Profit from your Blog

Blogs can be real money-producers with AdSense™. You just have to know how and what: how to get AdSense to your blog and what to do to make it work at maximum capacity.


Blogs can be for profit or non-profit but most bloggers blog for the purpose of making money .

There may be some contents published to simply provide an outlet for voicing out the bloggers’ opinions and share their thoughts.
However, the general population of bloggers has the intention of profiting financially. Fortunately, there are several methods of profiting from a blog and applying these methods can help you gain money.


The Advertisements

Selling space for advertisers is one of the most common ways to profit from a blog. Since blogs that have a considerable amount of traffic can make income with ad sales, make sure that you have a target audience. The reason why bloggers choose to sell advertising is that it is a passive form of income once the traffic has progressed. Although it takes work to look for advertisers and maintain the ads on the blog, those who can achieve it can gain reasonable amount of money with the ads.

Compared to other forms of profiting from a blog, selling advertisement space can be one of the most consistent revenue streams. If you are able to maintain your ad slots filled, you should have a very good idea of just how much you can make every month.

On the negative side, selling ads requires you to have some kind of established traffic. Traffic is important because it draws interest from potential advertisers. You might find it hard to sell an ad space without traffic and it will most likely not produce much revenue. Additionally, the blog must have a target audience in order to achieve the maximum amount of cash for advertisement space. Remember that advertisers are more likely to pay if your target audience is a match to theirs.Affiliate programs are also a major resource of profits for several bloggers. Affiliate programs are excellent in a sense that they enable you to have the opportunity to make money even if your blog has a small audience. However, one bad side to affiliate programs is that there can be instances where you cannot make any money at all.

Newly created blogs feature affiliate ads most of the time compared to selling space directly to advertisers. Since selling ads is hard to do without much traffic, affiliate programs are perfect for new blogs. More so, they can be easily maintained and only take very little time.

Promoting and Premium Content

Bloggers who are service providers at the same time have an excellent opportunity to look for clients and increase their rates. Maintaining a blog that focuses on your area of expertise can help you easily become a recognized authority in your field. Additionally, it can aid potential clients to find you. You can also benefit from the increase in demand of your services and improved reputation that you build, which enable you to charge more for your services.

Aside from promoting your services, selling premium contents are also excellent ways to profit from a blog. Blogs are a massive source of information and remember that not everything has to be free. There are bloggers and business that attained success by selling some of their work. There are blogs that sell memberships on their Web sites. Although selling premium content is possible in any field, you must have the capability to give something to the reader that is worth paying for.

Blog Definitions

A blog is (short for weblog) is a personal online journal that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption.

Blogs are defined by their format: a series of entries posted to a single page in reverse-chronological order.

Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or reflect the purpose of the Web site that hosts the blog.

Topics sometimes include brief philosophical musings, commentary on Internet and other social issues, and links to other sites the author favors, especially those that support a point being made on a post.

The author of a blog is often referred to as a blogger. Many blogs syndicate their content to subscribers using RSS, a popular content distribution tool.

Great Ideas for Blogging

23 Great Ideas For Blog Posts

After you have been blogging for a while, sometimes you run out of inspiration. Here are some ideas to get you going again.

1)Write a book review

Read a good book about your topic and write a review on it. As a bonus, you can link to the book on Amazon.com and get some commissions for selling the book.

2)Review a product.

Pick a product that people in your niche will be interested in. Make sure it is something you use yourself. There are a lot of products you can link to on Amazon.com, or look for another affiliate program.

3)Review a popular blog or website about your topic.

If your readers are not familiar with your subject, or if they are new to the web, they may not know about all the resources that are available. They will be happy that you told them about it.

4)Make a list of available resources.

Find a lot of good, helpful sites about your topic. Make a list of them with a short description of each, and of course link to each one. This is the type of post that people like to bookmark or link to.

5)Explain something about your subject that might be confusing to newbies.

This is the type of information that people could be searching for, and they just might find your site when they do the search.

6)Tell why or how you first got interested in this topic.

