Important Blogging Rules Every Guest Blogger Must Know

As a guest blogger or collaborative content marketer, you are expected to showcase your talent in the website of your host. If you have guest blogging as part of your overall content marketing strategy, you had better be good at your trade. You must therefore know the rules of guest blogging and play by the rules. If you can consistently create good content around topics relevant to the audience of your host blog, using the right and appropriate format, and directly promote your content and the host website, you’ll quickly endear yourself to your host. Thereafter, if you follow the rules and keep to your host’s lead, you can succeed as a guest blogger. That success rubs off on your host as well as your own business. That makes the relationship mutually beneficial to both the host and the guest blogger. In this relationship, the golden rule is read the rules/guidelines, reread the rules/guidelines and keep strictly within the rules/guidelines in your guest blogging activities.

 

Therefore, if you want to be a great guest blogger, it is important you know these here tips/rules/guidelines.

Do Your Homework Well

Knowledge and preparation are vital keys to successful guest blogging. Always do your homework well before starting out. Part of this preparation is proper investigation of your host blog before selecting them. You must know something about the audience, the blog niche, the categories and tags for the content, frequency of publication/updates, preferred topics, and if by-lines and backlinks allowed on the content. This information will enable you to prepare well enough for the huge task of guest blogging ahead.
 
Review and Understand the Guidelines

Don’t ignore the blogging guidelines as related to your blog host. Always review and understand the guidelines well enough as you start off and as you blog along. Whatever the guidelines require you do, be sure to comply. Some guidelines may require you to first submit an expression of interest form, or a pitch and even a completed article and your concise Bio. Compliance with these requests to the satisfaction of your blog host helps to quickly cement your guest blogging relationship.

Create Only Unique and Relevant Quality Content

Do not ignore consistent good content. That is what attracts readership. You can always review what’s been published on a particular topic then give the topic a bit of twist to provide fresh and additional information for the benefit of your readers. If you manage to consistently come up with an uncommon angle about a particular topic such that your content manages to provide a fresh take on the topic, you have very bright chances of impressing your host website’s submission reviewer and the audience.

Carefully Pick Your Target Websites

One of the major benefits of guest blogging is to extend your reach beyond your website and your brand. That way, your content manages to reach more readers, secures quality backlinks from authoritative domains, and increases your social-sharing opportunities. That naturally translates to more traffic back to your website. It is important to figure out which sites reach the people you want to reach and which domains offer more credibility to your content and brand. Thereafter, you can carefully pick your target websites before you guest blog on their sites. 

Conform with Set Formats

Most blog websites have their preferred blog formats. The reason you must avoid submitting content on a radically different topic or format. You do not have the luxury of content experimentation as you can have on your own blog website. It is best to fit your content into your host’s blogging environment as much as practicable. Unless you have express permission to do so, never submit a content type that your host blog is not used to publishing. If it becomes absolutely necessary to publish something a bit different, you can explore the possibility of convincing your host blog to expand its focus to your particular format or topic of interest.

Write Only for Their Audience

A guest blogger writes solely for the audience of his host blog. If your content fits in seamlessly for the readers, they may not even know you are a guest blogger unless your bio says so. Write content to fit what the audience expects. This content is reinforced with a matching blog style, factual and informative content as well as educating and entertaining content. Your content must focus fully on how it can help your audience and not as disguised ads for selling anything. It should not in any way be perceived by your audience as a way to get as many backlinks as possible to your website.

Always Submit Original Content

In content marketing, content is king. The best content for guest blogging is original content. Some host blogs don’t accept content that’s been published anywhere else on the internet. It is easy for them to detect any content that’s been published elsewhere through Copyscape software for instance. Some blogs may accept content if a disclosure is made and proper acknowledgement and attribution shown. Failure to do this, you risk getting blacklisted.

Don’t Fail to Promote Your Content

Promoting your content vigorously is highly beneficial to your host blog and your own website. It is therefore advisable to widely share your content on appropriate online channels particularly social media channels. While sharing, be sure to include links to the original post. That helps with directing traffic to the right places.

Routinely Engage with Your Readers

If you routinely engage with readers, you can get useful feedback and even great ideas for more content. User generated content too is very useful for SEO. Try to always read and respond to all comments generated by the content you posted. It is also advisable to track where your content is promoted on social media and carefully interact with any comments posted therein.

