Hey, what's up?
John Sonmez here from simpleprogrammer.com.
I got a question about writing for different companies.
This is a blogging question.
A lot of you have taken my free blogging course.
If you haven't already, you can check it out here.
It is a course to teach you how to create a blog.
I give you the best tips and tricks that I have learned from blogging, even how to make
money from your blog.
You can check that out.
it's totally free.
I get a few questions on that.
This question is kind of old.
He says, "Hi John, I hope you enjoyed Europe."
You can tell how old that was.
I think that was like 2 years ago.
Sometimes I leave questions on my board for a while and I get around to them eventually,
but I do get a lot of questions every day.
"It seems like you left it just at the right time, politicians and different political
groups seem to be getting crazy over here."
Oh yeah?
Well, guess what's happened in the United States in the last 2 years?
It's gotten a little crazy over here.
Anyhow, "Half a year ago I was contacted by someone from SitePoint if I want to write
posts for them.
Now half a year later, I have a great topic and some time at my disposal and am going
to write 2 posts, just to see how it goes.
However, generally, do you think it makes sense?
After watching one of your videos earlier this week I realized, writing for them is
just like contracting.
And if I can't write the post fast enough I shouldn't do it in the first place and instead
focus on my job and contracts.
I wrote a post on Air Pare" and he gives the post there.
"Which brought me plenty of new visitors and probably also a better Google ranking for
my own blog, however, I'm not sure SitePoint will have the same effect.
I'm surprised to see that you had written one post from them."
Essentially he wants to know, "Do you think, writing for SitePoint is good for ones career,
or is my time better on contracting/consulting time and some side project?
Regards, Peter."
Okay, so Peter, I'm going to boil this down a little bit for everyone that's watching.
SitePoint is just a site that does—a software development site that has a lot of different
posts.
I wrote a post for them on creating a Chrome plugin in 15 minutes, 5 minutes, something
like that, I think in 5 minutes.
You can check it out here.
In general, I don't write posts for a lot of other sites even if they pay me money,
but—so the question really is should you write posts for your own blog or should you
write for another blog and then get paid to do that?
Isn't that just like contracting?
Would it be better to spend that time just doing consulting work, just making money or
just writing blog for your own blogpost?
What makes sense here from the perspective of getting the best success with your blog
and your career?
There's a couple of ways to look at it.
You don't want to just be writing posts for other people's blogs because unless you're
going to be a professional writer which there's not much money in that, I'll tell you that
right now, because I hire professional writers for really cheap a lot of times.
People will write for free, honestly, and it's worth it for them to write for free.
Now, I have people who write on my blog and they get an advantage of writing on my blog
is that they get a huge exposure to my entire audience so there's some value in that.
The reason why I'm saying that is because I wouldn’t write for someone else's blog
for the money because they're not going to pay you a lot of money or they're not going
to pay you anything and it's not going to be worth your time.
You're going to make way more money consulting and doing contracting work, not worth it.
But for the exposure it is totally worth it and that's why I wrote that article that you
reference on SitePoint.
I've written a few different articles for different blogs.
Now, it depends on where you're at on how effective that's going to be.
If you're just starting out your blog, one of the best things that you could possibly
do to gain traction on your new blog is to write for other blogs and have a bi-line that
links back to your blog or have some reference to your blog in that guest post that you write.
A lot of people not guest post and they say it doesn't work, it doesn't work for SEO,
that's bullshit.
It does work because it gets your name out there and it does help your search rankings.
I guarantee you that it does.
Spammy stuff where people are doing these kind of fake sites and guest posting on those
or like spammy kind of stuff, that's not going to work.
But if you're writing quality articles for someone else's site that's valuable.
People are going to click the link to go back to your site.
I know it because I look at the links on Simple Programmer for my writers who write on my
blog and I can tell you, they get a lot of clicks.
It depends on what they write and how good of a writer they are, but a lot of them get
really—quite a number of clicks especially if their article is popular.
I think it's a good way to get exposure to other audiences, to build up your name and
reputation and to get some traffic and some domain ranking on your—some Google juice
on your own domain, but you should definitely be writing on your own blog.
Don't just write on other people's blogs.
I would say that you want to do something like—when you're starting out and you don't
have a lot of traffic, you want to spend a decent amount of time writing on other people's
blogs, maybe 50% of your time.
That would be a good way to get a jumpstart if you can do that, if you can line those
up.
As your blog becomes more established and you start to get more traffic of your own
and you're already getting much more SEO it's not going to make sense because—or it's
not going to make as much sense.
It doesn't mean that you shouldn’t ever do guest posts, but those guest posts are
going to have lesser and lesser impact, if that makes sense, over time.
But don't write for money, it doesn't make sense.
That definitely doesn’t make sense because you're going to make more money in other places.
Do it for the opportunity.
Even things like, you know, if you wanted to write an article MSDN Magazine, that's
a whole crap load of work.
I went through the process and kind of vetted out.
They don't pay you jack shit.
I mean really, I think it was like 500 bucks or something like that.
It's like not for all that work, it's the exposure.
The money is nothing.
That's trivial.
It's the exposure for your 3 weeks' worth of work, it's the exposure that you're getting.
That's what you should keep in mind.
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