Blogging Tips

As a blogger you may have your work published on sites owned by someone other than yourself. Perhaps you are guest authoring an article for another blog, or maybe you are a freelance writer publishing the bulk of your work on various sites across the web. Further still, you may be an employee of a particular blog. Either way, you are not really the person in control of the blog.

You have little to none say-so in the blog’s layout or design. You may not get to select which articles are posted or when they get to be published. You may not be a featured author, or your article may not appear on the blog’s front page. You may not have any contributions to that blog’s business model, advertising and marketing strategy, or sales.

So how do you ensure that your content is noticed?

Ask the Blog Owner How They Promote Authors’ Works

In most cases you as a blog author will not have to do any of the heavy lifting when it comes to promoting your articles. Most blog owners have several tactics in mind for spreading the word about the blog’s presence, and marketing the blog well. If a blog owner has the ability to pay for writers, then they are most likely looking to focus on the business aspects of their blog. Instead of spending all their time writing articles for they blog, they are spending all their time finding ways for the blog to generate revenue. This means bringing traffic back to the blog.

Find out how your blog owner operates as far as this level of marketing goes. How do they promote individual blog posts as well as individual bloggers? Where will your content be distributed and how much traffic does the blog receive on a daily basis?

From there, you can work more closely with the blog owner and the blog editors in order to ensure that you are mutually meeting each other’s needs. The more cooperative you are with the blog owner, the easier it will be for your articles to be featured.

The information you learn from the blog owner can also help you as you build up your own network, which can be tapped for information, interviews, quotes, statements and exclusive stories. This is because you will have the necessary information about your blog at hand, and this is the information your contacts will rely on when determining wither or not it is worth their time to give you that interview.

Find Out What the Blog Owner Expects of You

Even if a blog owner does the bulk of the marketing, you may still be expected to turn to your personal network for marketing purposes. If you have a significant amount of friends on Twitter or Facebook, the blog owner may expect you to post a link on these networks for each article you publish. This is because your friends on these networks are more likely to click through to their blog in order to read an article you wrote.

The same principle is applied to social bookmarking sites, where you may have a lot of connections as well. If you have a friend Digg your article for example, this action can be spread throughout your contacts on Digg, resulting in the article creating a lot of buzz and return traffic.

Most blog owners not only appreciate these acts, but rely on it as well. Some authors are targeted not only for their writing skills and availability, but for their connections across the social web. If you are an author and an influencer, you increase your value as a contributor to most relevant blogs.

Keep this in mind when writing for blogs other than your own, and remember that many blog owners appreciate such action. This shows that you are proud of your work on that particular blog, and are happy to promote both the blog and yourself.

Figure Out What Benefits You the Most

Regardless of what a blog owner does to promote your work, there is always additional promoting you can do. As I mentioned above, you can share your work across the social web, turning to your connections for support. You can set up several automated ways in which to redistribute links to your content, in turn sending a lot of traffic back to that blog.

For some additional benefits, speak with the blog owner about receiving payments based on the amount of traffic, buzz and internal activity you have helped to generate. Many blog owners will offer payments based on action-driven results, encouraging you to spread the word about your article. This of course spreads the word about the blog, and the blog owner earns revenue accordingly. If it is worth your while, put in the extra effort of promoting your work in order to receive extra pay.