Grow Your Busi­ness with Triberr: #5 Guest Blogging

Wel­come to Seg­ment Five of the Grow Your Busi­ness On­line with Triberr eSeries!

This is the fifth seg­ment of the Triberr eS­eries. If you haven’t read the pre­vi­ous seg­ments, you can find the first four in­stall­ments here:

1. Net­work­ing on Triberr
2. Mas­sive Triberr reach
3. In­creas­ing Cred­i­bil­ity and Cus­tomer Base
4. Men­tors and Lead­ers in Your Niche!

Today’s seg­ment is about us­ing Triberr to find guest post­ing opportunities!

Triberr.com is a blog­ger com­mu­nity; that’s what makes it a good place to start mak­ing con­tacts for guest blogging.

If you’re a blog­ger you’re most likely fa­mil­iar with the two sides of guest blogging.

The pub­lisher

As a pub­lisher (i.e. blog owner) you can use guest au­thors to get ad­di­tional con­tent for your blog.  This helps you to pub­lish con­tent more fre­quently, while not hav­ing to write every­thing yourself.

More fre­quent con­tent means more fre­quent read­ers, and more Google love.  Yes, con­stantly up­dated con­tent is one of the most im­por­tant rank­ing fac­tors for Google in 2013 and the years to come.

With every­body crank­ing up their con­tent mar­ket­ing ef­forts, it’s get­ting harder and more dif­fi­cult to keep up.  Get­ting guest posts is one way to help your website.

The au­thor

As an au­thor, you can use guest posts to pub­lish your con­tent on other people’s blogs.  The ad­van­tage is that you get your ar­ti­cles in front of new read­ers who prob­a­bly haven’t heard of you before.

If you write good stuff, oth­ers WILL no­tice you!

The guest post will at least fea­ture a back link to your own blog.  Of­ten it will also fea­ture links to your so­cial me­dia pro­files, or to any page you want to promote.

Most blog own­ers are both a pub­lisher and au­thor at the same time. If this is you, then guest blog­ging is most in­ter­est­ing for you.  You can get more con­tent for your blog, and in­crease vis­i­bil­ity of your own blog by adding your con­tent to other sites.

Each guest post­ing con­tact you make is worth twice as much! Think about it, once you in­vited some­one to post on your blog, you can soon fol­low up and of­fer to post on her blog in re­turn. And vice versa, of course.

Is Guest Blog­ging Get­ting A Bad Rep?

But, wait a mo­ment, isn’t guest blog­ging get­ting a bad name?  Haven’t I read re­cently I shouldn’t do guest blog­ging anymore?

In­deed,  there are some prob­lems aris­ing. As usual, this is due to SEO spam­mers. Here’s a short his­tory of guest blog­ging gone bad:

1. When guest blog­ging first be­came pop­u­lar it was a very sim­ply thing. Blog­gers who knew each other would use the op­por­tu­nity to write on each other’s blog. The writ­ers who wrote the posts were ac­tual blog­gers, writ­ing in their field of expertise.
2. Soon more and more peo­ple jumped on board to in­crease back links to their blogs by sub­mit­ting guest posts.  As long as those were still gen­uine blog­gers, that was ok.
3. Every­thing broke lose when Google re­leased its Panda and Pen­guin up­dates, de­stroy­ing lots of crappy SEO work that had been done.  Since then the SEO in­dus­try has un­leashed SEO mi­graines upon blogs. Hun­dreds, if not THOU­SANDSs, of poorly writ­ten guest posts are cre­ated each day by ghost­writ­ers (not blog­gers) for no other pur­pose than get­ting a back link.

Les­son learned:  Do not ac­cept guest posts from SEO writ­ers or SEO agencies.

Here’s where Triberr comes in.  Un­like so-called ‘guest-blog­ging-com­­mu­ni­ties,’ Triberr is NOT a play­ground for SEO agen­cies or SEO free­lancers.  There may be a few, but even those show up with their real iden­tity and their own writing.

Triberr Con­nects You To Real Blog­gers, Real Writ­ers!   Since we’re al­ready in part 4 of this Triberr se­ries, I won’t re­peat all the de­tails. I’ll fo­cus on what’s rel­e­vant to find­ing guest blog­gers for your blog, or find­ing blogs to pub­lish your own guest post.

Triberr is a net­work site where blog­gers can con­nect in groups called tribes.

• There you can read, share, and com­ment on posts from other blog­gers. This will be­come im­por­tant in a moment!
• You ac­cess a sim­ple fo­rum, called bonfires.
• You’ll find links to everyone’s blog and Twit­ter profile.

1. Your First Stop For Guest Post­ing Op­por­tu­ni­ties On Triberr:

The Bon­fires:  This is the fo­rum sec­tion where you can post guest blog­ging of­fers and can read of­fers from other blog own­ers or authors.

The screen­shot be­low shows you how to ac­cess the ‘Look­ing for Guest­posts’ forum.

