More than two years have passed since MyBlogGuest.com launched, a website dedicated to connecting bloggers who like to share articles for republishing elsewhere. I was one of the early adopters of this very powerful website, having written my initial review of this site in February 2010 and following up with another post in May 2010 and yet another one the next month.
Last month, I made my first mention of MyBlogGuest.com in quite some time, and that mention reminded me to follow up with this article where I will explain to you my current involvement with this tool. There is a reason why I have kept MyBlogGuest’s widget on this site for the past two years — if you’re looking for greater exposure to your blog, forum or website, you’ll want to join MyBlogLog to reap the benefits.
The way that MyBlogGuest.com (MBG) works is quite simple. You sign up and you begin to either claim articles through the Article Gallery for your website or write fresh content and submit your articles for others to claim. Yes, you can do both. The end goal here for contributors is to acquire backlinks, a perfectly acceptable and wise strategy for raising your visibility online.
Given that I’ve talked about the claiming process before, today I’ll hone in on the article writing process. I’ve written nearly a dozen articles over the past week and have posted these for others to grab. As a contributor, you get to decide who will post your work and where. You’ll want to keep the following in mind as you write:
Contribute original work only — Everything you offer to MBG must be original. If you attempt to submit an article that appears elsewhere, you’ll be stopped — MBG uses Copyscape to automatically check every submission. I was “caught” sharing an article where I obtained some quotes from a press release for an automaker. This is standard journalistic practice, but those words are often shared in articles published to other websites. To comply, I still kept the quotes in, but I rephrased some other language to ensure that the article was unique. In some cases that isn’t easy to do because a 300-horsepower 24-valve 3.5-liter V-6 engine can only be described in one way.
Write lengthier articles — Although articles as short as 400 words are accepted, you’ll want to write at least 500 words, preferably much longer. The handful of articles I’ve written that were 750 words or longer, including two that came in around 1,200 words, attracted more attention and I had many offers to choose from. Those articles are now hosted on PR4 or PR5 websites, quality destinations I am happy to be associated with. I can’t wait to see how those backlinks will help my websites! My current strategy, however, is to write both shorter and longer articles — I’m finding that both are in demand, especially for automotive topics.
Include a photo — This is one area where I am at odds with MBG. You’ll be expected, not required, to contribute a photo with your article. And herein lies the problem: you’ll need to ensure that the photo has been released and includes attribution. Go without a photo and you’ll get a note from a moderator suggesting that you include one. Personally, whenever I claim an article from MBG, I don’t usually keep the photos. Why? Because some are not released into the public domain or the approval from the photographer is sketchy at best. Also, a MBG moderator may suggest you include multiple photos for a longer article, but I usually don’t. I look at it this way: if I pour my heart and soul into an article, the person who hosts the article can find suitable pictures to make it shine. Leave the “release” issue up to the webmaster.
Write regularly — My recent explosion of writing is new. In fact, I’ve only contributed one article to MBG in my two years of participating with this site and that article I eventually withdrew as I did not see sufficient interest in it. I’ve claimed dozens of articles and published these to sites I own or manage, but one thing was lacking: the benefit I could receive from having quality backlinks to my websites. My goal this year is to raise the visibility of every site that I own or manage. I’m just not going to pay a bundle for advertising, but I am investing a part of my time in contributing high quality articles. Even if you wrote just one article per week, that makes for 52 potential articles pointing to your website(s). Figure you’ll invest about two hours writing and submitting your best quality work, so you’ll need to set aside about 100 hours per year on article marketing. Can’t afford the time? Look at this way — you can’t afford not to market.
In future MBG articles I discuss other topics including subscriptions, whether you should consider a pro account and share updates on my various writing campaigns. What I like about MBG versus article marketing with the article directories is that your article is only published in one place. That place should be a quality site, one that you’re proud to host your best work and a site you can show to your freelance client as part of your writing “clips.”
