From: http://www.thedoorbell.net/

Hey Folks:

Please welcome this guest post from Anna Miller.  I’m digging the straightforward and simple approach to the whole topic of guest blogging.

Take it away Anna!

I’ve been a guest author for quite some time now, and from the feedback I receive, I guess I must be doing something right. Writing for other people is often more challenging that writing for yourself – not only are your options limited by their niche, your work is also likely to be rejected because it doesn’t fit your host’s idea of what is suitable for their blog. In general, guest blogging is a good way for any writer to gain more exposure and promote their own website, so it pays to learn the finer aspects of writing for other people. And to this end, I’d like to share with you a few tips and tricks that I’ve picked up over the years that help you become a better guest author:

• Don’t jump the gun: When you’re posting on another blog, it’s best to go through its contents, not just the articles, but also reader comments, before you begin writing for it. This helps you gain an insight into the essence of the blog and its readers, using which you could decide on what to write and how to go about writing it. When you blog as a guest author, you have to tread the fine line between adapting to the style of the blog and compromising on your own, and the best guest blogger is one who can achieve a sensible balance between the two.
• Don’t promise what you cannot deliver: And what you do promise, make sure you deliver. The whole idea of being a guest blogger is to develop your connections on the web and maintain healthy and fruitful relationships with others in the blogging community. So when you fail to keep your word, your credibility is shot to pieces and blog owners will not want to have anything more to do with you. So if you’ve said you would give them one post a day or one every week, stay true to your word even though this means neglecting your own blog because you’re pressed for time.
• Keep your blog current and interesting: And finally, don’t forget the real reason you’re guest blogging – to secure links back to your own site and entice readers to become regular visitors to your blog. So when you focus completely on the guest blog and lose sight of your own, you end up sabotaging your own efforts. In fact, the best time to guest blog is when you have many interesting things going on at your blog. Visitors who drop in at your site for the first time are bound to hang around and come back for more when you’re able to hold their interest.

Guest blogging is a great way to get more people to visit your blog, so if you’ve never considered it before, it’s time to give it a try.

By-line:

This guest post is contributed by Anna Miller, who writes on the topic of online degrees . She welcomes your comments at her email id: anna.miller009@gmail.com