This will let your natural enthusiasm show through, and it will encourage beginners, because you will be recalling when you were a beginner too.

7)Do a review of a relatively unknown but good blog in your niche.

Your readers will be glad to discover a new blog, and the author might be so happy for the attention that they link to your blog too.

8)Take a stand.

Take something that is controversial and tell how you feel about it. Just be careful to be respectful to both sides. You don’t want it to turn into a flame war. Besides, it is just more professional to state your opinion in a calm, objective way.

9)Tell about some mistake that you made and what you learned from it.

This will help your readers to avoid making the same mistake, and will make you seem more human to them.

10)Do a case study.

This is always very popular, because it shows some real-life application of principles. For example, for a gardening blog, you could do a case study on your own garden - what you did, what the results were, etc. Pictures would be great with this too.

11)Conduct an experiment and tell the results.

This is another very popular format, especially if the experiment is about something that people have always wondered about.

12)Do an analysis of something.

I think it was John Chow’s analysis of the biggest known Adsense earners that really made him popular. Of course, he came up with a catchy title for his post, which helped it spread even further.

13)Find some offbeat or weird website on your topic and link to it.

If you do this once in a while, it will lighten up your blog with some humor or human interest.

14)Find a good video about your topic on YouTube, and embed it in your post.

Add some commentary of your own. A video is a nice change of pace.

15)If you are a little more adventurous, create your own video post.

The blog 45n5 does this often, and it helps his unique personality to show through.

16)Be different. Do something unexpected. State something which goes against popular opinion.

The mention of 45n5 made me think of this. It is something he does often, but he seems to do it in a good-humored way so that people don’t take too much offense.

17)Find a big topic and do a series of posts about it.

People seem to love this. At least, they will keep coming back if they get interested in the series.

18)Run a poll. After it is done, discuss the results.

I have never actually done this, but it seems to be popular. People will probably come back to see the results of the poll.

19)Interview someone and post the interview on your blog.

If you pick someone interesting to interview, you could get a lot of links. The interviewee will probably link to you too. I think people often are more agreeable to interviews than you would think, especially if you don’t waste too much of their time.

20)Take something technical and explain it in a step-by-step way.

It helps to use screenshots or pictures of some kind. This works for other things besides computer stuff, too. For example, in gardening, how to plant a bulb. I know a picture would help me, because I always forget which end of the bulb is supposed to point up.

21)Tell about a personal experience.

This is often the best kind of post (if it relates to your subject matter). It makes your point more real, and people always have an easier time of making something interesting if it is a story about themselves. Just make sure it relates to your topic in some way. People don’t want to read about your cat, unless it is a cat blog! If it is a cat blog, the more cat stories, the better.

22)Use humor.

Cartoons are great. Once I posted a cartoon on my site (the cartoonist said it was ok, as long as you linked back). Somebody linked to my post on StumbleUpon, and I got visitors for a long time afterward. People just love cartoons! In fact, maybe I’ll post that one here… hmm… Make sure you have permission though - or draw your own cartoon.

23)Make a list.

An example is this post. Lists are very popular, and seem to get bookmarked and linked to a lot.
I’m sure that if you put your mind to it, you could think of even more creative ideas. So don’t get into a blogging rut - vary the type of posts that you do.

BY: Pat Doyle

Focus on Your Blog

I covered the meaning of blog focus and the benefits and reasons to narrow your blog’s focus by your writing style or content.

As part of this ongoing series on Blog Struggles, today I want to cover how to find your blog focus, and tomorrow, how to change your blog’s focus.

Finding your blog focus is not as easy to define as it may seem.

Your blog’s focus is a combination of:

*Your writing style.

*Your blogger persona.

*Your blogger perspective on the subject.

*Your blog’s content.

Your blog content often dictates your writing style, and your blogger personal. I can also reflect your perspective on the subject. So the clues lie within the blog’s content as to your blog’s focus.

How to Succed by Blogging?

I know most of you really want to become a successful blogger.

You want your opinion and thoughts posted on your blogs will be reached by millions of internet users around the world.

You might not become a popular journalist, but you dream to become a popular blogger.