Always Follow Up Diligently

By following up, you can always review performance feedback to evaluate the success of your content. If you detect contents not doing well, you can find out why then take remedial actions. Poor performance of content may have to do with issues relating to your blog headlines, your audience, the topics and even your general approach to blogging. It is good too to always check in with the blog editor or director of your host blog. That way, you can tap into their thoughts and opinions about how well you are doing as a guest blogger. You can share your host blog editor’s opinion together with your content stats as intro for other guest blogging opportunities.

Write to an Appropriate Length

Most host blogs usually have word count ranges for the blogs they allow. Their blogging guidelines usually specify this. Even if not specified, you can spot-check the length of existing content then craft your own content to fit in. You diminish the likelihood of your articles being accepted if you write too long or too short.

Respect Facts

In blogging, facts are sacred. They help to enhance credibility and authority. Always make sure your facts are correct and all direct quotes/statistics attributed appropriately. When it comes to quoting statistics and figures, be sure to get to the original source to verify before quoting. If you are unable to verify any information or statistics, it is advisable to exclude them from your content.

Follow the Stylebook of the Site

Most blog submission guidelines often specify the site’s stylebook. Just stick with it. In some cases you may be required to stick with American grammar or English grammar and that includes the dictionary type too. Stick with their formatting style as well and be sure to stick with the steps provided by the host website to submit your content.
 
Always Make a Case for Your Content

It is part of blog promo to always make a case for your content. If you are given an opportunity to craft an introductory email, make it brief but intriguing. You can customize it for the site as proof and to show you know the audience and the purpose of the blog. That helps to project why your authorship and content should work well on the site. If you introduce yourself well enough through your accomplishments, you can quickly build authority, social proof, and a great rapport with your audience.

Quickly Establish Your Credibility

You need credibility to build authority, social proof and rapport with your audience. Credible references are essential here. For this reason, you can always cite relevant outlets where you’ve published content, and if convenient, demonstrate your content’s effectiveness with credible stats and laurels. Don’t leave out your bragging rights if you are not compelled to. They help your credibility.

Diligently Scrutinize Feedback

User generated content is helpful for a blog’s SEO. The reason you cannot afford to ignore feedback from your audience. If you diligently review the comments and questions posed through feedback, it can help you to craft new content or to retouch old content with new information. You may even decide to take down an old post if the feedback you get makes it necessary.

How to Promote Your Website like a Pro

If you have a website, and you greatly need to have one if you are a serious marketer, you must devise ways to promote it with a view to attracting traffic to it. You need very clear strategies to do so if you want your efforts to yield good results. What requires the most attention is how to use these strategies not just to increase the visibility of your site but most importantly to increase the quality and standing of the site. To promote your site like a Pro, you must do what the Pros like to do. Here are some of the strategies real Pros recommend particularly about design, layout, aesthetics, presentation, hosting and actual operation of any website meant for online business marketing purposes.

Make it simple to use and navigate

Depending on your type of business, simple sites always give better results than complex and complicated sites. The Pros always advise that such sites must be clean, simple, sleek, and very fast in loading time. If can avoid excessively large images and too many fancy features on the site, that can help a great deal on its navigation since large images and fanciful features tend to slow down navigation on any site. The easier you make it for someone to browse through your site, the better their chances of staying longer on the site or even winding up subscribing or making a purchase.


 
Have on it many channels of feedback and Interaction

In any business, a 2-way communication is very vital. The more and easier ways visitors can interact with your site, the better chances of your site becoming more and better known. The more you allow users to interact on your site, the more they will do so. The more they interact with your site, the more likely they are to become interested in it. How do you better enhance this interaction? Install on the site, email contact button, allow users to comment and even engage in conversations with some token moderation. Allow users to rank the site and vote on comments with likes and dislikes. Even sharing and live chat features on the site are helpful as well.

Foster an onsite community

Community is where group interaction and communication really takes place and works well. As you design and build your site, you must factor in and think of the type of community that you want to foster. By allowing interaction, responding quickly, and moderating the discussions onsite, you are, in essence, creating a community. It is not good for business to always push your product/service on everyone you come across. Pros advise that it is best to always create awareness first before you make your product/service available. Fostering and working in an onsite community of like-minded fellows enables you to do that fairly easily.

Be very liberal with visitors’ participation
 
If you want to sell and sell well, you must be ready to deal with people at all times taking into account the complex nature of every human being. In our complex world of today, most people not only want to be seen, they want to be heard as well. Everyone thus always has an opinion to express about any and every issue. You must therefore device ways on your site to allow visitors to interact freely with your site and with others. People always like to bring their knowledge and wisdom into any conversion. By allowing them to freely do so, a bit of moderation directly by you is of essence. Set and maintain boundaries by monitoring and moderating your site yourself. This type of check should not in any way be seen or construed as akin to command and control. Real freedom particularly of expression and choices is very good for business. So, you must allow liberal freedom to visitors to your website.

