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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Today I’m continuing with answers to the questions presented to me by my customers and readers. And question we will work with today is equally vital to the blogs of every size because it deals with most vital aspect that determines blog success – Targeted Traffic!

In the image above you can really see the less common variant of problem from a blogger who already gets decent amount of visitors and simply need to expand and continue with the growth. Overcoming traffic plateau is EXTREMELY vital as each and everyone of us will have to deal with it, at one point or another…

How To Overcome Traffic Plateau And Get More Targeted Traffic?

First I want to say – Congratulations!

If you are facing same “problem” as a customer who submitted question above – you have managed to achieve already more then many blogs ever will. 1800 unique visitors per day is nothing to sneeze on and quite an accomplishment! In fact in some niches it might be close to maximum of what you will see, unless you start taking more direction actions…

Step 1 – Evaluate Where Most Of Your Current Traffic Coming From

This will be the most vital step as we need to know exactly What Works for you right now! And in order to get this done – we need some form of Stats Tracking implemented that provides us with honestly detailed information.

I personally prefer and teach my Expert WordPress customers how to integrate Google Analytics, as it is free, simple to add to your blog (just insert their javascript before the </body> closing tag in footer.php) and provides decent level of stats.

If you haven’t been using Google Stats before – you need about a month worth of stats to get more or less accurate picture on where most of your visitors are coming from. Once you identify your traffic sources – go to step 2

Step 2 – Isolate 3 Traffic Sources And Identify What Promotion Associated With It

Time is precious and for us to increase amount of visitors coming to your blog we need to identify which of your promotional efforts or perhaps SEO strategies work right now and concentrate more effort on it.

Implement Rinse And Repeat Strategy!

If something is already working for your blog it only makes sense to do more of the same to get even more traffic. Couple examples could be:

• Search Engines show up as major traffic source but when you look at what content brings most of the traffic you find that you have many posts deliver a bit of traffic each but combined make a large Volume!
  Conclusion – Your SEO Efforts work and each post properly optimized for search engines delivers traffic even though only just a bit each post individually.
  Action Plot – Do a long tale keyword research, write more posts optimized for ranking for long tale ranking.
• eZineArticles.com shows as one of the largest Direct Referrals.
  Conclusion – your article marketing works as designed and article directory delivers you not only the traffic you need but also new loyal readers and blog subscribers.
  Action Plot – Continue your article marketing efforts and simply increase number of articles you submit. If you simply double the number of submitted articles you should effectively double the number of new visitors from that source.

And same principal can be applied to ANY traffic source. All you have to do is Identify The Source, Associate Promotional Effort Responsible for it, Rinse and Repeat but increase intensity!

In my personal experience 80/20 rule applies perfectly to the traffic driving strategies – 20% of your efforts will deliver 80% of your traffic and in this part I simply question that you identify what 20% of your Traffic Driving Effort produce results, cut out the other 80% and then…

Double Your “Proven To Work” Efforts – Double Your Traffic!

Now you still left about 60% of promotional efforts left unused after you cut out what is not working and doubling what does. So lets place this effort into…

Step 3 – Finding New Sources

While strategy above should help you overcome the traffic plateau and effectively get a lot more of visitors, it is based on thought of simply taking advantage of what already works and ignoring the fact that these sources might have their own limits.

Reality is – if you don’t branch out and continue to search for new sources of traffic – you will eventually hit the plateau again. Unique Visitors number might be a lot higher but problem will still be same – luck of growth.

You simply must continue to grow, don’t settle on any single strategy and when you find one that works – add it to your 20% of the “working efforts” and continue to search for new ones. This will obviously be different for each blogger as it will be determined but what you currently do that works. Here are some of the more common:

• SEO
• Article Marketing
• Social Marketing
• Forum Marketing
• Video Marketing
• Blog Marketing
• Link building
• Your own strategy here…

You get the point!

