Thursday, July 11, 2013

Guest Blogging: How to Land Paid Gigs



Are you sick of blogging for “expanding your presence” alone. I hear you. I have been there. Of course you should write guest posts to establish relationships with successful bloggers and attract new readers. You should post to expand your presence too.

But eventually you like getting paid for your work. If you practiced developing a skill monetizing the talent can make your job easier, right? So you want to land paid guest blogging jobs to cash in on your talents. Landing paid gigs becomes easy after you develop your writing skills.

The trick lies in improving your skills to the point where people will pay you for your work. This requires you to practice writing for many months or even years in some cases in order to command paying jobs.

Guest Blogging

If you want to get – in terms of acquiring paid guest posting jobs – you must give freely for a sufficient length of time. No set time exists; just persist, giving freely, helping people, reaching out to fellow bloggers and you can prosper through paid guest blogging opportunities.

Make Friends with Fellow Bloggers

Before you try to snag another back link try creating a buddy for your blogging life. Guest posting opportunities avail themselves to the mindful, helpful blogger. On the other side of the fence, guest posting opportunities seem to evade the selfish, greedy blogger.

You know selfish bloggers; comment drive-by’s are a frequent hallmark of bloggers only out for themselves. If you make friends with bloggers by posting valuable, helpful, usable comments to their blogs, on a persistent basis, you might just make a blogging buddy for life.

 Mindfully create comments after reading entire posts. Stop trying to get something for nothing. One quick way to make blogging friends is to simply be a friend on a daily basis.

 You can become friends with a blogger by: reading their latest blog posts, creating helpful, insightful comments which add value to the post and promoting the post across 1 or multiple social networks. This formula is easy to follow but tough to stick with, or least for the bloggers who wants backlinks over friends. 

If you go about setting up guest blogging opportunities intelligently you can make friends with ease, grow your network and score many guest blogging gigs. Once you score more guest blogging gigs – freebie gigs, that is – you can generally land guest blogging paid jobs.

Guest Blogging: Write as Many Guest Posts as Possible

I am no record setting guest blogging champion but I do create waves of guest posts when I can, reaching out to fellow bloggers, submitting my best content then continuing with my marketing and blogging campaigns. You cannot afford to be picky if you are new to guest blogging. Intelligent bloggers hop all overguest blogging opportunities frequently.

Why? Guest blogging expands your presence like few other practices. Imagine reaching an audience of 10,000 readers, or perhaps even 100,000 readers, or more, with a single blog post?

Unless you have serious blogging experience your audience likely pales in comparison to these numbers. Even if you have 10,000or 20,000 readers your audience differs from the audience of your fellow blogger.

Expand your presence with alarming speed; create helpful, usable guest posts in batches, submit to authority blogs within your niche and unless the blog you are posting to lacks quality or resides well outside of your niche, never turn down a paid guest posting gig.

 Push yourself to raise the guest blogging bar; create at least 5 or 10 guest posts every 1-2 weeks if you are hungry to land paid guest blogging gigs. Once you begin to be “all over the place” you can find yourself being pursued for free or paid guest blogging gigs.

 Sift through these opportunities carefully. Do not jump at any venture; save your time, and the time of your fellow blogger, by choosing perfect matches. If the blog caters to an audience from within your niche sign up for the gig.

 After persistently accepting free guest blogging gigs paid guest blogging gigs will find you. Sign up, create wonderful content, expand your presence, build your brand and sock away cash money in the process. One thing to keep in mind; if you want to target your readership including guest blogging SEO in your posts to attract relevant, targeted guest posting opportunities.

Create Valuable Posts for Your Blog

Be careful not to neglect your blog. Build up your readership before you network with bloggers and create guest posts in order to cement your digital footprint. Smart bloggers build their brand before going on a networking or guest posts tear. Why build somebody else’s brand exclusively by only creating guest posts or leaving relevant comments on other people’s blogs?

Create on your home based; then you can begin networking or writing guest posts to further expand your presence. The most important thing you can do as a blogger is to create blog posts. If you want to find guest bloggers guest post in as many spots as possible.

Creating posts improves your writing skills significantly. Posting quality material to your blog catches the eye of bloggers eager to pay for skilled talent. Good posts are at a premium; if you practice writing daily your skills will improve to the point where people will want to pay you for posting.

 This is why I advise you to increase your time spent blogging each day; writing 2, 3 or even 5 posts or articles boosts your writing skills quickly. Think about professionals in any endeavor; these folks get paid because they hone their craft on a daily basis. Do not be confused by bloggers who instruct you to post once daily; if you want to improve your writing skills quickly practice developing your writing skills each day.

 If you want to spend years writing and toiling post once each week or once each day. If you want to get paid guest blogging gigs in months write for 1, 2 or 3 hours daily. You are a professional blogger, correct? Take the time to learn how to write, by writing for hundreds and thousands of hours, and you will notice how quickly your blogging and writing skills improve. If you are looking for guest bloggers these individuals will find you quickly and easily as you become a more skilled blogger.

Stop Trying to Land Paid Guest Posting Gigs

This is one of the weird things about trying to make money online; the moment you cease to incessantly scrounge for paid guest blogging opportunities you seem to find paid guest posting ventures.

Put more accurately, paid guest blogging ventures find you. Many talented bloggers scare off money and paid gigs by obsessing over the prospects of getting paid for blogging.

 These unwise folks ignore any opportunity to write a guest post, turing down free ventures because they are above writing for free, or writing for an audience which does not seem sizable enough for them. If you are yet to land paid guest blogging opportunities you need to write more, posting to your blog more frequently and submitting guest blog posts at every chance you can.

 Guys, you need to be seriously hungry if you are going to make a living online. Paid ventures are out there but you need to hustle, improving your skills on a daily basis, and most of all you need to detach from receiving paid posting opportunities for these ventures to manifest for you.

One strange thing about life escapes most individuals; when you detach from outcomes, or surrender, and focus on giving of your time and talents freely, the outcomes manifest with amazing speed. If you want to find a guest blogging network create frequently and connect with fellow bloggers by promoting individuals. Use this 1-2 punch; forget about obsessing over getting paid gigs.

 I landed 2 separate paid guest posting gigs by using these tips. Oh yeah, I almost forget the last tip ;)

Even though You Need to Detach You Still Have to Look

Just because you are detaching from paid guest blogging opportunities does not mean you can get lazy. Aggressively search for paid ventures to find paid ventures.

The trick lies in spending a few minutes researching these opportunities daily without getting attached to any one venture or opportunity. Pore over message boards, online job boards and ask your fellow bloggers if they are aware of any paid guest blogging ventures.

Keep your ear to the cyber street; the vigilant, diligent bloggers finds more opportunities than the lazy unmotivated blogger. By getting after things and pushing yourself to find guest blogging ventures which directly pad your pockets you will find that there are more opportunities out there than you previously imagined.

Final Note

NEVER lowball yourself! Talented, driven bloggers sometimes do desperate, silly stuff, like writing 400 word posts for $5, or submitting free, “trial” work to people who may or may not pay them for their time and effort. Charge your worth! Have you landed paid guest posting gigs?

 How did you score paid guest blogging opportunities? Or are you struggling terribly to write paid guest posts? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

- Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/76657755@N04/