitors are, as well as a number of blogs on topics that are related but not identical. You may even be friends with some of the bloggers! Making contact with these bloggers is a great way to arrange guest blogging opportunities. On sites that make regular use of guest posters, you may also find posts outlining exactly what their guest posting procedures and requirements are.
• Google search. A good old Google search is another great way to find guest blogging opportunities. Google Blog Search is another helpful tool that specifically searches blogs.

In order to maximize the benefits of green blogging, aim to write guest posts for blogs that have both steady traffic and readers with interests that overlap with your own. For example, writing a guest post for a popular internet marketing blog and linking back to your green blog on alternative energy may get you exposure to thousands of readers and subscribers, but only a few of those thousands will be interested in both internet marketing and alternative energy.

It is also important to vary the blogs you write for. If you write guest posts repeatedly for the same blog, you will eventually reach the point where any of the blog’s regular subscribers who might be interested in subscribing to you will have done so, and you will attract few new readers by continuing to post for the blog. Google and other search engines also place more value on a handful of one-way links from one site to another than many such links.

Arranging Your First Guest Post

The process of writing a guest post varies a bit depending on the host blog.

Some blogs have procedures and standards for guest posts posted publicly. (Check out Green Marketing TV’s guest posting requirements for an example.)

If the blog does not have guest posting requirements posted publicly, you will have to contact the blogger. If you’re not sure if the blog accepts guest posts, it’s important to establish this first. If you know the blog accepts guest posts, then the best practice is to introduce yourself briefly and suggest an idea for your guest post. If the host blogger likes your idea, he or she will accept it and you can write the post. If the host doesn’t, then he or she may suggest a alternative, or may refuse the guest post entirely.

An alternative technique, if you know that a blog accepts guests posts, is to send out a short introductory note with a finished post to offer them as a guest post. If the host blogger accepts the post, this speeds up the process considerably; if he or she doesn’t, you can then offer the post to someone else.

How To Write a Great Guest Post

Whether you agree on a topic with the host blogger before writing or send out full posts from the start, it’s important to write high quality content.

At minimum, guest blog posts should be:

• completely unique and not published anywhere else
• relevant to the host blog’s niche
• checked carefully for spelling, grammar, and style

Remember, the more outstanding your guest posts, the more benefit you will get from them. Look on your guest posts as your portfolio – the better it is, the more new readers and subscribers you will attract, and the more willing other bloggers will be to accept your guest posts for their own blogs.

Guest posting is one of the most valuable tools for green bloggers to gain traffic and subscribers. With these tips, you should be well on your way to success as a green guest blogger!