Patricia, the biggest difference is that with guest blogging, you write blog posts for sites hosted by other people. I’m talking about how to get started doing it and how to do it right during the online “Reach More Readers” conference coming up in 10 days. You can get the details at http://reachmorereaders.com/access/aff/go/sandrabeckwith .

Sandy

Hello Sandra,
Guest Blogging sounds great! How is it different from my own word press blog?

Are there any guidelines to get started?

Thanks,
Patricia

You’ll get a sense of the quality of what they might provide for your site by what runs on their own site. If their own posts are awful, yes, they’ll send you an awful guest post. But you wouldn’t want to submit a guest post to a site with awful content anyway, right?

Sandy

Do I…just blog about the shared genre in general, then? Am I supposed to make sure I don’t talk about my own book? What if I offer to swap blog posts and their post is horrible? Now I’m stuck.

Guest blogging is common practice — you’re doing each other a favor. It’s one less blog post the host writes and it helps you reach more of your audience. While your guest post won’t be an ad for your book, it’s definitely fine to offer to run a guest post from your host.

Sandy

Good to know it’s not against etiquette to ask to do a guest post on someone else’s blog. So, if I can only handle one extra blog a month, that shouldn’t be too hard. Do you feel many would be insulted as I’d be outright asking for free publicity? Should I propose a blog swap in the very least?

These are all great questions, Carrie. Yes, you can just randomly approach other blog owners and propose a guest post — that’s actually more effective than go through a blog tour service.

And yes, you can stop by the blogs of others and ask them to guest post on your site. Most won’t ask you about your traffic so don’t worry about that.

Good luck!

Sandy