And here is what I have found other bloggers say about Traffic Plateau and How to Overcome It:

• Darren Rowse in 6 Reasons Your Blog Traffic Might Be Declining [And What to Do About It] stated: “While we all want to see our traffic rise the reality is that every blog has days, weeks and even months where traffic levels out or even decreases. This can be quite distressing for bloggers who have huge hopes and dreams for their blogs.”
• Tibi Puiu in Get Your Blog Moving: Break The Plateau! writes – “And just like life a blog will pass through several stages of existence from birth, to its moment of climax, to its inevitable death. During its lifetime, if it’s long enough of course, a blog will fluctuate numerous times on up-down scales and ever so often you’ll find that for a limited time it doesn’t go up, nor does it go down, but just stagnates. This is called a plateau.”
• Daniel Scocco in 4 Steps to Increase Your Blog Traffic shares – “Just make sure to do the 4 steps as plotted and to spend the two hours and a half every day (obviously if you have more time available you can expand the time spent on each of the four steps proportionally)”

—————————————————————————————-

For the beginner, the blog learning curve can be steep. As well as all the technical and blog visibility issues, there are questions about focus, content types and research, and of course reaching readers.

You’re plugging away, day after day, and getting small in the way of recognisable success. How can you stay motivated during what can be a very trying time? Here are the techniques I use.

1. Do what you like.

Staying motivated is a whole lot simpler when you’re constantly thinking about, and dealing with, the topic you blog about. If you like your topic, you’ll find it simpler to reckon up content thoughts, engage with readers, and establish a warm and welcoming voice that encourages rapport and develops readership.

2. Take it one step at a time.

When you start a blog, it’s simple to be overwhelmed by all the things you feel you should be doing to help it grow. Realise up front that your blog isn’t likely to be an overnight super-success and pace yourself. Instead of focusing on what you haven’t done yet, spend time each week assessing the things you have done, and considering ways to build on those results.

If you’re going to avoid burnout, you need to be kind to yourself. Otherwise, it’s all too simple to tell yourself it’s too hard, you don’t have time, and to give up.

3. Plot, plot, plot.

If you haven’t already, develop a flexible, but clear plot of attack for building up your blog’s content and reach. A focused plot will help you to keep your expectations of yourself in check, and to test and assess the results of what you do.

This kind of periodic review will give you information that you can feed back into your efforts to make each new promotional approach more successful, and helps you avoid the must-do-everything-now, scattergun approach that quickly exhausts even the most motivated blogger.

As you plot, you’ll likely identify some simple wins — things that you expect will be fulfilling or gratifying on some level. Perhaps these are tasks that will pull in a lot of readers, or maybe you just know you’ll really delight in doing them. Try to space these jobs so that when the going gets tough, you know you have a favourite task just around the corner. This can make a huge difference to your motivation over time.

4. Allow for downtime.

Once you’ve got a plot, fit some downtime into it. Make sure you’re not always operating at breakneck speed, or that if you are, it’s only for a small, manageable period. Be sure to build in time out for family and friends, and to be flexible about your schedule.

Above all, let yourself really delight in that time off — don’t spend it guiltily obsessing about all the things you should be doing to build your blog.

5. Realise that everyone has terrible days.

It’s right. Some of us even have terrible weeks! And months. It doesn’t mean you should throw in the towel or that you don’t have what it takes. Of course you have it — the thing is, you need to manage it to get the most out of it. If you have a terrible day, don’t beat yourself up. Accept that this is part of life.

If you feel like giving up, let yourself feel it. Stare your discomfort in the face and see if there isn’t some way you can overcome it, or work around it, and make your blog better in the process. After all, necessity is the mother of invention. Sometimes, it’s the thin end of the wedge that gives us the impetus to innovate solutions that make our blogs — and our work on them — infinitely more enjoyable.

These are the main ways I keep motivated about blogging. What kinds of techniques do you use?

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

Avoid Blogger Burnout: 5 Tips to Save Your Sanity

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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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Eearlier in the week I questioned readers to suggest their favourite free WordPress plugins. The response was fantastic and I’ll pull together a compilation of the most mentioned ones in the coming weeks.

But I’d also like to get your suggestions on the most useful Premium WordPress Plugins.

Over the last few years we’ve seen more and more premium (or paid) WordPress plugins released. At first many bloggers were skeptical about paying for plugins but of late I’ve noticed a bit of a shift and more and more bloggers are willing to pay for quality premium plugins.

If you’re a blogger who has forked out a few dollars for a premium WordPress plugin – I’d like to get your feedback on which ones you’ve found most useful.

So which are your favourite Premium WordPress Plugins – and Why?

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

Premium WordPress Plugins – What are Your Favourites?

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