Guest Blogging Checklist – Part 1 – Importance of a Checklist

This is the first part of a two part series of Guest Blogging Checklist

Being a guest at somebody else’s place is a royal experience. You are treated well, special food is prepared for you – all those scrumptious meals that will make your mouth water. Plans are made according to your wish. It is almost as if you are the king of that particular house.

The hosts also have a reason why they bring a guest to their house.  Hosts get to spend quality time with guests in return of the hospitality offered by them. So, by making your stay special, they make their experience with you even more memorable.

But, in order to be invited or allowed to stay as a guest at somebody else’s place you have to behave properly and have a certain minimum set of etiquettes like table manners or social etiquettes. If you are lacking in any of those, you will not be welcome at anybody’s house.

The same applies to guest blogging. The host blogger invites a guest blogger to get some free content and add a slight change to the blog in return of the extra exposure given to the guest blogger.

Now, in order to be accepted, you need to comply to the guest blogging guidelines (it is a list of points which can be interpreted as the owner’s code of conduct) of the blog. Your articles should match the blog. You might have something different to say but your articles should not be completely off-topic.

A structured approach towards any task proves to be productive and effective. We can use a structured approach in guest blogging by maintaining a guest blogging checklist. A checklist helps  in making sure that you don’t miss out on anything crucial. If you miss out on anything important, it may lead to a rejection. Maintaining a guest blogging checklist does not mean that there is a  100% guarantee of articles being published, but the probability of articles being accepted surely increases.

My Guest Blogging Checklist includes a set of crucial steps which, in my opinion, should be never be missed in any guest article. The checklist is as follows:

1. Blog Search:

First and foremost task for guest blogging is to find a suitable host blog. Before you start searching for a suitable blog, i should make you aware of the fact that the sole purpose of guest blogging is to get more exposure and reach a wider audience. So, you have to search for blogs that are more popular than yours and ones that are centred around the same or similar niche areas.

Guest blogging on a blog that writes on a completely different topic than yours can be really disastrous for your blog, it will be a total waste of your precious time. Take an example of a gardening blogger who guest blogs at a technology blog. The technology blog has a set of readers who are following the blog because of the technology news. When they will receive a gardening article instead of a tech article, most of them will ignore the piece because it was not what they had ordered. So, this means that a very very small percentage of the readership will actually read the article. Hence you would not be gaining exposure. On other hand, you might be losing on your reputation.

Make a list of all the blogs in your niche or similar niches having significantly higher popularity than your blog and save it for future reference because you will need it whenever you want to increase your blog’s readership.

2. Study the Blog

Studying the blog is as important as searching for the blogs in your niche. You have to make it a point to carefully align your article with that of the host blog so that it doesn’t seem as a misfit.

Your first task should be to read the guest blogging guidelines. These guidelines are formulated for the sole reason that you are aware of two important things – what and how to construct an article, so that you don’t waste the host’s time and energy by asking too many questions.

Other than the guidelines, you should thoroughly study the blog. Take a look at the format and style of the writing. See, if the author adds certain images or videos to the blog articles and if that is the case, then, you should also follow the same format and add images or videos to your article.

To be continued….