But soon as you realized how hard is maintaining a blog, you immediately surrendered and stopped blogging.

And then you immediately say that blogging is not meant for you.

Well, it’s true that it’s not really easy to blog. You can easily set-up a blog at the Blogger.Com. You can easily customize the theme of your blog. And you can even easily write a blogpost. But maintaining a blog is not really easy.

Why? Why is it not easy to maintain a blog?

Yes, it might be easy to maintain blog if you have the heart to do it.

How many bloggers created blogs and started blogging? There are tons of bloggers who are interested in blogging just in few days or even few months.

But, where are they now?

Some say, they failed to update their blog because they’re busy on their studies, work or any thing. Some will even say that they stopped blogging because they lost their interest in blogging.
But if we’ll examine what really are the reasons why they’re lost in the Blogosphere, we’ll learn that it’s not their job , their studies or any thing in their life that caused them to stop blogging.

The very reason is that they don’t have the passion on blogging. They didn’t even believe that they can reach their blogging dreams.

Reach Your Dreams

For example, your dream is to become a popular blogger. Well, it’s really good to imagine yourself being popular because of your blog. To let you know, there are times that I am dreaming that I am Yuga; that my blog is already catering millions of visitors; that I am traveling around the world; and lot of dreams sprouted on my mind. But I can’t reach them if I will not try to reach them.

So, what should you do so that you’ll become popular blogger?

(1) Start Blogging

That’s really the first thing that you should do. If you still don’t have blog, then buy now a domain and webhosting services. I’m sure there are tons of cheap but reliable webhosting services that exist today.

If you have already your own domain, and webhosting account, then install Wordpress. I recommend, you to use the Wordpress blogging platform because you can easily add plugins and even choose themes for your blog from thousands of available themes online.
Once your blog is ready, then start writing blogposts.

(2) Don’t Stop Blogging

Just like when you’re climbing up a stair. You can’t reach the end of the stair if you’ll just start climbing but then when you reached the middle of the stair, you then quit and turn your back.
No! You will never reach your goal if you’ll do that. You really need to continue blogging. Give time, even just 1 hour, for blogging.

(3) Don’t Stop Learning

If you have free time, use it in digging information. Read books, magazines and even articles found on the internet. You need to fill your brain with knowledge because you can’t write quality contents for your blog if you don’t have enough knowledge on everything, especially to those related to your field. You can’t even share knowledge to your blog’s readers if you don’t have knowledge to be shared.

So, if you set a time for blogging, set also a time for digging information.

(4) Connect with People

Keep socializing with other people whether offline, online or mobile, especially those related to your field (blogging). This is one of the fastest way for you to gain popularity. You can introduce your blog to your friends and to those who will become your friends. And let them introduce you and your blog to their friends and to the friends of their friends.

(5) Believe it, You can do it

And I think, the most important thing that you should have is to believe in you. You may have your own blog; you may have enough knowledge; and you may have millions of friends out there; if you don’t believe yourself, then everything will end up nothing.

Don’t ever think that you can’t do it. Always think that you can, because the truth is you really can do everything and you can reach everything. But you must first believe yourself that you can.

Destined to Reach Your Dreams?

Now, let me tell you that I don’t really believe that those who reached their dreams are really destined to reach their dreams.

Reaching dreams really depends in you. I don’t believe that fate is there to push you up to reach the highest peak of your success. It is you who push your self up. It is you who bring your self to the highest place you want to be.

If you want to succeed in blogging, so do the things you need to do.

What is Blogging?

Blogging is a hot medium. It is easy, almost instant, publishing of content to a website, where every entry is preserved in a database and is therefore categorizeable and searchable. Content can be photographs, recipes, restaurant reviews, or anything digitally storable on a computer that you can categorize. It is taking over the world - the corporate world that is. But many executives are complacent in thinking that blogging is just something "the kids these days dabble in" Which is not the case because most businesses are using blogs for marketing their products.

Starting a blog is ridiculously cheap; indeed, blogging software and hosting can be had for free online. There are also easy-to-use ad services that, for a small fee, will place advertisements from major corporations on blogs, then mail the blogger his profits.

