10 Lessons from the Guest Blogging School of Hard Knocks

In this post-Panda and Penguin search landscape, one much talked-about topic when SEO specialists gather together for a virtual drink is guest blogging.

Guest blogging, as you may already have read from several different sources, is perceived as a way to rank high in the search engines, mainly because guest blogging is all about content. And with compelling content, social media sharing comes into play.

Given the many algorithm changes that have been happening of late, social media, as some blogging and SEO experts claim, is the new SEO.

I do content marketing for small businesses through guest blogging. While some say “guest blogging” is so 2011 and that the new norm is now “contributing,” to me, that’s nothing but a technicality.

Writing a guest blog post can be referred to by several different names, but the basics of success remain the same – content, relevance, value.

I’ve been doing this for over a year now and have already gotten a good number of guest articles published in relatively big and small blogs.

It’s a rocky ride, just like any online venture. But along the way, aside from the usual and not-so-usual pointers we read regarding the principles of successful guest blogging, including what to do to turn a guest blogging pitch into an absolute disaster, I’ve picked up a few invaluable blogging lessons that somehow make the ride less strenuous.

I’ll be highlighting ten of them, so if you’re ready and comfortable, let’s begin:

1. Do not venture into territory you know nothing about, unless you’ve done a good amount of research and are confident you can tackle the subject high and low.

2. Do not write about subjects that have been beaten to death a thousand times. If you must, make sure to inject a fresh perspective, like your personal experience, a case study and so on. Creativity can go a long way.

3. Lengthy posts are not always in. Despite what everyone else is saying, sometimes, short, concise posts that pack a punch are better. Just remember to review the blog’s requirement on minimum number of words or look for guest blogging opportunities with fewer restrictions if necessary.

4. Humor sells. While snarky stirs the pot, if you can’t handle the heat it might generate in the comments section, stay away from it.

5. Do not take rejections negatively. The editor always has a reason for not publishing your article. If you want to know why, politely ask. In spite of the explanation and you still disagree, calm down. Never walk away in rage. Burning bridges is not going to address the problem. Besides, it’s not your blog. It’s their blog.

6. What others perceive as mistakes, consider as “room for improvement”. If you’ve been given the chance to edit your article, follow instructions to the letter. Otherwise, maintain an open dialogue with the editor if the changes requested don’t necessarily suit your taste.

7. Don’t get too cocky. Even when several of your articles have already been published in the same blog, there’s no guarantee that article you just submitted for review is going to get published as well.

8. Find a critic. This person can be anybody you trust, like a blogging partner or a friend who reads your stuff. Just make sure she’s not your mom, particularly if she’s the doting kind. No matter how skilled you think you already are, there are things you don’t see through your own eyes.

9. Read a lot, especially about breakthrough trends. Editors, bloggers and readers appreciate cutting edge more than period pieces, unless you’re writing for a history blog.

10. Keep the lights in your blog’s porch open. If all else fails, your guest article should always find a home.

This, of course, is only applicable if you follow the first and ultimate guest blogging golden rule: Write and pitch articles you would be willing to publish in your own blog.

Bonus video: 

11. Find a mentor. It doesn’t have to be somebody you communicate with on a regular basis. This can be somebody who runs a blog that gives sound advice on guest blogging. One VERY obvious candidate: Ms. Ileane of Basic Blog Tips.

12. Last but definitely not least, keep believing in yourself even when no one seems to believe your content is compelling enough, or relevant enough, or valuable enough.

Strive to better your craft every opportunity you get. Do not give up at the first sign of difficulty. Instead, persevere. Soon, you’ll prove the unbelievers wrong.

What about you, have you already started your guest blogging journey? If so, what guest blogging lessons have you learned so far?

