Whether building up your own blog audience or guest posting this slideshow features lots of cool take-away tips that you can easily implement today. Learn how to find blogging inspiration, promoting your posts for maximum exposure, landing the best guest blog spots and more.

1. Making Good Blogs, Great.
Awesome, actionable tips to make your blog posts more
sharable, likable, linkable and memorable.
Contents:
1. Topic Inspiration
2. Anatomy of an Awesome Post
3. Promoting your Blog
4. Assessing Guest Blog Opportunities
5. Guest Blogging Bargaining Chips
6. #ProTips

2. Why?
Whether writing blogs for yourself or as
guest content for links, creating
masterpieces are worth the extra effort...
• Future-proof (unaffected by search engine updates)
• More engagement, comments, links and shares
• Improve brand/author credibility & reputation
• Justification to exist (content is created for a purpose, not
just adding to the noise)
• More interest from outreach to blog owners [guest
blogging]

3. Topic Inspiration for Blogs
Deciding what to talk about is hard. Use the
following resources to find inspiration...
• Twitter (and Topsy.com) – search #hashtags, monitor thought
leader/influencer posts, trending topics
• Yahoo Answers, Answers.com, Quora and industry forums
• YouTube
• Google Trends & News – Jump on time-sensitive topics and try
and pre-empt growing areas of interest
• Competitor Blogs – Which posts get the most engagement?
• WordTracker’s Keyword Question Tool
• Portent’s Content Idea Generator

4. Other Blog Ideas
• Solve a common question, problem or
error that people often ask about
• Create a “one stop shop” list of resources
for a specific topic
• Write a well-reasoned (or controversial)
counter-argument to a popular article or
blog

5. Other Blog Ideas (Cont.)
• Take a difficult or hard-to-grasp topic and
make it simple
• Review a new product, tool, service, etc...
• Interview someone (influential people, a
business owner, peers etc...)
• Make a prediction – Where is your industry
going? What will your world be like in 2
years time?

6. Anatomy of a Memorable Blog Post
Today, people are scanners, not readers.
Instantly engage them with rich content
instead of paragraphs of text...
• Intriguing editorial title, opening paragraph and sub-
headings
• Captivating image(s)
• Multimedia content
(videos, graphs, slideshows, galleries, embedded sound
clips etc.)
• Clear, readable formatting
• Summary of take-aways

7. Think About...
• “Click to Tweet” links on key take-aways
• Call-to-action on share buttons
• Expose other related content and relevant
articles
• Disabling comments in favour of sending readers
to discuss on your social media profiles
• Connecting your author profile to your Google+
profile for rich snippets

8. Promoting Your Blog Posts
Exposing your new content is arguably as
important as creating it. Consider the
following promotion tactics for new posts...
• Post your latest articles on your social media networks
• Answer relevant open questions on forums and link to
your article
• Comment on other related blogs and link to your article
• Bookmark within relevant categories on StumbleUpon,
Reddit, Technorati etc.
• Send to your mailing list or include a link within
newsletters

9. Promoting Your Blog Posts
Continued...
• Add a link in your email signature
• Alert real-world contacts such as friends, co-workers,
suppliers etc (online and offline)
• Outreach to thought leaders and influencers in your niche
• Consider paid advertising
• Utilise share buttons with a compelling call-to-action
• Ask for a link within your content
• Create the HTML for readers to copy+paste into their own
sites (Tynt automatically adds your URL when readers
copy+paste excerpts of your content)

10. Assessing Guest Blog Opportunities
Just because a blog looks good, doesn’t mean it
will benefit your link profile or build brand
awareness. Look a little deeper...
• Audience engagement – Do previous posts attract comments?
How frequent? How legitimate?
• Social engagement – Does the blog owner have a solid and
outspoken following? Are they an influencer in their niche?
• Quality of existing content – Is the blog owner proud of their
blog? Do they accept any old rubbish?
• How do page authority and back link profiles of a sample of
historic posts look?

11. Assessing Guest Blog Opportunities
Continued...
• Ownership – Does the blog owner internally link to guest blogs
in their content? Do they share posts on their social media
profiles?
• Owner credibility
– Do they have a positive reputation in the industry?
– Do they consistently write for anyone else?
– What social media platforms are they active on?
– Do they have a clear passion for their blog/niche?

12. Bargaining Chips
Bloggers may try to charge you to guest post.
Here’s what you can do to sweeten the deal
without handing over cash...
• Submit pre-written meta data (remove any extra work)
• Offer to promote & share their blog on your social media
channels
• Offer to reciprocate a guest blog opportunity
• Offer to write a second blog on their chosen topic
• Offer exclusive content (or free sample products)
[#Tip: Avoid bloggers who charge – they often care more about the
money than quality of content and accept rubbish]

13. #ProTips
Visit rickeliason.com/blogging for more tips on
optimising and promoting your blog like
these...
1. Use more than one resource for your research – don’t simply
regurgitate what is already out there
2. If you embed videos in your blog be sure to upload a XML
video sitemap to get rich snippets
3. When guest blogging, link to previous posts the owner has
written within your blog where relevant – flatter them
4. Links posted on Google+ get instantly crawled – do this for
guest blogs to get your content indexed quickly

14. If you take nothing else away, please
follow these guys!
When it comes to blogging, these guys know
their sh*t. Here are some of my personal
favourites who I know you will love!
1. Jeff Bullas (@jeffbullas)
2. Heidi Cohen (@heidicohen)
3. Kristi Hines (@kikolani)

15. Lastly...
Please follow me on SlideShare. This is
just the beginning, there is lots more
to come...
Feedback is always welcome 