Are you a blogger using writing to get marketing exposure (and traffic/back links) to your blog? If yes, then there’s a good chance you know guest blogging is an excellent way to achieve that purpose – and you probably already use it.

But Just In Case You Don’t Know, I’ll Tell You

There’s always the possibility that someone reading this post will be new and looking to learn. If that describes you, here’s a quick definition: guest blogging involves submitting high quality blog posts you’ve written on a topic related to your blogging niche to specific blogs you identify.

The Key Benefits

Apart from helping you steadily gain name recognition and develop authority status, it also generates for you a stream of new, fresh traffic from other blogs, in addition to quality back links.

All of these will over time make your blog show up more often in search engine results pages.

Now, who doesn’t want that?

Where to Submit Guest Posts: Big/Popular Vs Small/Lesser Known Blogs

Conventional wisdom suggests best results can be had by getting your guest post published on a big and popular blog. If you can pull this off – and your post resonates with the readers – it rarely fails to yield multiple benefits for both the host blog and the guest blogger.

However, I suggest you consider adopting the approach I’m about to describe, especially if you are just starting out, and your blog is yet to chalk up any noteworthy rankings.

There’s no harm in aiming high or thinking big, but when you’re starting out it can help greatly, if you keep an open mind about choosing legitimate outlets to promote your blog.

The way I see it, pretty much everyone will be aiming to get published on the most popular blogs. Let’s face it, we all want to play in the big leagues and rub shoulders with the top guys. But with so many people trying to get in the same door, this can take time.

The truth however is that many not so big or popular blogs get decent amounts of traffic/ranking, and CAN give you good quality exposure, traffic and back links. This is truer even now because of Google’s improved ability to ensure good quality content websites show up more often in searches.

But what is probably an even more compelling reason to focus MORE of your attention, on getting published on not-so-big blogs, is that they have FEWER submissions to sift through in order to decide what guest post to publish next. Many of these big guys are overloaded with submissions. There is a long queue, and you may have to WAIT a while before your guest post goes “live”.

Of course, if the guest post you submit is really great, there’s a good chance the blog owner could send it right to the top of the pile for immediate publication. But that may not happen often – or with every blog. So, spreading your stuff around to other decent ranking, but not so well known blogs can help you make progress.

How Getting Published More Often On Smaller Blogs Can Add Up…To “Big Blogs” Exposure

Now think about it this way. If you submit your new guest post to a smaller blog that’s not over loaded with submissions, it’s likely to go live on the Internet faster than it would on a “busier” blog. Every time this happens, you instantly get at least one new back link to your site (via your byline).

But if you’ve done a good job of the post, it won’t end there. For instance, since everyone knows Google penalizes duplicate content, if the post is good, it’ll ONLY get shared, and linked to by more people – thereby generating buzz.

That buzz would attract the attention of Google bots, so your guest post will show up in more search results for its keywords. In addition, the social media spotlight would get other people (some belonging in the bigger and more popular blog networks) to “discover” and also link to it.

Sooner than later the traffic and other benefits you seek will be yours.

The Best Approach Is Always a Combination of Methods

Of course I’m not saying there’s harm in shooting to get published on large blogs. But NEVER make the mistake of focussing exclusively on big ones, and snubbing the smaller ones. This is because having your guest posts showing up on many different blogs – even if they are small – can eventually ADD up. And it could even leave you better off in the long run.

Having said that, you’ll find from watching a video demonstration I’ve just created for my MS Excel Guest Posts Submissions Manager & Performance Monitor, that I used it to choose websites to submit to, based on Alexa traffic and Google page ranks.

That was mainly for ease of explanation.

In reality, my preferred strategy is to periodically “identify” and submit guest posts to some big name blogs. However, I will actively look out for/evaluate and submit to lesser known blogs that I identify to fit into my target niche.

If you want to get your guest posts published faster, and not have to wait endlessly to reap the rewards for the efforts you put into writing them, you might want to do the same thing.

Any thoughts on this post?

What do you think about the perspective to guest posts submission discussed above? Has anyone got experience on the benefits (or otherwise) of going this route?

Share your thoughts or opinions by posting your comments!