Tagged as: Guest Blogging

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Anis Shivani: National Poetry Month Emerging Poet Spotlight: Interview with Lynn Xu, Author of Debts and Lessons

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Anis ShivaniWriter, anisshivani.com

GET UPDATES FROM Anis Shivani   Like 58 National Poetry Month Emerging Poet Spotlight: Interview with Lynn Xu, Author of Debts and Lessons Posted: 04/15/2013 4:57 pm Read more Experimental Poetry , National Poetry Month , Rusty Morrison , Canarium Books , Joshua Edwards , Lynn Xu , New Poetry , Omnidawn Publishing , Poetry Interviews , Poetry News , Postmodern Poetry , Small Press Poetry , Books News
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Lynn Xu's debut book of poetry, Debts & Lessons, has just appeared (April 1) from the always terrific Omnidawn Publishing. Together with Robyn Schiff, Nick Twemlow, and Joshua Edwards, Lynn edits Canarium Books. My interview with Lynn follows, but first, here's one of my favorite poems from the book, "For Frank O'Hara," from the "Lullabies" section:

Dear Frank. I am writing you a letter with nowhere to send it. We've taken a room in San Felipe, on the Calle de los Claveles. Separating the bedrooms are fifteen paces covering the length of our courtyard. Purple jacarandas seesaw above us and in the street, blouses dissolve like lozenges to release the natural color. At night we are carried out with our noses missing. Darkness spreads from person to person. Black hills outstretch the rugged profile of the soil.

Anis: How long did it take you to write Debts & Lessons and what were the major stages in its growth and progression?

Lynn: Debts & Lessons took about seven years to write and the book proceeds pretty much chronologically, with the first poem written in 2005 and the last finished in 2012. Given the fact that there are seven poem sequences in the book, I would say I write about one poem (one series) per year. Each time I sit down to write something new it feels like an insurmountable stage and I am plunged into the unknown. I'd like to believe that what I learn comes from my ability to forget. I've always consigned this to be a defect of my intellect, but now that I've lived thirty years with this engine of a mind, I am making an effort to embrace my forgetfulness as a valiant feature of understanding. I am growing, in spite of what I know.

Anis: This is your debut book. Can you talk about particular challenges you faced in putting together this book? What did you learn in this process?

Lynn: The hardest thing was to figure out what a "book" is--that is, what it is to me. I mean: is it a project? An argument? A collection of poems under the aegis of a governing lyric voice? These questions return us to a very basic problem of parts to whole. But the book, as an object in time, exercises its unifying power--indeed, it solicits our synthetic powers to make its existence something comprehensible, consumable in one go. My book does not openly undermine or seek to sabotage the regulative principle of the book as a form--but what I learned in making it, about myself and what I wanted it to be, was that it was simply a pause, a resting point against which to lean the mind's restlessness. I do not conceive of it as a closed object, nor secured against revision and further change. The book should not succeed too successfully, but raise furtive glances amid the dead and living alike.

Anis: What are your most important poetic influences? Both in general, and in particular for this book?

Lynn: This book is not shy about announcing its kin, or what it hallucinates to be its cultural deictics. Names not openly acknowledged, or books I was reading and rereading at this time: Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian), Brian Evenson (Dark Property), William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom!), Walter Benjamin (Arcades Project), Susan Stewart (Poetry and the Fate of the Senses), and various parts of W.G. Sebald.

Anis: I particularly like the section "Lullabies." Could you talk about your favorite poem in this section, and the nature of your dialogue with the poet in question?

Lynn: During our reading tour this last month, the two lullabies I found myself returning to were: the lullaby for Hart Crane and the lullaby for Jules Laforgue. The Hart Crane one still remains a mystery to me--so I won't ruin it for myself by talking about it too deeply. As for the Laforgue, the incantation is not for him alone, but for the undergrowth. I wanted to call to mind a cross-current, wherein the voice that is speaking (whatever it is) cannot but risk it all--that is, subjectivity at the risk of history. Laforgue came to me first through Eliot and his ventriloquy in "Prufrock." I wanted to produce a similar ventriloquism here, but to restore to him (to Laforgue) a fearful intelligence, a promiscuity of absolute embodiment.

