This column is written by Kimberly Turner from Regator (a fantastic tool that gathers and organizes the world’s best blog posts). – Darren

While Darren and his family are on a well-deserved holiday, he has lined up enough pre-written content and guest posts to keep ProBlogger readers supplied with plenty of quality reading in his absence. So it makes sense that, this week, we’ll be focusing on the art of the guest post. The most vital thing to remember is that guest posts are a win-win situation for the host blog and guest blogger. Keeping that in mind as you send pitches (or review incoming pitches) will take you far.

Regator has, as always, provided a list of the ten most blogged-about tales of the last seven days, and we’ll use posts about those hot trends to learn about what makes a fantastic guest post:

1. Iraq
Example: A Traveler’s Library’s “Baghdad in War Time”
Lesson: Have a strong understanding of the blog you want to write for. What topics are covered? Who is the audience? What tone is used? Preferably, you’ll pitch your thought to a blog you read regularly, but even if you’re trying to expand your niche by writing for a blog that is new to you, take time to skim posts dating back two to three months to ensure that your thoughts are in line with the blogger’s vision. Pitching an thought or post that is not in keeping with the blog you’re targeting shows a lack of respect for the host blogger’s time. In this example, the guest poster has a history of writing about topics from health and science to environmental news, but this post shows a clear understanding of the tone, theme, and audience of the host blog.

2. Emmy Awards
Example: Plus Size Plum’s “Plus Size Beauty Goes to the Emmys”
Lesson: There are several reasons you might solicit guest posts for your blog: They provide fresh voices and content, allow you to take breaks without leaving your readers hanging, and as this post demonstrates, guest posts can be used to provide a unique point of view. This guest poster wrote about the Emmy Awards from the perspective of an attendee whose spouse was nominated for an Emmy—a vantage point that few, including the host blogger, would have been able to provide.

3. Glenn Beck
Example: Religion in American History’s “Beck Plays Prophet”
Lesson: As a general rule, bloggers do not want recycled content. When you pitch a post or thought, it should be something that has not been published on your blog or any other blog. But as this example demonstrates, there are times when a blog sees fit to use a guest post that has already appeared elsewhere. The vital thing is to be honest and up front about the post’s history. Unless you explicitly state that a post has run elsewhere, most host bloggers will assume you are delivering original content.

4. Apple TV/iPod Touch/Ping [It was such an Apple-heavy week, that I’m combining the three so that they don’t take over the trends list. Apple fever is an epidemic.]
Example: Silicon Alley Insider’s “Apple Just Killed MySpace Even More Dead”
Lesson: When relevant and appropriate, link to other posts on the host blog. It’s excellent for their SEO, it shows the blogger that you are keeping up with the blog, and it’s helpful for readers.

5. Hurricane
Example: Sociological Images’ “Racial Violence in the Aftermath of Katrina”
Lesson: Don’t save your best material for your own blog. Place your all into every guest post. After all, the key word is “guest.” When you’re in your own home, it’s fine to place your feet up on the coffee table if you want, but when you’re a guest in someone else’s home, you should be on your best behaviour and respect the rules of their home.

6. Paris Hilton
Example: Clusterstock’s “Senators Are Pushing To Cut Taxes For Paris Hilton”
Lesson: Once your post is published, your work is not finished. You’ve got two more jobs: 1. Help with promotion. Share the link so the host blogger receives new visitors from your network. Remember the win-win rule. 2. Check back to answer questions and follow up on comments. This example received several negative comments but when the guest poster didn’t return to address them, they got out of hand. It’s the internet, once the negativity starts, it has a terrible habit of snowballing. A simple answer can show that you’re engaged and open to discussion.

7. Afghanistan
Example: The Best Defense’s “How to get kicked out of Afghanistan without really trying — too hard”
Lesson: Before pitching a post or thought, question yourself what you’re offering and how you’re adding to the blog. You should, as always, be solving a problem or providing a solution with your post. This post by a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve offers an insider’s perspective.

