How To Come Up With Killer Guest Post Ideas

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

How To Come Up With Killer Guest Post Ideas

While it can be awfully tricky to come up with interesting content for someone else’s blog, guest posting can do wonders for your own blog, and for your writing and networking career, so there’s just no getting around it.

If you have found yourself in that sticky situation, here are 9 tips that may just come in handy.

1. Know your audience.

The first thing you need to find an answer for is this question: Who am I writing for? Remember that what you will be writing for is a different blog – and you may not exactly know its target audience as much as you know yours. You need to know how to catch their interest. You also need to provide them with content that are relevant and/or useful to them. You can write what they want by taking a look at what they talk about. You can do this by reading their comments and finding out about the topics they feel strongly about.

2. Survey them

Don’t know what content to write for your audience, ask them? Send out an email to your subscribers or post something on your blog and ask them what type of content they want more of. Chances are if your readers want that type of content others will too.

3. Know what’s going on your niche

This is one way of making sure that what you’ll end up with is relevant. You can even write about news. Note that you should avoid directly rewriting news articles; you can instead write about its impact; you can even get a comment storm going if you do this right.

4. Determine what needs writing

You can also find out about trending topics; if a trending topic related to your niche has not been written about yet, you can work on that instead. You can also watch trends to come up with ideas about topics that may just be hot in the next few weeks.

5. Ask the blog owner

If you are very confident with your research and writing skills, you can just ask the blog owners if they want a certain topic covered. Not only would it ensure that your post would be relevant; it would also help you earn brownie points.

6. Keep a journal

Inspiration may strike anywhere, which could only mean that you need to have something to write on ready at all times. It could be a smartphone or a tablet, or a more conventional notepad. In fact, the latter can be a better option because it is not limited by battery life. Now, if you are thinking so fast that you believe your pen cannot keep up, an audio recorder might come in handy.

7. Have the article in list format

Readers love lists. They are easy on the eyes and are highly-readable. You can come up with subheadings, numbered lists or mere bullet points. Anything would so, so long as the audience do not have to put up with a huge chunk of text.

8. Try follow up articles.

Follow up articles would make great guest post articles. If there is a popular article on the blog, say “5 Craziest Presidents Alive”, you can come up with “5 Craziest Presidents Alive Part 2″, or if there is one about “5 Little Known Facts About Weight Loss”, you can come up with “5 More Little Known Facts About Weight Loss”. Not only would that increase your chances of scoring a hit; you would also gain more interest for the original articles, and the blog owners would appreciate that.

9. Look inside you

People love to hear about success stories — and epic failures. You may want to look within you and think about your own life – the lessons you’ve learned, what you think about something (might be better if it is relevant to the blog’s niche, although it does not always have to), your experiences and feelings. You can write something like “3 Things I Learned From Growing Up Poor”.

The thing is, you may know your way around your own blog and have mastered the craft of providing top-notch content for your readers. However, guest blogging is an altogether different thing. But you don’t have to worry because these tips on how to come up with guest post ideas could come in handy.

Tom Jones contributed this guest post for www.make-a-web-site.com – see here for more information on their create a website tips. Tom is a freelance writer for blogs such as problogger.com and webmastertutorial.net