Anis: In what particular ways do you think Debts & Lessons is marked by your unique voice?

Lynn: This is a difficult question, not because I do not think my voice unique (since every voice due to the timber and tenor of how one lives is singular), but because Debts and Lessons is so interested in preexisting voices. As a framing device, I am one way in which our relationship to what we read (to the canon, to what we learn and how we come to do what we do) can be read. I must regard the ego as a faceted lens.

Anis: Have you learned things during the composition of this book that you are either determined to repeat or not to repeat?

Lynn: I do not want to lose the exigency of voice, but I do not wish to repeat anything else.

Anis: Can you name a few specific ways your closest readers and/or your publisher helped make this a better book?

Lynn: First of all, it cannot go unsaid that I had the best teachers (Bob Hass, Lyn Hejinian, Geoffrey G. O'Brien, C.D. Wright, Forrest Gander and Keith Waldrop): they were a dream team for my mind. Geoffrey in particular was an incredible reader for the title poem, which in early drafts was in want of a structuring principle. And Rusty Morrison, editor extraordinaire, read through the manuscript with me, poem by poem, over the phone. I cut several lullabies as a result, and rewrote parts of "Debts and Lessons" (the poem). Finally, my husband (poet, translator, and founder of The Canary and Canarium Books, whose being-in-the-world I take to be an antidote to my own) provided an honesty and etiquette of tough-love I could not expect of anyone else. He made this a better book, no doubt about it.

Anis: Who in the contemporary poetry landscape do you think comes closest to the sensibility in this book?

Lynn: Another difficult question. I want to say: everyone and no one--because so much (and perhaps all) of writing is writing-with and writing-alone. I am a big fan of my Canarium co-editors (Nick Twemlow, Robyn Schiff, and Joshua Edwards--his Agonistes poem is something I feel extremely close to, to the point where I sometimes hallucinate its speaking voice) and, in effect, many of our Canarium titles I feel a strong bond with--for example, John Beer's The Waste Land and Other Poems, both collections by Robert Fernandez, We Are Pharaoh and Pink Reef, as well as Ish Klein's Union!--to say the least, in these I find spiritual and lyrical resonance, a balance between historical understanding and self-assertion. Hearing Mary Hickman read recently, I find this dissonance (how to test personal experience against this intellection of objective knowledge) in her ekphrastic poems to be an incredible challenge. This is true for Suzanne Buffam's poems as well as her husband's, Srikanth Reddy, both of whom make the ground rules of epistemology a playground, the clearing of which makes: a life well lived.

Anis: What is your next poetry project?

Lynn: This is a secret! I cannot work unless I have the non-committal reassurance of equal parts experimentation and failure. But I will say that one of the things I am working on is a collaboration with a British (but Paris-based) visual artist, Charlotte Moth, a Canadian architect and film-maker, Rebecca Loewen, and (my very own) husband Joshua Edwards. Also with Joshua Edwards, we are working on a building project with British architect and sculptor Alan Worn, tentatively titled: Notes Toward a House. Finally, I look forward to working with one of my best friends, the artist and poet (and one of the curators of Private Line) Kendra Sullivan; although our discussions remain aquatic at this stage, it is the best possible way.

Anis: What advice do you have for poets trying to make their way in the world of publication and recognition?

Lynn: My sincerest advice (and one which I abide by myself) is: do not let the rat-race lead you astray. Creative work is the work of the spirit, and though the spirit must do its earthly work in its allotted lifetime, remember that its responsibility and conversation is always with a much larger and much more abstract sense of space and time.

Anis Shivani's My Tranquil War and Other Poems has recently been released by NYQ Books. He has just finished a book of sonnets called Soraya. His book The Fifth Lash and Other Stories has also just been published. Look for his novel Karachi Raj in 2013, and a new book of criticism called Literature at the Global Crossroads.