8. Ground Zero Mosque
Example: Pagan + Politics’ “Guest Post: Islamophobia”
Lesson: Include a brief bio with your post. If the host blogger wants to write his or her own intro for you, as has been done with this example, he or she will do so, but a brief, well-written bio provided by you may save time on the blogger’s end and will give readers an thought of your expertise and background.

9. Discovery Channel
Example: Watts Up With That?’s “Stop the Hysteria”
Lesson: Stirring controversy in a guest post is risky business, particularly if the host blogger disagrees or the comments get out of hand. As Chris Garrett said in a ProBlogger guest post from 2008: “If you are going to be snarky, hurt your own brand.” This example, but, is opinionated but clearly backs up the host blogger’s opinion. You’ll need a pretty excellent sense of his or her ideologies before you can do that though, so know where you stand before you take the plunge. As always, be sure to take the blog’s tone into account. Darren has fostered a positive, helpful vibe here on ProBlogger so my posts are still very “me,” but tend to be a bit less snarky and opinionated than posts I might do elsewhere.

10. Oil Spill
Example: Naked Capitalism’s “Guest Post: Scientists Say Dispersants May Delay Recovery of the Gulf By Years … Or Decades”
Lesson: In addition to building your reputation and expanding your audience, getting backlinks is one of the main reasons many choose to guest post. This example shows subtle promotion. Don’t go overboard and make the entire guest post about you and your brand. It’s content, not an ad.

Do you accept guest posts? What advice would you give those who wanted to guest on your blog?

For further reading on ProBlogger, check out:

• “How to Guest Post to Promote Your Blog”
• “How to Maximize the Benefits of Guest Posting”
• “Finding New Readers for Your Blog With Guest Posting”
• “9 Ways to Become and Exceptional Guest Poster”
• “How to Use Guest Blogging to Grow Your Blog Exponentially”
• “How NOT To Get A Guest Post Published On A Blog”

Kimberly Turner is a cofounder of Regator.com and Regator for iPhone as well as an award-winning print journalist. You can find her on Twitter @kimber_regator.

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

Blogosphere Trends + Guest Posting

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You don’t need to be a huge-time blogger to need to outsource some aspect of your blog. A beginning blogger with a serious business plot might want to contract a designer to make a skin for their blog. A entrepreneurial blogger might want to outsource some writing, or have an agency provide social media strategy for the blog.

There are plenty of reasons why you might outsource some aspect of your blogging. But once you’ve identified the need, how should you proceed?

Don’t make your first step trying to find excellent candidates! Before you go hunting for help, you need to do your homework. Here’s the process I’d recommend.

1. Define what you want.

“I need help with my blog content” is not a clear directive. If you’re going to source help, you need to know what to look for, which means you need to have a clear thought of what, specifically, you want.

Don’t just reckon in terms of contractor skillsets. Reckon in terms of your audience. So you want to have a new interface designed for your blog. Fantastic. But what do you want it to do? Do you have a visual identity you want the design to reflect or match? Are there interactive elements — like social media buttons or a subscription box — that, in accordance with your readership objectives, you want to prioritise in your design? Do you have user and usage stats that can help to drive the technical specifications you provide to a designer?

Work out what you reckon you want, and why, before you start thinking about who might do the work.

2. Make it measurable.

The word ‘measurable’ really gives the game away — if the first step in this process was to define specific objectives, the next one is to make them measurable.

Some tasks are hard to measure — the “success” of a new homepage design might seem like one of them. But look a small closer and, whatever the task you’re setting, you’ll likely find ways to assess the results. Perhaps you’ll assess your current traffic metrics and set new goals that you expect the new site design to help meet. Perhaps you’ll require the designer to show you the results of usability testing.

Alternatively, your goals might be internal — related to your time or operations. Maybe you want to save time — say, two days a week — by outsourcing some of your blog post research and writing tasks. Fine. But make sure you’re prepared to track the time you spend managing your contractor, to make sure that you haven’t simply replaced two days’ writing with two days’ contractor management!