Blogging is all about communicating with words (and pictures, too) and is very addictive. Thus, when you're going to start a blog, you have to stay really focused on your topics of choice and the niche you desire to attract, regardless if your blogs goal is to just speak your mind or to build a strong readership followed up with some added value revenue streams.

Today blogging is more fun and rewarding because there are so many good things about it, but comment and trackback spam can tarnish the process. So make sure your blog is up to date with the latest spam software and plugins.

Blogging is one of those things which have inserted itself into American culture whether we like it or not. According to the BlogWorld site, of the 147 million Americans who use the internet, almost 40% of them read blogs. And the mean reason for this is because it shows personalities of different people worldwide. In other words it's about storytelling. Not the kind of storytelling where the story is handed down and repeated generation to generation.

Bloggers use blogs as something different which make you share your experience or knowledge with others. And I good suggest rule for a single post is 100 words only and be straight to the point.

The world of blogging is like anything else, it takes a lot of hard work and patience. At the end, success rate for making money with a blog is probably lower than someone making money by starting their own business. And the only way you can make lots of money with blogging is when you have large readership and your blog is popular.

Blogging can be a great way to reach your goals, but only when you know all the ins and outs of the blogging industry. Blogging is like renovating: you find it endlessly fascinating and interesting if you are an interesting person.

Source:Eki String

How to Create Name on Your Blogs?

Blog naming is a big topic. A lot of people obsess over naming their blog No doubt about it, blog names are very important. What you call your blog matters.

A great blog name can help with positioning, branding, making you or your company memorable, and much more.

A bad blog name? Well, it can position you poorly, seem unprofessional, be hard to remember, even be offensive to your target market and readers, and perhaps worse, you may hate it.

These five tips should help you choose an appropriate blog name.

1) Give your blog a reasonable name.

Avant-garde names are very popular now, for example, Boing Boing and icanhascheezburger are extremely popular blogs, but do you want a "strange" name for your blog long term? Blogs are becoming mainstream, and most blogs, for example professional and business blogs, should have mainstream names.


2) Consider a descriptive name.


"Blogging for Business" is a descriptive name; My Blogging for Business blog is quite simply about "blogging for business.""Schneier on Security" is another descriptive name. It's about security and written by well known security author and thought leader Bruce Schneier. Oh, you hadn't heard of Bruce Schneier before? It doesn't matter as his target audience certainly has.Ask the Atheist, CorporatePR, and Java Programming Blog are other examples of blogs with descriptive names.


3) Don't use the term "blog" in your blog name


First of all blog isn't the prettiest name. Some readers may be biased against the term blog Also it will certainly sound anachronistic, old fashioned, someday, as the term blog will go away eventually.


4) Get a domain name to match your blog name if you can.


You don't want a URL like myblog.typepad.com or myblog.blogspot.com. For example, Seth Godin, the New York Times best selling author, blogs at sethgodin.typepad.com and when I asked him if there was one thing he could do differently if he started blogging today, he had to think a bit, but he said he probably should have used his own domain and put his blog under sethgodin.com.

One good exception is if you use company domain name or a subdomain for your blog.


5) Remember your blog doesn't even NEED its own name.


You could just use your own name on the blog This is a very valid approach when it's you that you're branding and promoting though the blog as opposed to a product, company, or idea, etc.For example I could start a blog that just said "Ted Demopoulos" in the header, perhaps together with a picture or some graphic.


6) There is no such thing as a "perfect" name for a blog and if it were perfect today, it probably wouldn't be perfect tomorrow. It's best to pick a great blog name, knowing that there will most likely be compromises in naming your blog and just get on with it.


7) Relax as you can always change your blog name. Hyper popular blogger Guy Kawasaki has changed his blog name several times with no adverse efforts.Blog names are important for sure, but don't let choosing a name slow you down. These tips should help you choose a good blog name and get started blogging. You can't have a successful blog unless you start, so just do it.


