Why Your Guest Posts Suck and Hard Lessons Learned from Doing it Half Right

Like everyone who works in social media, I love Mashable Copyblogger (And strikethroughs).

I came across this post last week called 17 Easy Steps to Brilliant Blog Posts. It was a guest post by Jill Chivers, who I had never heard of. The post didn’t move me, but what she did on her website I thought was brilliant and is overlooked too often by guest writers.

I normally skip right over peoples bios. They are a good idea to write, but they’re boring. Weirdly, I read hers and I even clicked on the link back to her page. I guess I read it because right above it was a tip to always write a bio. (Subliminal message? I like it!)

Welcome Copybloggers.

That was the header I saw when I landed on her page. She made a post knowing she would get traffic from copyblogger and as the icing on the cake, she made the copyblogger header her post image.

Brilliant. Now I’m interested.

This is a great idea and one that I haven’t seen enough. Everyone promotes their guest post, but they aren’t optimizing the new traffic they’re getting from making the post in the first place.

Kudos Jill.

As much as I loved this idea and that she did it, there are some things I hated about how she did it.

• Please Proofread. The first thing I notice is you link to the post calling it “16 Easy Steps” and the actual post on Copyblogger is “17 Easy Steps”.

Shit changes so fast online and maybe the name of the post changed, but no matter what happened I’ve lost a little confidence in you in the first 5 seconds on the site. (The make or break time)

• Follow your own ideas. The second tip on her Copyblogger post was, “Make sure you have one idea per post”.

I didn’t understand the one idea from the post on her website. The post was ramblings about the different things she does. I got an overview of her, but I don’t know what her website is about or what she’s selling.

• Don’t ask me to sign up for anything. I’ve read through your page a few times and I have no clue what you do.

You are bringing in a whole new audience, you need to make sure they know exactly what it is you do and what you can help them with.

She says, “You might even want to sign up for our weekly ezine (and fabulous freebies).  At the very least, it will spike my analytics graph and give me something else to look at during my weekly site statistics seminar.”

I love humor online, but I still don’t know what your ezine is or more importantly why I should sign up for it

What am I getting at? Nobody is perfect and I still love what she did. I wish instead of a long post she told me why I should care about her product or her.

There is a lot of ways to do this, but I like the soft sale.

I would have made a short post about what the site is about and what’s in it for the reader. After that, post a list of the best posts she’s written, so the reader can get a better idea if it’s a site they care about and want to opt into. The ironic thing is in her copyblogger post she littered the post with links to other copyblogger articles, but on her site she only linked offsite.

(P.S. I tried my best to use Jill’s 17 tips in this post, they are good)

Photo Credit: antmoose