Respond to feedback very quickly

Quick response to inquiries is very good for business. Your site must be known by others as a quick response site. That notion helps to promote it a great deal. No matter the type of inquiry, even if it is mere commenting, filling out a form or sending an email, online visitors always want a quick response from a responsive site. The real reason you must make your website responsive and quickly too. Timely responses always manage to help move relationships forward while the interest therein is still keen and fresh.

Personally monitor and moderate your website 

Freedom of choice and decisions is very good for business. Allowing real time interaction onsite is crucial to a successful website operation. But, too much uncontrolled freedom is a danger to it as well. As the site owner, you must set boundaries for all your visitors to stay within. Adequate allowances must be made so as not to allow these boundaries to be unduly restrictive. If they are too restrictive, you may end up scaring away visitors you are keen on retaining. People tend to abuse excessive liberty online by spamming and being abusive. Both must be checked directly by the site owner who may need to invest a bit of time and energy to delete or moderate spammy and offensive comments. That is what the Pros do.


 
Integrate your site into larger online communities
 
To integrate your site into larger online communities, you inevitably must turn to social media. Because of their huge popularity and ease of sharing messages by millions and millions of users, social media is the best place to integrate your site and latch into the activities of a huge and very active online community. Social media sites are best used not only to draw traffic to your site, but to demonstrate how your site and eventually the community you desire to create on your site manages to fit into larger communities which online platforms represent. A very fitting and productive goal is to design your site with the social media features that allow for easy integration with these larger communities. That is what the Pros do and they highly recommend.

Last Line!

Aside from having interesting and entertaining content on your website, deploying the foregoing strategies will make it more attractive to others. Websites give better results if you use a format that works well on different types of media. For flexibility and versatility, your website should be readable and attractive to read on different devices like smart phones, tablets, TVs and desktops, irrespective of whatever operating system or browser used to view them. That is how the Pros get it done and they highly recommend too.

6 Smart Ways to Make Unhappy Customers Happy

“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.” - Jim Rohn

Smart business owners are coming to terms with the fact that happy customers are good for business. How to keep customers happy has therefore become a common concern for many business owners. If as it happens often a customer isn’t happy, it is smart to use some tried-and-tested strategies to turn things around. Here are some of the strategies some top entrepreneurs routinely use to handle unhappy customers.

01. Take full responsibility for mistakes. When any of your customers gets agitated about your product or service, do not make the mistake of shifting blames. Take full responsibility and get to work on the issue immediately. Be sure to personally communicate with the concerned customer. Never make the mistake of delegating this duty. When customers realize they are dealing with the “real man” behind the business, it gives them real assurances and that makes them happy.



02. Give your customers a listening ear. Be available always for your customers no matter how busy you are. Many times, customers are unhappy because no one actually listens to their complaints. That is very true! As a business owner, when such disputes arise, you can listen directly and resolve them yourself. A direct telephone conversation with the complaining customer comes very handy here. That goes a long way to douse tension and calm frayed nerves most of the time.

03. Habitually engage your customers. Doing this shows that you value your customers and their concerns. You can directly engage your customers through feedback throughout the buying process or by asking for their preferences even during product development. It is generally true that the more businesses engage with customers, the happier they are.

04. Show empathy and never forget to say sorry. Sorry is a very powerful and highly emotional word to use in business. Never forget to connect to your customers’ emotional levels as a way of reminding them you're only human and are trying everything possible to make them happy. Show genuine empathy with their concerns and be as transparent as possible to make them understand you are doing everything to have the issue of their concern resolved very quickly. That somehow manages to make them happy to allow you resolve the matter.

05. Respond fast to customer concerns. Quick response is always a very vital key in any dispute resolution. In resolving customer disputes, speed could be more essential that even the solution. Without speed, many customers probably won’t even give you the opportunity to find a solution. They could be that impatient.

06. Resolve customer concerns without delay. Always remember that no matter what business you are in, you always have real competitors out there snapping at your heels to take away your customers. Quick fixing of problems could be their selling points to achieve their goals. So, to keep your own customers happy and loyal to you, you must find practical and credible ways to quickly resolve customer concerns. Customers are always happy when they have the full assurances that your business can deliver quick solutions to their problems.