By Ted Demopoulos

Most of the popular Adsense blogs that are able to generate healthy revenues from the Google Adsense program have a number of things in common. In this article we will explore the two most common rules carefully observed by the most popular Adsense blogs.

The first rule that is common in most of the popular high earning Adsense blogs is that they tend to target very narrow niches in the market. Here the secret is in the fact that the narrower the niche you are targeting, the hungrier for information your visitors will tend to be. The hungrier your visitors are for information, the more they will click at your relevant Adsense ads.

It is therefore not surprising that the most popular high-earning Adsense blogs tend to be tightly focused on narrow, tiny niches in the market.

The second rule that is common with the most popular and prosperous Adsense blogs is related to the first. It is the fact that the bloggers behind these blog sites value targeted traffic much more than volume of traffic. The reason is obvious. Targeted traffic will tend to give a blog many more clicks on their Adsense ads at the end of the day than general traffic or traffic that is not tightly targeted.

Emulating these two little know rules carefully observed by the most popular Adsense blogs will have an impact on your Adsense revenue.


By Christopher Kyalo

How to Earn Money from your Site?

Earn money from relevant ads on your website

Google AdSense matches ads to your site's content and audience, and depending on the type of ad, you can earn money from clicks or impressions.

The answer starts with a different question. Is AdSense a product your customers will find of value? If your answer is "yes" then AdSense is potentially good for

your small home based business. Like every product you offer, it must be weighted against your other products, evaluated in light of your competition and have a sales strategy.

This probably makes the whole idea of integrating AdSense into your web site sound too complicated. You could certainly sign up for a Google AdSense account, add some code and hope for the best.

Maybe your web page content will attract targeted ads for people to click on or maybe not. You could be sending your target market visitors to your competitor's site or just providing links on subjects you don't specifically address with one of your other products.

If AdSense is a product, your goal should be to understand how the product creates revenue and what your net profit could be under different scenarios. There is a certain amount of time and effort required to integrate and maintain AdSense on your web site. If you're losing some traffic for your other products will the "click" income make up for it?

AdSense is a relatively simple product but it must be viewed in the context of your general business plan and the specifics of your marketing plan. If AdSense is good for your small business you'll find the answer in your small business plan.

Make Money Blogging

You have created a blog and your blog is dedicated to a niche industry. Have you ever thought that the blog could make money for you? We would look here in this article, ways and means, to make money blogging. Lets first have a look at what are the prerequisites for a blog needed to make money:

1. Blog needs to be dedicated to a niche market.

2. Updated regularly.

3. Enough back links (Don't worry for it. Directory submission would be enough to begin with)

4. Good blog host or application (blogger, Xanga or typepad recommended), and

5. High quality articles or news items supported with images.

Get the above criteria in place and Hurrah... You are ready to Make Money Blogging.

Top 5 Ways to Make Money Blogging.

Lets now take a look at top 5 ways using which you could make money blogging:

1. Google Adsense

Google Adsense delivers text and image ads to the authorized websites/blogs depending on the content of the website. Small code is required to be pasted at proper locations on a webpage and Google automatically recognizes the page. Google shares the revenue it gets from the advertisers whenever a visitor clicks on these ads.

Google bills advertisers on price per click basis (PPC). Advertisers are required to pay only when any visitor clicks on their ads. They bid against each other for the keywords in order to receive better placement and thus prices for each keyword differ from one another. It is better to choose keywords for your blog which pays high $ per click.

2. Amazon

Amazon Associate program is another important way to make money blogging. The Amazon Associate program gives opportunity to website/blog publishers to promote any product from its inventory by adding a predefined code to their website/blog, which, when clicked by a visitor, takes them to the relevant product page. Once the visitor buys the product, the blog owner will be compensated with a commission.

3. Blog ads

You can use Blogads as an effective tool to have a better control over the advertisers in your blogs. You can analyze and compare your profits with any one of your online agencies. Blogads can be simply specified as an advertising service used for the web logs or blogs. From the total money generated by Blogads, it retains 20% of it and the remaining money is paid to you through PayPal or checks.

