Do You Dilute Your Own Blog When You Blog for Others?

This week, I was offered a steady writing gig for a major site. The pay is not that great, but the exposure could be vast. “What’s this have to do with diluting my blog,” you may be wondering.

Well, as seems to be the custom, everyone wants original content. So, that’s less content I’m able to churn out for my own blog. So, this got me to wondering, “Am I diluting the stickiness, effectiveness, authoritativeness of my own blog by writing for others?”

The answer is no, of course. But I’ll come back to that in a minute.

Too Tired to Create Fresh Content

The reason this question came to me at all I think is because I was at a point where I was dead tired. It had been a helluva week, and I was glad to see it end. When I got the email with the details of the job, I thought to myself, “I don’t have the brain cells to come up with any more original content on freelance writing (my niche).”

How am I going to churn out fresh daily content for them and for my own blog? I sat there almost in tears for a minute (I’m not a cryer normally, but like I said, it had been a particularly bullish week).

How to Write for Others & Keep Your Blog Full of Fresh Content Too

Yesterday, I decided to accept the gig. I knew I would regret it if I didn’t. And, I can always opt out if it doesn’t pan out the way I want (sometimes as freelance writers, I think we forget this little caveat).

As the universe usually does, it made me see the folly of my ways. Let me explain.

There’s More Than One Way to Skin a Cat! Building Site Rank Through Linking

This week, I started a steady gig with an existing client — an internet marketing firm. I write short, industry articles for their website; abstracts taken from industry sources. Most of these articles focus on search engine optimization. One of the articles I wrote yesterday had to do with linking strategy.

The whole gist of the article was that a few good outside links can make or break a site’s search engine ranking. It was as if the powers that be were talking to me, telling me not to worry about fresh content. There are other ways of continuing to build a successful site, ie, via link building.

My point? When you write for other sites, link from your blog/website to your content on the site in question. If the site has a good ranking, it helps your site/blog’s rank. I already knew this of course, but it escaped me in my moment of panic about “giving away” fresh content.

If you’re unfamiliar with link building, two other tidbits I want to pass along that I picked up from researching the aforementioned article:

(i) It’s not enough to just link to a site. You have to link to relevant content on the site. So, link to a specific page, not just the home page for example, unless that’s where your relevant content is found.

(ii) To raise your site’s rank, link to sites that have a higher rank than yours – while keeping the above in mind (relevancy, relevancy, relevancy), of course.

For example, if you’re writing about making money from blogs, a good post to link to would be How I Make Money Blogging from Problogger.net. The site has a PR rank of 6 (via Google Page Rank Tool on PromotionWorld.com) and is an authority on this subject.

How to Create Good Writing Karma

One final caveat: When you write for other sites, don’t hold back. Write your best stuff. After all, you never know who’s reading and where it may lead.

Beyond that, it’s just good karma. Writing from a place of “I want this to be the best it can be,” instead of “This will do,” comes through on the page. No matter how you try to hide it. Remember, the universe recognizes – and rewards – intent.