Guest posting help

[Dawnielou]

Hello all

I'm a reasonably new blogger and have read quite a bit about guest posting being beneficial for your own blog.

My question is, how do you go about doing a guest post for someone? Do you just write a post and send it to the other blogger or do you contact the blogger first? Also who decides what topic the guest post should be about?

I'd appreciate any guidance!

I think that you should contact the other blogger first and see if they would like to host a guest post from you. It's a good idea to have built up a relationship with the blogger beforehand though, perhaps on Twitter or by regular commenting on their blog, as I know that I personally get a lot of requests to host a commercial guest post from people that I have never heard of and that are just looking for a link back to their company, and I just ignore them. If someone is happy to post something from you then you can agree a topic with them.

I agree you should contact them first, but I have written guest posts for people I don't know (for commercial purposes, in my other life as a freelancer) and I think the most important thing is to have a body of work to prove that you can write, so they know they'll be getting a good post. It's also important to understand what their blog is all about and what you can write that would fit well with it. e.g. I had a request from someone wanting to write something health related for my blog (London with a Toddler) and I said No. Someone else offered to review Mudchute city farm, I said yes.

Bit rude to ignore people entirely JenniferJJ! We are real people, even if we're working on behalf of clients, and you might never know when you're going to run into one of us in real life, at a bloggers' conference or somesuch. It doesn't take much effort to say "not right for us, thanks"

Just to clarify, I don't ignore requests from people that sound genuine, and I have accepted many guest posts from fellow bloggers that have built up a relationship with me first!

I get a lot of requests from people, particularly from the US, that are spamming (I assume this because they go into my junk folder). They are not bloggers, they are companies looking for backlinks, and have clearly done no research whatsoever into my blog.

Sometimes you cold find somebody in Mumsnet: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/bloggers/1782150-Where-to-find-guest-bloggers

Just thought about something else. Sometimes blogs/sites run competitions where the winners have as a part of the prize indexed link to their own blogs. You could take part in those But much better is running competition yourself. Because competitions like that are run this way everybody write a post on their own blog with indexed link with specific text to the blog which runs competition.

Hope it makes some sense. One of competitions like that is somewhere nearby on www.mumsnet.com/Talk/bloggers . And I just saw something less serious (you just comment about Halloween): www.mums-dads.co.uk/news/happy-halloween-2013/ but with less participants it's more chance to win