As part of setting measurable goals, don’t forget to apply a timeline to each! This is the most basic way for you to assess whether your outsourced work is on track.

3. Set a budget.

Now that you have an thought of what you want, and what benefits you need it to bring, you should be able to translate those benefits into a dollar value, and choose on the investment you’re willing to make to achieve that goal.

You might want the new design for your blog to increase average per-session pageviews by 1.5 within the first three months. Fantastic! What will that do for your advertising revenues in that time? And how much can you afford to invest to generate this return?

Setting a budget is an essential step in the process. This will help you to qualify candidates early in the process, and save you from spending time talking to “prospective” contractors who really aren’t in your market at all.

4. Seek recommendations.

Unless you have experience in a given market space or discipline and believe you have the skills to select excellent talent off the bat, you might consider asking peers and colleagues for talent recommendations. Whether you’re outsourcing blog content production or your accounting tasks, personal recommendations are the best way to have some assurance that you’ll get what you expect.

Alternatively — or additionally — you might call for expressions of interest through your blog, your social networks, your professional networks, and other likely sources. To me, these approaches are still better options than advertising blindly on freelance networks, or scouring the web in an effort to find that needle in a haystack — excellent help that you can afford and trust. Recommendations are best.

5. Research the provider.

But you obtain recommendations, research the provider before you contact them. Conducting your own research is vital — you never know what information a quick web search will turn up. Hopefully it’s the same information the contractor in question will provide to you, but if it’s not the kind of detail they’d likely share, you’ll be glad you looked into their work yourself.

If the contractor is local, your peers or colleagues may know them, so again: question around. Encourage people to be candid and to give you their honest opinions, but also be sure to find out the bases for those assessments. Try to remain as open-minded and objective as possible at this point, so you can make a shortlist of at least two — but hopefully three or four — providers you believe might suit the job.

6. Make contact.

Make careful observation of each shortlisted candidate from the moment of your first contact. Everything they do and say will provide clues as to how well you may be able to work with them. If something makes you uncomfortable, try to work out what it is and why it’s a problem.

Again, it’s vital to try to remain reasonable and objective at this point. The fact that your potential designer is wearing a suit and tie doesn’t mean he’s not as creative as the previous candidate, who rolled up to the meeting in ripped jeans and cool runners.

Try to get all the information from the candidate that you’ll need to make your outsourcing choice. The things I want to have in hand when it comes time to assess my options include:

• contact details
• competent past work examples
• a pitch, brief, or written document that clarifies what they’ll provide, for what value, and shows that they know and agree to my expectations, goals, and time and budget constraints
• fantastic references from current clients
• personal experience with the candidate (it doesn’t matter whether I’ve met them to discuss the job over coffee, or over Skype: I want to meet them one way or another!).

Now, the hiring choice is all yours. To make sure you’re protected, though, you might want to ensure:

• you both sign a legally binding written contract that clarifies the work and the work arrangements
• your contractor has any insurances you feel are necessary
• you’ve discussed and agreed upon any copyright and intellectual property considerations
• you’ve had the contractor sign a non-disclosure and/or anti-competition agreement if you feel that’s necessary.

These steps aren’t substitutes for excellent research and gut instinct, but they may help you if your research and instinct don’t pay off for some reason.

Have you outsourced any aspects of your blog? How did the process work for you?

About the Author: Georgina has more than ten years’ experience writing and editing for web, print and voice. She now blogs for WebWorkerDaily and SitePoint, and consults on content to a range of other clients.

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

How to Outsource Your Blog… Or Part of It

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Alexa.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com and is a website which provides information on traffic levels for websites.The Alexa rank is measured according to the amount of users who’ve visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

What is the Alexa Rank?

Place simply, the Alexa Rank is a ranking system which bases its
ranking schema on the level of traffic each website receives from the
number of people who visit a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

Why would you want to increase your Alexa rank?

