Get Paid To Guest Blog
It is necessary to realize that recently Google has announced that it is going to crack down on those that use guest posting for the sole purpose of gaining favor with the search engines. They are not killing guest blogging in general. But as usual blog owners are in a state of panic. This could adversely affect ways to make money with it.
Guest Blogging - What is it?
As the name suggests, if you post to another blog (with their permission, of course) you are considered a guest blogger. You create your post based on either a specific topic, or one of your choosing, and you submit it to the webmaster of the blog. You in return, get a link back to your site.
But there is also the opposite scenario where someone approaches you and asks to be a guest blogger on your blog. It then is up to you the type of arrangement you wish to make with that blogger. Perhaps you want coverage on a specific topic, or you simply want a diverse topic so you let the blogger write at will.
Some bloggers create a user id for guests and return the favor. But it's truly necessary to have a great trust with each other to make sure that everything stays on the level, so to speak.
Can You Really Get Paid For Guest Blogging?
In a word, you can. If your blog is an authority site with high SERPs, you will likely get approached by many bloggers offering you money to allow them to post. And it typically is per post that you can get paid from these bloggers. But you need to be really selective about who you choose, especially in light of the recent Google announcements concerning guest blogging. You don't want link backs to the "wrong neighborhood" if you will.
But if you do trust other bloggers because either you've seen their work before or they have given you examples of their work (and you verify it's theirs) then you probably can make something of it.
Matt Cutts on Guest Blogging
If you are considering doing anything with guest blogging, it may be worthwhile to read over Matt Cutt's blog post about guest blogging:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/
My personal feeling is that as the dust settles, people will come to realize that guest blogging will continue as long as people follow some rules. Many you will want to:
- Make sure that guest posts to your web site coincide with the niche. Letting anyone write whatever they want is probably not wise.
- Don't give out user id to other guest bloggers. Of course, this means you are now going to have to play editor role.
- Make sure the post that is produced for your blog by the guest is very high quality. This sounds like it should go without saying, but this is one of the reasons for the Google crackdown.
- Ensure that the links that are being included are to "good neighborhoods" and not to spammy websites.
How To Make Money with Guest Blogging
This has already been touched upon before a bit, but if you have a great, authoritative blog already I can guarantee you are going to multiple offers for people to post on your website. You will get to pick and choose from the best of the best.
If you website is not yet an authority, then you should consider guest posting for other higher authority websites so that you can get good traffic back to your website. You may be thinking that you need to pay those other authority websites but I'm going to let you in on a secret. There are ways to approach these web owners that can actually get them to want your posts over many others.
- Read through the authority site that you would like to guest post on. See what kinds of subjects are being discussed. This is really important especially with the Google changes because you will want to create posts that are in line with the subject of their niche. Then write three or four quality articles and make them fairly lengthy (say 1500-2000 words).
- Make sure that you do not litter the content with one keyword phrase and that you instead include related or similar keywords (known as Latent Semantic Indexing). Always make sure that it is natural sounding. Make the articles super high value. Remember it's quality over quantity so even if this takes you a week or two that's okay. If this gets accepted, the traffic that comes from this could last months or even years.
- Ensure that the articles are free from any grammatical, punctuation, or spelling errors. Get professional help for this if necessary. The last thing you want is the web owner pointing out these types of errors (they may just turn you down and forget about you)
- Approach the website owner and ask if he will read through your articles to see if they fit.
- If they accept you that's great and you didn't have to pay them anything. You will get your article displayed on their website. They may have a schedule of when this happens so it could take a bit of time. I would be cautious of rushing them in any way. Ask them if they can contact you when it's published and leave it at that.
- If they don't accept you, ask them if there was anything you did wrong. If they tell you accept it gracefully and ask if they would consider you for future assignments. Also, ask if they know of anyone else who may be interested in what you have written.
You really need to weigh the risks of a Google crackdown on whether or not to pursue guest blogging. It can bring lots of traffic or it can make you money - depending where you are in the so called web food chain. But you want to make sure you keep within the guidelines of this article. Even then, there is no guarantee that search engines won't flag you.
