The Art of the Guest Post

Ever heard of a guest post?  If not, it may be one of your favorite ideas ever when it comes to keeping content on your site updated regularly.

In a nutshell, a guest post is when someone completely unrelated to your blog writes a post for you.  They aren’t pretending to be you or anything, but they are contributing.  It’s like a contributing editor or writer.

How do you get them?  Well hopefully, you’ve developed some relationships with other bloggers in your space.  You might reach out to them and offer them the chance to guest post on your site.  That might be all it takes.

You might first offer to provide them with a guest post written by you. Chances are they will run it.  Just make sure to write something that isn’t time sensitive.  In other words, write something they can stick in the “rainy day” folder, and break out when they need something in a pinch.

If you have a fairly good amount of traffic, you could just ask your readers to submit something.  Many of them are probably bloggers themselves and would be willing to do it.

The payoff for you is a little breathing room to take a break.  They are great to have on days you are not feeling the mojo.  They can also bring you outside readers that may click in from the author’s site…you never know.

How Many Topics Should a Blog Cover?

typing 250x187 How Many Topics Should a Blog Cover?One of the mistakes people often make is trying to be all things to all people in their blog. Folks, there’s a blog already out there on every topic you can imagine. From knitting blogs to squirrel awareness blogs to blogs about bubble gum. That’s right, it’s all been written about before.

So how many topics should your blog cover? Well, if you’re blogging for fun, cover as many as you want. Just do whatever makes you happy.

However, if you’re blogging for fame and fortune, I would advise that you establish your “wheel house” and stick to it. In general, people start to return to blogs over and over because they know what it is going to be about. I know when I go to my favorite Yankees blog, there’s not going to be something there about the Knicks. When I go to read a celebrity gossip blog, there isn’t going to be in depth political coverage, etc.

So ask yourself, what made you want to start your blog in the first place? Whatever the answer is, that’s what you should stick with.

Sure, there’s room for branches out into other directions once in a while, but the reader should always be able to find their way back to your central theme. Also, it’s kinda hard to keep all your “category buckets” fresh with new content. Once you have 20 different things to write about, eventually a category starts to get neglected. [Read more...]