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James Clear: How to Become a Billionaire: Lessons Learned From Meeting Richard Branson

James Clear: How to Become a Billionaire: Lessons Learned From Meeting Richard Branson HPFB.init();
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James ClearEntrepreneur, weightlifter, and travel photographer

GET UPDATES FROM James Clear   Like 24 How to Become a Billionaire: Lessons Learned From Meeting Richard Branson Posted: 03/24/2013 8:20 pm Follow   Business , Financial Advice , Richard Branson , Richard Branson Virgin , Sir Richard Branson , Entrepreneurship , How To Become a Billionaire , Success , Business News
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In 1966, a dyslexic 16-year-old boy dropped out of school. With the help of a friend, he started a magazine for students and made money by selling advertisements to local businesses. With only a little bit of money to get started, he ran the operation out of the crypt inside a local church.

Four years later, he was looking for ways to grow his small magazine and started selling mail order records to the students who bought the magazine. The records sold well enough that he built his first record store the next year. After two years of selling records, he decided to open his own record label and recording studio.

He rented the recording studio out to local artists, including one named Mike Oldfield. In that small recording studio, Oldfield created his hit song, Tubular Bells, which became the record label's first release. The song went on to sell over five million copies.

Over the next decade, the young boy grew his record label by adding bands like the Sex Pistols, Culture Club, and the Rolling Stones. Along the way, he continued starting companies: an airline business, then trains, then mobile phones, and on and on. Almost 50 years later, there were over 400 companies under his direction.

Today, that young boy who dropped out of school and kept starting things despite his inexperience and lack of knowledge is a billionaire. His name is Sir Richard Branson.

How I Met Sir Richard Branson

A few months ago, I walked into a conference room in Moscow, Russia and sat down 10 feet from Branson. There were 100 other people around us, but it felt like we were having a conversation in my living room. He was smiling and laughing. His answers seemed unrehearsed and genuine.

At one point, he told the story of how he started Virgin Airlines, a tale that seems to capture his entire approach to business and life. Here's the version he told us, as best I can remember it:

I was in my late twenties, so I had a business, but nobody knew who I was at the time. I was headed to the Virgin Islands and I had a very pretty girl waiting for me, so I was, umm, determined to get there on time.

At the airport, my final flight to the Virgin Islands was cancelled because of maintenance or something. It was the last flight out that night. I thought this was ridiculous, so I went and chartered a private airplane to take me to the Virgin Islands, which I did not have the money to do.

Then, I picked up a small blackboard, wrote "Virgin Airlines. $29." on it, and went over to the group of people who had been on the flight that was cancelled. I sold tickets for the rest of the seats on the plane, used their money to pay for the chartered plane, and we all went to the Virgin Islands that night.

A few moments after hearing that story, I stood shoulder–to–shoulder with him (he's about six feet tall) and thanked him for sharing some time with us.

The Habits of Successful People: What Makes the Difference?

After speaking with our group, Branson sat on a panel with industry experts to talk about the future of business. As everyone around him was filling the air with business buzzwords and talking about complex ideas for mapping out our future, Branson was saying things like: "Screw it, just get on and do it." Which was closely followed by: "Why can't we mine asteroids?"

As I looked up at that panel, I realized that the person who sounded the most simplistic was also the only one who was a billionaire. Which prompted me to wonder, "What's the difference between Branson and everyone else in the room?"

Here's what I think makes all the difference:

Branson doesn't merely say things like, "Screw it, just get on and do it." He actually lives his life that way. He drops out of school and starts a business. He signs the Sex Pistols to his record label when everyone else says they are too controversial. He charters a plane when he doesn't have the money.

When everyone else balks or comes up with a good reason for why the time isn't right, Branson gets started.

Start Now

If you want to summarize the habits of successful people into one phrase, it's this: successful people start before they feel ready.

