Guest Blogging

What do you think of guest blogs? There are a couple of different angles I’d like to look at when thinking about this topic today. Ready?

A number of authors and bloggers have used guest blogs for a while and for a number of reasons:

For authors:

Guest blogs are a great way to get exposure for their writing/most recent release.
You get exposure to a whole new audience and have an opportunity to turn a new group of people into readers of your work.


For bloggers:

You get the opportunity to take a week off from writing your own blogs
Potentially, you get a new audience who come over to see what your guest (whom this audience already knows) has to say. Hopefully, they’ll then take a look around at what you’ve written and then come back for more.

And then there are the blogs which show up regularly on blog tours which are there solely for authors to promote their work. I haven’t quite figured these blogs out. Who looks at them? Anybody besides raffle junkies? Do people actually read the posting the author worked so hard to write (especially for those blogs which say that they only publish original content)?

I’ve done a couple of paid blog tours and I’ve never had any success in either selling books or getting reviews from them.

On the other hand, when I’ve guest blogged on the blogs of other authors, I have seen both sales and a spike in visits to my own website. Blogs hosted by authors which have substance and aren’t just there for promotional purposes do the best in terms of marketing and promotion—or so I’ve found.

With those thoughts in mind, I’m thinking of opening up my blog—yes, this one, which I’ve written entirely by myself every single week for four years—to other authors. What do you think, my devoted readers? Should I do this? Would you like to post here?

I would, naturally, only post blogs related to my theme of writing and self-publishing, but I feel that many of you have had a lot of experience in these areas and I’d love to hear what you have to say and I bet everyone else here would as well.

I’m thinking that I’d post one guest post a month. So, would you like to be first? Email me if you’d like to guest post here. If no one does, then you’ll all have to just continue to put up with whatever I’ve got to say, but I think it would be really interesting to hear from others, so, join in!