Webmasters, advertisers and ad networks use your blog’s Alexa rank as
a gauge to determine the worth of a link on your website. If you depend
on link or site selling as a form of monetization you’ll certainly
want to increase your Alexa rank, because it’ll increase your bargaining
power when it comes to ad pricing.

ReviewMe, Text Link Ads and Sponsored Reviews are just three of the networks which base your ad selling strength on Alexa Ranks.

20 Ways to Increase your Alexa Rank

Here is a collection of methods you can use to boost your Alexa Rank.
Most of these tips are derived from several fellow webmasters I know
who claimed to have derived positive results through their experiments
with the Alexa Rankings.

Some of the other tips were derived articles and sources, which I have duly referenced at the end of this post.

Do these tips work? According to some, yes they certainly do work.
But do note that most of them require active effort of some sort and
hence, they will work as long as long as you are consistently performing
specific actions.

To increase your Alexa rank in the long run, I would highly recommended that one focus on developing quality content which attracts and maintains a large audience instead of purely focusing on artificially increasing your Alexa Rank.

Fantastic link-worthy content will leads to an natural increase in site traffic and is an brilliant way to passively increase your Alexa rank.

It is vital to emphasize that you should devote most of your
efforts in growing your site audience alongside integrated
implementation of any of the following tips below.

1. Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.
2. Place up an Alexa rank widget on your website. I did
   this a few days ago and receive a honest amount of clicks every day.
   According to some, each click counts as a visit even if the toolbar is
   not used by the visitor.
3. Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar. This
   includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog
   readers. Be sure to link to Alexa’s full explanation of their toolbar
   and tracking system so your readers know what installing the toolbar or
   extension entails.
4. Work in an Office or own a company? Get the Alexa
   toolbar or SS Firefox extension installed on all computers and set your
   website as the homepage for all browsers. Perhaps it will be useful to
   note that this may work only when dynamic or different IPs are used.
5. Get friends to review and rate your Alexa website profile. Not entirely sure of its impact on rankings but it might help in some way.
6. Write or Blog about Alexa. Webmaster and bloggers
   like to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to
   you and send you targeted traffic (i.e. visitors with the toolbar
   already installed). This gradually has effects on your Alexa ranking.
7. Flaunt your URL in webmaster forums. Webmasters
   usually have the toolbar installed. You’ll get webmasters to visit your
   website and offer useful feedback. It’s also a excellent way to give back to
   the community if you have useful articles to share with others.
8. Write content that is related to webmasters. This
   can fall in the category of domaining and SEO, two fields in which most
   webmasters will have the Alexa toolbar installed. Promote your content
   on social networking websites and webmaster forums.
9. Use Alexa redirects on your website URL. Try this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.doshdosh.com
   . Replace doshdosh.com with the URL for your website. Leave this
   redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This
   redirect will count a unique IP address once a day so clicking it
   multiple times won’t help. There is no official proof that redirects
   positively benefit your Alexa Rank, so use with caution.
10. Post in Asian social networking websites or
    forums. Some webmasters have suggested that East Asian web users are huge
    Alexa toolbar fans, judging by the presence of several Asia-based
    websites in the Alexa Top 500. I suggest trying this only if you have
    the time or capacity to do so.
11. Make a webmaster tools section on your website.
    This is a magnet for webmasters who will often revisit your website to
    gain access to the tools. Aaron Wall’s webpage on SEOTools is a very
    excellent example.
12. Get Dugg or Stumbled. This usually brings massive
    numbers of visitors to your website and the sheer amount will have a
    positive impact on your Alexa Rank. Naturally, you’ll need to develop
    link worthy material.
13. Use PayperClick Campaigns. Buying advertisements on
    search engines such as Google or Exact Seek will help bring in Traffic.
    Doubly useful when your ad is highly relevant to webmasters.
14. Make an Alexa category on your blog and use it to
    include any articles or news about Alexa. This acts as an easily
    accessible resource for webmasters or casual search visitors while
    helping you rank in the search engines.
15. Optimize your well loved posts. Got a well loved post
    that consistently receives traffic from the search engines? Include a
    widget/graph at the bottom of the post, link to your Alexa post or use
    Alexa redirection on your internal URLs.
16. Buy banners and links for traffic from webmaster
    forums and websites. A prominent and well showed ad will drive lots
    of webmaster traffic to your website, which can significantly boost your
    rank.
17. Hire forum posters to pimp your website. Either buy
    signatures in webmaster forums or promote specific articles or material
    in your website on a regular basis. You can easily find posters for
    hire in Digital Point and other webmaster forums.
18. Pay Cybercafe owners to install the Alexa toolbar
    and set your website as the homepage for all their computers. This might
    be hard to arrange and isn’t really a viable solution for most.
    I’m keeping this one in because some have suggested that it does work.
19. Use MySpace . This is a small shady so I don’t
    recommended it unless you’re really interested in artificially inflating
    your Alexa Rank. Use visually attractive pictures or banners and link
    them to your redirected Alexa URL. This will be most effective if your
    website has content that is really relevant to the MySpace Crowd.
20. Try Alexa auto-surfs.
    Do they work? Maybe for groundbreaking new sites. I reckon they are mostly
    suitable for new websites with a very poor Alexa rank. Note that there
    be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like
    Adsense. They aren’t also long term solutions to improving your Alexa
    Rank so I suggest using with caution.

