Below are a few questions I sent to top bloggers, people getting thousands of visitors per day. I wanted to get their ideas around a source of traffic called guest posting.

Guest posting is a when you write a post for another blog. The owner accepts your offer and post your content to their blog under your name. You get full credit for the post.

the advantage to guest posting is the traffic it drives to your site.

I asked these experts about guest posting vs writing for your own site.  The topic is targeted at bloggers/entrepreneurs who are still in the early stages and trying to build traffic.

Note: Each expert’s responses are in italics.

Danny Iny – www.firepolemarketing.com

Danny Iny, a.k.a. the “Freddy Krueger of Blogging”, is the proud founder of Firepole Marketing. He’s also the author of the Amazon best-selling book Engagement from Scratch!, the Naked Marketing Manifesto, and the Audience Business Masterclass (among other things).

Below are three guest posting related questions. I’d like to know how you handled this way back in the beginning.  Particularly your mindset about it. I’d like to see how a pro got past the unknown and moved forward. 

1.) From the post you referenced earlier, you had a few articles on your site before guest posting.   Did you already have a product or email incentive available at that time?

I had a product and an email sequence, but that was a mistake; you want the free giveaway and email sequence at that point, but not a product for sale – building something for sale at that point is a waste of time, and is even counter-productive.

2.) How did you decide what to create for your first product or email incentive?  

I used my judgment based on what I knew about my target audience. It’s important not to over-commit to that decision, though, and give yourself room to iterate and improve based on feedback.

3.) For your first product, did you have any concerns about how to be perceived as the expert?  What were your thoughts about how your product would sell given all the other better available products out there (by much bigger names/bloggers)?

You don’t successfully build the product first, you build the expertise first.

Caleb Wojcik – thinktraffic.net

Caleb Wojcik makes sure things don’t break day to day at Think Traffic and is co-creator of Expert Enough & Fizzle. Caleb left a cushy corporate finance job just nine months after he started his blog (www.calebwojcik.com) and hasn’t looked back.

I’d like to shed more light on whether unknown bloggers should have a certain number of post on their site before guest posting. If their site is lite on content, they won’t utilize any traffic that comes their way. But how much content should they have?

Is ok to have only a product? Or should some of their own free content be mixed in?
I’d like to know what you guys think. I’ll give you full credit of course.

Here are my thoughts on the matter:
Before you guest post you should definitely have an online “home” to refer people to. That could be a blog or just a landing page with your services/products. It really doesn’t make sense to guest post too much before you have something to refer people to though, as you won’t be utilizing your energy properly! And on your blog you should have plenty of free content for people to check out as well. People want to get to know you before they pay you.
Hope that helps!

Chris Ducker – www.chrisducker.com

I help entrepreneurs catapult their business into the 21st century by utilizing what I call the ‘New Business’ style of marketing.

If you only have 2 or 3 articles and decide to seek out guest posting, aren’t you wasting the traffic that comes to your website?  Shouldn’t you wait until there is more content or even a product on your site?

The goal is to be sure you fully utilize your guest posting efforts/traffic.  I’d like to know what strategy you think people should employ in the beginning stages.

I think that guest posting can be very worthwhile, but I certainly would want to make sure that I had a lot more than just a few posts on my OWN blog, before I started writing for other peoples, as a strategy to get traffic to MINE!

I’d shoot for 20 or so on my own domain before contacting some of the sites I was looking at for guest posting. And on that, I’d suggest leaving the ‘big boys’ alone for now, and focusing on other small and medium-sized blogs, within your niche, as potential targets.

Excellent and thank you very much.  I was thinking along this same plan but wasn’t sure about a specific number of post.  Having a specific goal (number of post) on your site is more helpful.

I believe people will find this very useful and end up increasing their chances of sustaining guest post traffic.

Yes, absolutely.

Content is KING.

Marcus Sheridan – www.thesaleslion.com

I’m the founder of the popular blog, The Sales Lion, which is full of business, sales, marketing, and personal development conversation.

If you have only 2 or 3 articles and decide to seek out guest posting, aren’t you wasting the traffic that comes to your website?  Shouldn’t you wait until there is more content or even a product on your site?

The goal is to be sure you fully utilize your guest posting efforts/traffic.  I’d like to know what strategy you think people should employ in the beginning stages.

I think any type of guest posting at any time is a good thing, but it’s certainly way more effective if they have a clear goal to their guest posting. For example, before I had my free eBook on The Sales Lion, guest posting didn’t have nearly the impact for me as it does now. Before, if I was doing a guest post on a large blog and included a simple byline and link at the bottom of the post to my site, I might get 50-100 visits and a handful of subscribers.

But today, when I do a guest post, I now include a strong call to action to get my Content Marketing eBook, and instead of sending them to my site’s homepage, I’ll send them to the eBook landing page. This generally leads to 50-100 new downloads/subscribers per guest post.