Alternative Services:

*Crispads is another useful network focused on the blogs. You can put your advertisements in their blogs using Crispads. You can move through their RSS/ATOM feeds that help in generating revenues.

*Tagword – It is similar to Blogads. It makes you select the ads and their price.Users can place their text-based ads in the site within minutes and the ads will be displayed instantly on the website.

4. Affiliate Programs

Your affiliate programs can help you earn a lot of money for selected products and services. Lot of websites offers you to become affiliate members. These affiliate programs can provide a better reach and an in-depth exposure to the products. The commissions for the sales differ according to the quality of the product, sales and marketing strategy involved. You can gather information related to the commissions by looking into the catalogues of Link Share and Commission junctions.

5. Text Links

Text links has emerged out to be the best form of moneymaking source that you can use instead of cluttering or crowding the page with ads. You don’t have to make these text links prominent within your website. This link can act as an extra value to your site and will also help to promote the rankings of other sites. In most of the cases you will find these text links placed in the bottom of the web pages. The best part of this strategy is that the publishers send and accept links as the market continues to grow.

Ways to Make some money by Blogging

Blogging takes conquered the world, and thousands of blogs are set in motion all day when of course, people want to earn money, their share, and I suppose that the reason why you’e here.

Then, how will the money blog? Here are three methods, the bloggers are with every day of the rake in the big men.

Marketing advertising:

This is by far the most popular way Monetisierung by a blog. People buy advertising in blogs to gain more visibility for himself, and that is that you and your blog into the game, you can sell, text, banner advertising, 125 by 125 pixels ads in your Sidebar … the possibilities are endless. At the beginning, you might not be able to keep all customers into account that many, but a pair of one month to money, what you no longer popular in the blogosphere.

Affiliate marketing:

It is another winner, and thousands of people every day. In general, these major companies will sell their things for them. Let us say you have a blog about dogs, as a popular topic these days, and you know about this big dog is healthy, that the food is very good for dogs.

Find sold by the company offering this type of food, and you will find they have a partner program. So you can register and receive a personal relationship with the people themselves.

Each time someone buys this food for dogs online through your link, you will receive a reduction in profits. For people who sell products such as digital video or on-line services of the Commission may take up to 75% or more!

My friend John Yeo has recently begun to find some large U.S. dollars by the blogs, and that is what inspired me to write this article, which is a bit like an introduction for you.

How To Earn Cash With Blog?

From this article you will learn how to build a profitable internet business and make money for life time

.

Here are 4 important steps that you need to follow...

Step 1 - Start Blogging.

Step 2 - Generate Traffic From Search Engine.

Step 3 - Build Subscribers List.

Step 4 - Promote High Quality Products.

Let's move down for more juicy details...

Step 1 - Start Blogging.

You should understand power of blogging, if you want to earn killer income from your home based internet marketing business.

Start blogging continuously with quality content and it will surely give you chance to earn some cool money on internet.

Search engine will definitely notice your site for doing this.

Step 2 - Generate Traffic From Search Engine.

You have to win heart of search engine, once you will get it done you will surely become rich with your internet business work.

Do you know why search engines love blog? Because blogging have potential to provide changing content continuously.

So the formula is, keep blogging with quality content rich site.

Step 3 - Build Subscribers List.

As you are getting decent traffic now, you should focus on building a list of prospective customers.

You just need to divert your traffic on sign up page and convince them to fill up their email addresses and other information in that form.

Step 4 - Promote High Quality Products.

If you will promote high quality product in your blog, you will surely get good response from the people in your niche.

Follow this step seriously to make some killer income from your home based internet marketing business.

By: Murtuza Abbas

Do Free Blogs Make Money?

There is no denying that hundreds of thousands of people all over the world own free blogs but the fact that very few make money from them does not mean that nobody makes any serious cash from blogs. On the contrary there is a rapidly increasing number of bloggers who are taking home some amazing incomes-even from free hosted blogs like blogger.com.


Clearly the key to making money from blogs has to do with traffic. One of my free blogs on blogger has received almost 1.5 million hits and I use various affiliate programs as well as sell my own products directly on this blog to earn a fairly good living for myself. So I can confidently tell you that folks DO make money from free blogs, because I can be counted in that number.