YOU CAN READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE-  http://www.doshdosh.com/20-quick-ways-to-increase-your-alexa-rank/

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Is your blogging getting a small dry? Perhaps it is time to become a bit more playful as a blogger.

One of the things that I’ve learned over the years is that the more I ‘play’ and experiment with my blog the more I learn that helps me to make my blog better.

Experimentation helps you not only learn what works in the blogging medium – but also what works with your audience.

Notes

• Watch the full sized version at Become a Playful Blogger
• Video shot on a Panasonic Lumix DMC GF1 (aff) – here’s why I use that camera to shoot my videos.

Become a Playful Blogger Transcript

I’ve had this video transcribed below for those who prefer to get it that way. The transcription provided by The Transcription People.

Today I want to talk about being playful. I’m standing in front of some of the artwork that my four year ancient has done at Kindergarten. It’s been fascinating to watch the progression of his artistry over the last couple of years. He’s a very artistic, creative small guy and he likes to paint and he likes to make things and he likes to basically make stuff.

But, the development in the quality and intricacy of his work has been fascinating to watch over the last few years.

What I’ve noticed is that the more he does it, and the more he experiments with different mediums and different ways of holding a brush and using his fingers and different types of paints and cutting up stuff and sticking them on, the more he experiments, the more he learns and the more he develops.

I reckon this is really right for blogging as well.

One of the things that I’ve learnt over the years is that the more I try and use stuff, the more I learn what works and what doesn’t work for me in my style, but also for my readers, for blogging and the medium itself.

So, I’d like to question you today:

• how have you played on your blog?
• How have you experimented?
• What have you tried?
• What has worked and what hasn’t worked?

I’d like this to be a discussion. For me, I’ve tried lots of different styles of writing over the years.

For example, I’ve done a few rants on my blogs. I learned that, you know, me ranting doesn’t really work. Occasionally it does because, I guess I really believe in what I’m ranting about, but as a rule, ranting doesn’t really work for me.

I’ve also tried writing in the third person at times that sometimes has really worked for me. It’s had a real impact upon people.

I’ve also found asking questions like this video post itself works for me.

It’s just about experimenting with different ways of communicating. With using images, with your design, it translates across your blog in lots of different ways.

So, what have you played with on your blog? How have you been a bit playful? How have you experimented? What have you learnt? What has worked for you in your style and what doesn’t work for you in your style?

I’d like to hear your comments in the comments below this video.

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

Become a Playful Blogger and Inject Some Energy into Your Blogging

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