The advantages to guest blogging are significant. You build valuable backlinks to your website which may seduce visitors down your sales funnel. You get the SEO juice associated with posting on reputable blogs. You bring awareness to your branding, and build yourself as a subject expert.

You want to be strategic in terms of where you guest blog to make the best use of your time. Google’s search algorithms are akin to a popularity contest at a high school. Getting a backlink from a popular site is worth more than a backlink from a site that’s less popular.

How can you tell how popular a site is relative to other sites? Use Google’s PageRank tool to weed out the blogs that don’t bring in a significant amount of traffic. This is an effective way to narrow down the list of blogs you want to target.

Make sure that you review any guest blogging guidelines that are available. You can use this information to see if there is a fit, and to save you time asking questions that are already answered on the blog.

Although it’s often not mandatory, it’s good practice to submit blogs in html format. This helps the blogger save time formatting posts.

Consider including images with your posts. The blog owner may choose to use the images or not, but having that option saves the owner time, and will be more likely to use your guest post. Flickr is an excellent source for photos. Just make sure you properly credit the source.

Want to really make your posts standout relative to other guest bloggers? Include a link to other pages on the site. This could take the form of connecting to other relevant posts or even a related sales page.

I welcome guest bloggers, so read my guest blogger guidelines and let’s get you published!