We all lead busy lives.
Alongside blogging, you may be raising a family, juggling a day job, dealing with the day-to-day aspects of running a business, or seeing clients. And now you want to add guest blogging to the mix. Is it possible?
Of course it is!
But it’s important to take a strategic approach.
We’ve established that the guest posting strategy will bring you new subscribers and increase sales of your products and services. Yet, if you’re thinking you’ll just ‘fit in’ guest posting around everything else you do, you may get to the end of your week and find it didn’t happen!
That’s why it’s important to block out time to research appropriate blogs, network with other bloggers, brainstorm topics, update your tracking system, and of course to do the actual writing! This might mean you cut back on your posting schedule on your own blog – for example, if you usually post once per week, reduce that to once every other week and use the saved time for your guest posting strategy.
Start by creating a system to help you keep track of the blogs that might be a good fit for your guest posts. The easiest way to do this is with a simple spreadsheet. Later, as you begin to submit posts to different blogs, you may want to add to this basic system.
Never made a spreadsheet before? No worries – it’s easy. Especially now that you can do it all online on the Google drive. No special software is necessary. (Although you need to create a Google ID if you don’t already have one.)
1) Go to Google.com and click “Drive” (on the black bar that runs across the top).
2) In the left hand column, click “Create” (in the red box), and choose ‘spreadsheet’.
3) A document will open up with a series of columns and cells.
4) In column A type in “Blog Name”
5) Tab to column B and continue on, creating the following columns:
URL
Blog Size
Blogger (owner or editor of the blog. The “About” page is a good source for this information), Contact (either email address or contact form URL)
Post Idea (jot down any guest post idea you may have in regard to this blog. Just the headline will do.)
You’ll soon see how to put this spreadsheet to work.
Author: A-List Team