If there was ever someone who embodied the idea of starting before they felt ready to do so, it's Branson. The very name of his business empire, Virgin, was chosen because when Branson and his partners started they were "virgins" when it came to business.

Branson has started so many businesses, ventures, charities, and expeditions that it's simply not possible for him to have felt prepared, qualified, and ready to start all of them. In fact, it's unlikely that he was qualified or prepared to start any of them. He had never flown a plane and didn't know anything about the engineering of planes, but he started an airline company anyway.

If you're working on something important, then you'll never feel ready. A side effect of doing challenging work is that you're pulled by excitement and pushed by confusion at the same time.

You're bound to feel uncertain, unprepared, and unqualified. But let me assure you of this: what you have right now is enough. You can plan, delay, and revise all you want, but trust me, what you have now is enough to start. Who you are right now is good enough to get going.

We all start in the same place: no money, no resources, no contacts, no experience. The difference is that some people — the winners — choose to start anyway.

If you're having trouble getting started, then read this.

No matter where you are in the world and regardless of what you're working on, I hope you'll start before you feel ready.

James Clear is an entrepreneur, weightlifter, and travel photographer in 18 countries. He writes at JamesClear.com, where he shares strategies that make it easier to live a healthy life (both mentally and physically). You can get free ideas on how to live healthy by signing up for his free newsletter.

Original article: Habits of Successful People

 

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This story originally appeared on Quartz. Excerpted from The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from Their Founding Entrepreneurs by David S. Kidder,...

Dell Buyout May Turn Into A Bigger Competition Than Expected

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Is Michael Dell's attempt to gain more control over his company about to turn into a financial tug-of-war? The answer could...   Loading...     Comments1Pending Comments0 View FAQ Previewing Your Comment. This comment has not yet been posted You have exceeded your word limit by    words. Please click the "Edit" button and shorten your comment.

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of our newest badge: Community Curator. View All Recency |  Popularity HUFFPOST SUPER USERCarl CaroliI just don't understand people2007 Fans 26 minutes ago (10:15 PM)Lots of people do that and fail. Statistically, it's like saying that people that use a system to pick lottery numbers and occasionally win were destined to win. No way. It's more luck than anything else. Again, statistically, there will always be a winner but being at the right place at the right time is really the determining factor.Carl_Caroli: Lots of people do that and fail. Statistically, it's likehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Carl_Caroli/how-to-become-a-billionaire_b_2941528_239632819.htmlHistory |Permalink |Share itThis comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments…    new comment(s) on this entry — Click to refreshLoading comments… Most Popular Gay British Teen Dies After Being Set On Fire At Birthday Party Ticket For Massive Powerball Jackpot Sold In New Jersey PHOTO: Jessica Simpson's Pregnant Look Is Gorgeous Amanda Bynes' Family Concerned About Her Well-Being Ford Apologizes After Shocking Ad Mock Up Posted Starbucks CEO Smacks Down Anti-Gay Marriage Shareholder 4 Major Red Flags You Should Never Ignore Eva Mendes Tested Her Dog's Shock Collar ... On Herself American Tragedy: Thousands Of Gun Deaths Since Newtown Teens Arrested In Slaying Of 1-Year-Old LOOK: Well That's One Way To Show You're Single... Mother: 'He Shot My Baby Right In The Head' Asteroid NOT To Blame For Dinosaur Extinction, Scientists Say 'Spartacus' Video Recap: Manu Bennett On Crixus' Journey And Fan Support BREAKING UP North Dakota Becomes First State To Pass Fetal Personhood Amendment WATCH: 12-Year-Old Gives Amazing Gay Marriage Speech In Rhode Island 3 Dead In Shooting On Quantico Marine Base The Safety Concern Parents Need To Take Much More Seriously Follow HuffPost Email Facebook Twitter Google Plus RSS Mobile HuffPost Daily Brief Business Get top stories and blogs posts emailed to you each day.

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