Now, don’t ex­pect mir­a­cles from this fo­rum.  As you can see, it’s not very busy.  Less than half of all of­fers in this fo­rum get a re­sponse from some­one in­ter­ested.  I’ve checked sev­eral pages back.

If you re­spond to other blogger’s of­fers, your re­sponse will be well re­ceived, as they are rare.

It’s more im­por­tant, how­ever, to get your own of­fers into the fo­rum.  Click ‘new post’ to sub­mit your own entry.

Use these tips to in­crease your chances of get­ting a response:

Put the most cru­cial info first. I.e. your niche, and whether you’re a pub­lisher look­ing for con­tent or an au­thor look­ing for a blog.  As you can see in the screen shot, the fo­rum list­ing will only show the first 8 to 10 words of your post. Get both items of in­for­ma­tion into those first 8 words!

Pro­vide an easy way to con­tact you.  Un­for­tu­nately Triberr does not of­fer a way to con­tact other Triberr mem­bers di­rectly. So, if you don’t tell peo­ple what to do, they’ll be confused.

You’ll get best re­sults if your post clearly states how to con­tact you.  Ide­ally, you’d setup a con­tact form for that pur­pose on your web site.  If you pre­fer to pro­vide an email ad­dress, keep in mind that it is vis­i­ble to every­one on the internet.

BREAKING NEWS:
Dino Do­gan, Triberr founder, just told me, lit­er­ally while I’m work­ing on this post, that this prob­lem will soon be his­tory.  In his own words: “There IS a Di­rect Mes­sage op­tion when you’re part of Triber­r’s in­flu­ence mar­ket­ing cam­paigns. And we’ll roll out DM op­tion to the en­tire pop­u­la­tion soon”

So for now, still add your con­tact info to your Bon­fire post, later we can use DM.

That’s great to know.  I’m amazed how these guys pull some­thing new out of their hat every day.  I could tell you about the up­com­ing “In­ti­macy Es­ca­la­tion Model,” but that’s a topic for an­other post. ;-)

2. Let’s Turn Up The Heat: Con­tact Blog­gers Directly

The more you net­work, the more re­sults you get. That’s true in any busi­ness, and it’s true in blogging.

The strat­egy is very sim­ple, and it’s the same for get­ting your own guest posts out to other blogs or get­ting new au­thors for your blog:

1. Chose the peo­ple you want to work with.
2. Send them your offer.
3. Rinse and repeat.

The ‘send them your of­fer’ part is a bit tricky since Triberr doesn’t al­low you to con­tact them di­rectly.  You’ll have to find other plat­forms to con­nect with them, with­out re­ally know­ing how of­ten they check those platforms.

Look at their web site first. Smart blog­gers will de­tail their pre­ferred way of con­tact there.

Next go to Face­book. This is still the most used so­cial net­work. Be aware that mes­sages you send to some­one who is not your ‘friend’ will be stored in their other folder. Most peo­ple don’t even know that folder ex­ists, and they might die be­fore they ever get to see your mes­sage. So while you’re at it, hit the friend but­ton and send your of­fer with your friend request.

Use these tips to in­crease your chances of get­ting a response:

Don’t do the on­line equiv­a­lent of cold-cal­l­ing.  Don’t spam peo­ple who have never heard of you and your blog with your guest post­ing offers.

In­stead, build re­la­tion­ships first, send your of­fers later.  On Triberr you start build­ing re­la­tion­ships by do­ing any of these things:

1. Ap­ply for mem­ber­ship to someone’s tribe.
2. In­vite some­one to join your tribe.
3. Fre­quently share someone’s blog posts.
4. Most ef­fec­tive: Com­ment on someone’s blog posts us­ing the Triberr com­ment system.
5. Ad­di­tion­ally con­nect with them at least on Twit­ter (most Triberr ac­tiv­ity is re­lated to Twit­ter), and pos­si­bly other so­cial net­works, too.

Irish asked me to re­mind you to net­work within your niche.  That is true not only in the gen­eral sense, but also specif­i­cally when guest post­ing.  I sec­ond that.  It makes lit­tle sense to post guest posts to blogs un­re­lated to your busi­ness.  You won’t find read­ers in­ter­ested in your prod­ucts, ser­vices, or writ­ing.  Also, as a pub­lisher, you shouldn’t even think about con­fus­ing your read­ers and Google by pub­lish­ing un­re­lated posts to your blog.

Let’s wrap it up: Guest post­ing is a win-win deal for pub­lish­ers and au­thors, and roles can even be switched for added ben­e­fit.  Triberr is a great place to net­work with pas­sion­ate, real blog­gers – and in this post you’ve seen 2 ways how to get your of­fers out:

•  The Bon­fires (fo­rum)
•  Di­rect con­tact af­ter loosely networking.

This post was first pub­lished at: Dedicated2life.com.