I am very much aware of the fact that many web savy people do not take blogs seriously, let alone order anything from them. But I also know for a fact that I continue to receive a steady flow of orders for products that I have created, directly from my free blogs. I am sure that I would make a lot more money if I registered my own domain name and I will probably do that in the near future. But right now you can be sure that I am having lots of fun with my 39 free blogs covering a diverse and wide range of different subjects.


Naturally the key to all this is in being able to generate enough daily traffic to be able to make money from your free blog. I use just one promotional technique and that is articles marketing. In other words all I do is generate articles and post them to two article directories with links pointing to my blog.


Get hold of all the insider secrets I still use to make money from free blogs.


By: Christopher Kyalo

5 Areas to Research Before Writing Guest Post

When writing a post for your own blog it’s straightforward. You know what type of people read your blog, you know what topics you’ve covered previously, and you can write in your normal style.
However, things are a little different when it comes to writing a guest post. You’re stepping into the unknown so it’s important to do some homework, with 5 areas to focus your research on before you start writing:

1) The Choice of Topic

For your own blog this is easy. You think of a topic, assess how well it links in with any previous articles you’ve written, before simply sitting down and writing the article.

With guest blogging there are more factors to consider. In particular always research what’s been covered previously - writing a similar article to a recent post is the biggest giveaway that you don’t follow the blog you’re writing for, and as a consequence is a sure-fire way to irritate the blog’s readers.

Have a look through the archives and try using the blog’s internal search to see what topics have been covered previously. If any related posts do come up keep these in mind… you may want to refer to them in your guest post.

2) The Target Audience

Who are the regular readers of the blog you’re guest posting on? Find out as much as you can about them:

What do they do?

What are their interests?

What are their goals?

What beliefs do they have?

Try to hit the key characteristics of your audience. Focus on their interests (i.e. choice of topic) and relate this to their goals, whether that’s developing a A-list blog, making money online, or some other goal.

The area of beliefs is particularly important. People inherently like to hear and read views which reinforce their beliefs. Anything which challenges these beliefs creates friction, which is why at times being a guest blogger can be a risky job.

If your readers are new bloggers attempting to grow their blogs, deriding their achievements such as reaching the 1,000 subscriber mark or hitting the front page of Digg for the first time is not likely to go down well, as one blogger found out the hard way.

3) The Right Tone

Every blogger has their own tone, their own unique style of writing. Some are more conversational whilst others are more formal. Some write with short, sharp sentences… others prefer longer fully-explained content. Some use humour, others steer clear of this.

When writing a guest post you want to develop a balance between your normal style and that of the blog you’re writing for. The best approach is to simply approach bloggers which have a similar writing style to you, although sometimes these opportunities aren’t always available.

In general, you’ll just want to stick to a reasonable match. If a blog’s posts are all conversational try to put that element into your post as well, whilst not varying too far from your natural style.

4) Formatting

If readers are used to reading content which is broken up with sub-headings, quotes and pictures, the last thing they want is to be hit by solid blocks of text from a guest blogger.
Similarly, if a blogger frequently writes bullet-point lists, highlights key lines, and links out to other articles you’ll probably want to do the same.

You want to start off on the right footing with your new audience - using similar formatting allows you to achieve this.

5) Length of Posts

Take a look through the blog you’re guest posting on and assess the usual length of blog posts. Aim for a similar number of words or perhaps a slightly longer post. Avoid writing a brief post - this will give your audience the impression that you’re there for a quick win… post, get the link and a few visitors, before returning to your blog.

Take Maki’s blog over at Dosh Dosh. If you were given the opportunity to guest blog for him you’d certainly want to write an very in-depth piece of content. Anything short or less than comprehensive probably wouldn’t be accepted, but if it was the reaction would almost certainly be negative.

Writing a similar number of words works in the same way to formatting - it allows you to stay aligned with the expectations of your audience. First impressions are just as important online as offline… getting these factors right gives your audience a good first impression of you.