Promote and Market Your Content: Guest Authors

Welcome to our series on promoting and marketing your own content. Every other week, we’ll debut a new post designed to help you push your blog content to a wider audience like a marketing rock star, and show you how to build a larger and more engaged community of readers along the way.

Previously in the series, we pointed out how to highlight previous posts on your blog which readers may have overlooked. Another great way to increase your readership and market your content is to ask another blogger to be a guest author on your blog. You can reach other fans of the invited author and potentially be asked to provide a guest post on one of your favorite blogs in the future!

Is there a blog you read regularly with really great posts that you would like to share with readers of your blog? Ask the blog's author if they would write a guest post for your blog. The blog doesn't even need to be on the same subject.

For instance, you write a cooking blog and one of your favorite blogs is about do-it-yourself projects. Ask the writer of the DIY blog if they'd be inspired to branch out and write on a subject related to your blog. Or even let them write about a DIY project that you think your readers will appreciate. You'll get great content from a blogger you already enjoy to share with your readers and you've started a dialogue with another blogger who can talk up your blog with their readers and can ask you to share a post on their blog. You can see a good example of a guest post on a Typepad blog at Pulp Sushi.

Guest posts are also great if you need to step away from posting for a bit but you still want to keep your blog fresh while you are on vacation. For an example of a guest post series, see Typepad blog Mary Makes Dinner.

Keep in mind you should be writing and publishing high quality, unique guest posts which are meant to reach a wider audience and not just for SEO purposes. Try to avoid linking unnecessarily back to your blog multiple times (once or maybe twice - remember less is more!) and you'll avoid potential penalties by search engines.

Do you like to read guest posts? Are you trading posts with your blogging friends? Share your own tips and links to your guest posts in the comments.