An Invitation to Guest Posters

A little while ago I explained how I needed to change my strategy and reduce the posting frequency on this blog. An idea that I toyed with was inviting guest posters so I ran a poll in that blog post.

The most important statistic is the number of people who didn’t vote at all. Out of over 2000 subscribers, less than 100 voted so from that I can conclude that the majority of my readers really don’t mind if I have guest posters or not. The poll ran pretty much neck in neck for about a week and then finally the “yes” vote managed to just about pull ahead.

My personal feeling is that a few select guest posts could be a welcome change but I would not want to overuse them. I had originally suggested a weekly slot which I now think would be too much. I will use no more than two guest posts per month.

So, the purpose of this post then is to invite those of you who wish to guest post to submit your work to me. I’ll need to lay down a few guidelines:

Subject Matter

As this is a personal blog branded to my name, I need to make sure that any opinions expressed are my own. Even though every guest post will be properly credited to to the author and linked to his site, many readers miss this and still see the guest post as having come from the blog owner. Therefore, I’ll ask that the posts be guides, resources etc and not opinions. And I don’t want to see “10 top tips for a killer sales letter” :-)

Posts should stick within the topics that I cover here, that is generally Internet Marketing, Social Media and blogging. I’ll be particularly interested in posts about Social Media as that is a topic of growing interest for me.

Post Quality

This is a hard one to pin down but I’m not going to publish anything that I feel doesn’t add value for my readers. I see a lot of posts around the blogosphere which are well written and reasonably informative yet they are just “blah”. Its rather difficult to explain. A good post should enrich the reader in some way - teach him something, spur him into action, make him think etc. Post quality is a very subjective matter so to cover my butt I reserve the right to reject anything I don’t like for any reason whatsoever! However, if I don’t like your post I’ll try and tell you why.

Submission Details

Just email me via the contact form. You can either send me your complete post or just shoot me an idea. Either way, I won’t publish anything without reading it first and I will always write back and tell you if I’d like to use it. I’ll maintain a list of guest posts and I’ll publish them in accordance with what seems most relevant at the time. I will always contact you before I publish your work.

Please make sure you give me your full name, the title of the post and also a link to a site that you would like to have promoted in the post. Also, feel free to send me a short bio or some kind of introduction that I can add at the beginning to encourage readers to click through to your site.

If you are somebody who has emailed me about guest posting in the past then you can probably expect an email from me over the next week or two as I am going to be trawling through my email archives to contact those people - I’ll point them at this post.

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