Be a Guest Author on Website In A Weekend

(Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes)

Website In A Weekend has a tradition of hosting a guest author every Monday. Some have returned more than once. Five of the top 10 articles on Website In A Weekend are likely by guest authors. These articles tend to get more widely promoted, more retweets, more comments, more traffic than the regular fare.

This is a good thing for Website In A Weekend guest authors.

Why publish on Website In A Weekend?

Well, why not:

• broaden your audience,
• publish articles outside your niche, and
• get backlinks.

Sounds good to me.

Many bloggers, and you may well be one of them, use WordPress as a do-it-yourself publishing platform. Your main interest may be far from WordPress, yet you still find yourself learning more and more about it.

Wouldn’t it be great to share that stuff?

If you were food blogger, or a cat blogger or a car blogger, your readers wouldn’t care about your little WordPress comment hack (or whatever).

But here at Website In A Weekend, you’re exactly who we’re looking for.

Use that pile of notes to whip out a tidy little blog post explaining what you did, why it’s important to you, and how your readers can benefit from your knowledge. Here’s some guidelines for you:

• 300-1000 word article related to WordPress anything. Longer articles are welcome, we’ll turn them into a series.
• Brief bio for bio box.
• Head shot, 150×150 px or larger.
• Link back to your site
• Here’s the best part: your article is yours. If you would like to republish an article from your blog, by all means, let’s have a look at it. Website In A Weekend does NOT insist on exclusive publication rights. If you want to publish your article elsewhere… it’s your article!

  In fact, I’m really passionate about this, because I’ve spent 30 years working… with nothing to show for it. All of my previous hourly, salaried and contract work belongs to somebody else.

  I don’t want to take your stuff!

  It’s yours to share, not mine to take.

Feel absolutely encouraged to tie back into your subject niche too. Teach readers something fun and cool that they won’t know. For example, suppose your a farmer and you blog about crop disease, say, corn smut. Sounds gross, boring… but wait! They eat that stuff in Guerrero Mexico! I’d say a recipe for cuitlacoche would be in order.

Here’s some examples of guest posts recently published at Website In A Weekend:

• Top 5 Biggest Lies About Blogging for Money
• WordPress Architecture – The Building Blocks of Web Publishing
• Top 10 Reasons why WordPress is the Future of the Internet

You can see all of them here on the Guest Authors page.

Before you start…

Let’s make sure you feel right about guest posting.

From Editor Unleashed, here’s 5 Questions To Ask Before You Write For Free:

Are you guaranteed a byline? If no then politely decline.

Absolutely! Not just a byline, but an introduction with link to your website.

Will the site give you a bio note with a link back to your site? I consider this non-negotiable in exchange for providing free articles.

Definitely. I link back at the start of the article, and in your bio box at the end of the article. With contextually relevant keywords of course.

Is the site well-edited? Both Mashable and Copyblogger have wonderful editors. I wouldn’t work with them otherwise. Working with a good editor can be payment enough for what you can learn about writing online.

Yes. I am a reviewer for 2 academic journals, and I’ve edited large conference proceedings as well. I’ll make sure nothing really grotesque slips through.

Is the site closely related to your niche? An important factor to consider since it’s not as useful to write for sites outside of your niche. The potential new readers it brings should be interested in your content. And if you write a spec piece and it doesn’t work for whatever blog you’ve targeted, cool, you can run it on your own site.

This really depends.

If you’re totally focused on dominating, say, the cat juggling niche, yeah, fine. You want to stay within your incestuous little circle j^H of fellow cat jugglers.

On the other hand, if you’re a real person, solving real problems, and you write well, you will increase your audience by reaching out.

For example, Deacon isn’t going to guest post on very many blogs about wood block print making… because there aren’t any. By posting here and other places, he has a chance to reach a wide variety of people interested in art.

Are the site’s owners and editors polite and respectful of you and your work? If not, it’s not worth it. There are lots of great blogs out there. Go find another blogger who will appreciate your effort.

Totally agree. I promote guest authors heavily. On blogs using CommentLuv, I’ll typically choose the guest post for the backlink for two or three (or more) days.

For you, guest posting here is more or less fire and forget. You send the article or share it on Google Docs, I edit it appropriately, schedule to publish on the appropriate Monday, then forget about it. Like magic. It’s cool.

BTW, I’m posting every day into the foreseeable future, so you will catch momentum. I don’t tend to promote my own blog posts very much, but I do pump the guest authors posts pretty hard. My readers will come through.

So there you have it. Dust off those notes and pitch ‘em to Website In A Weekend!

Tagged as: Fame, Fortune, Glory, Guest posting