AP 0650: How Do I Become a Good Guest Blogger?

AskPat 650 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here. Welcome to Episode 650 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week. We have a great question today from Katie, but before we get to that I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is ZipRecruiter.com.

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Alright, thanks so much. Here's today's question from Katie.

Katie: Hey, Pat! Kate here. Thanks for everything that you do. You are totally amazing. My question's about guest posting or any form of getting in front of someone else's audience. You say that you should, when you approach them, talk about what you can do for them in exchange. My question is, how do you know what the going rate kind of is for that? Or what kind of things you should offer, especially so that you don't underbid and maybe burn a bridge or offend them? Any resources or anything you could point out, I look for forward to your response. Thank you so much.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Katie. Thank you so much for the question. When you say going rate for guest blogging, it almost makes it sound like you have to pay for that. You don't need to pay to do guest blogging. I actually wouldn't recommend doing that. There are ways to go and get in front of other people's audiences.

When I say provide value, there's a lot of different ways to do that. You can share an article or you can help them out in some way. Maybe they have a book and you write a review on it. Maybe they have a course and you talk about it a little bit or share that on your email list or talk about it on your website. There's a number of different ways to do that.

The number one thing you want to do is first, make sure that you get on their radar. The best way to that is to help them with something that they're working on too, or something that they've done already. That's what I mean by providing value in that way. Of course, you want to make sure you write up a guest post that provides value to their audience too. I think that's the biggest thing. I mean even if you don't help them out in some way, like I mentioned before, helping their audience out and giving them some incredible content that would be useful for them. That's going to be impressive to the person who owns that blog. Who will then be more likely to publish that article.

Now the reason I say you'd want to provide some sort of thing first for them, is because that way you're on their radar and it's not just a cold, “Hey, can you do this for me?” You're actually doing something for them first. Human nature comes into play. The law of reciprocity: When you do something for somebody else, they're going to be more likely to do something back for you too. That's what I would recommend.

A quick and easy way to do this, if you want some actionable advice, would be to plan ahead, see whose blogs you want to guest post on, what podcast episodes you want to be a guest on, and do a round-up post. Do your top 25 experts in this field and put their picture in there, add a little description, talk them up, and share that post. Those round-up posts become very popular. A lot of times those people will share them. You're going to get some additional exposure, but at the same time, you're going to get on their radar. Their going to know that you know them, and it'll make it a little bit easier when you reach out to them for that ask.

Now, I will say that when people approach me with a guest post, the ones that I normally say yes to … I actually don't say yes to very many at all. Now I'm at the point where I'm actually reaching out to people for guest posts for specific advice and articles on certain topics that I know that are in my editorial calendar that I want to cover. That's how I'm approaching it now.

If you're just starting out, I know that when back in the day when I used to accept more guest posts, it was more likely for me to say yes if I had already seen … If I had obviously already known about that person, but even if I didn't, if that guest post was already written, and I knew that it was written specifically for my blog, and not just kind of cookie cutter sent out there to everybody, it would give me an opportunity to read that and quite easily see if that was something worthwhile to be on the blog of mine. If not, then it was easy for me to say no.

If yes, then I would then reach back out to that person, refine it, and that sort of thing, and help that person … Typically it would go through two or three rounds of edits, but because I saw it first, because I knew this person spent the time to write something up, and it was a topic I was very interested in that I would want to share with my audience too, it was more likely for me to say yes. To actually vet out that idea and see if it was a post worthy of being on SPI.

I don't think in any of that you would potentially burn bridges. I think the only way you might do that, is if you see something wrong on their site or in their blog or in their podcast, and you call them out on it in a disrespectful way. I don't know … I think most of have common sense and wouldn't do that. You don't want to offend anybody. I think that's where the burning of bridges may happen. You don't want to offend anybody. But if you're sharing their stuff, if you're providing value in that way, you're not going to do that. You're only strengthening that bridge, I guess you could say.

Anyway, hopefully that helped, Katie. There's also a great post on guest blogging, that I remember, on ViperChill.com. Glen Allsop's website. If you look up ViperChill and guest blogging, you're going to find an article that is one of those timeless articles that works over and over and over again. He's done a great job of breaking down the process of reaching out and how that works and that sort of thing. You can find some even more detailed advice there. Hopefully what I mentioned here is helpful too.

So thank you so much, Katie. I appreciate you. We are going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For everybody else out there, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, all you have to do is head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Here's a quote to finish off the day by Yacine Baroudi: “Our digital future is about enabling better productivity and decision making to enjoy a better quality of life.”

Thanks so much, and I look forward to serving you in tomorrow's episode of AskPat. Thank you.