I mentioned on here not long ago that I was experimenting with the My Blog Guest online resource that provides a community of guest blog post writers and publishers. I haven’t had as much time as I would like to really delve into this resource, and that may actually be at the heart of any review.
The MyBlogGuest.com website is essentially a forum of guest post writers and publishers. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the balance in this equation is typically tilted far to the side of people wanting to publish guest posts. It is no different here.
My Blog Guest is a free forum to participate in as either a publisher or a writer. There is some back and forth in the forums where both publishers request material and writers offer it. There are also two areas of the community that require paying for a pro membership. One is a Private forum and the other is if you want to post articles as a writer to the article gallery.
The free areas of the forums work like a Craiglist of guest blogging. There is a posts wanted forum and a blogs wanted forum. A post I made in the posts wanted forum garnered two offers, one of which resulted in a pretty solid article. The other never followed through.
I did not make a post in the blog wanted forum yet. I will reserve final judgment until I do and see how that works out.
My Blog Guest Pro
I only used the service as a free member, so I don’t know what is discussed in the private forum. The description says that inside they share some “advanced guest blogging and link building lists and tips that actually work.” I assume that the implication that the tips and lists in the free areas don’t work is unintentional.
Whether there is enough value offered within to justify a paid membership, I cannot say.
The other thing that premium members get is the ability to post article directly into the Article Directory rather than exchange classified ads in the forum. It is the Article Directory that holds the most promise for publishers and writers.
Writers must pay a fee and get a premium account to post their work in the directory. Publishers, however, may use the directory for free. Again, there are far more willing writers than publishers. So, this arrangement maximizes the odds that articles can be published (the hard part) so that writers will continue to pay to get their articles published (the easy part).
My Blog Guest sends emails to users with blogs registered and verified on the system. The emails are not too frequent and often do point out potentially usable articles.
The main issue with the service is the time it takes. First, one must sort through the articles listed in the article directory. There are, as one might expect, plenty of low-quality articles targeting high-cost keywords and phrases. If your blog is just some marketing tool without any branding value, these articles are as good as any other. If, on the other hand, your blog is something that you maintain with a specific focus and quality, it can take some sifting to find good article concepts.
Once you find a title that you like well enough, it gets even trickier. You only get to read the first paragraph or so, which makes it tough to tell if the article is well written, and even more so, if it is well researched and on topic. An article titled Top 5 Widgets might be wonderful, or it might list 5 awful widgets with high-paying affiliate programs. There is no way to tell until you have seen the article.
Which, brings us to the next step. If you decide to take a chance on the article, now you have to indicate your interest and then wait for the author to say yes or no to your offer to publish their guest article. There are apparently, enough low value blogs to go along with the low value articles to motivate some authors to include restrictions in their comments about how they will only say yes to blogs with PageRank that are on-topic.
Once the author says yes, you can then copy and past the article into your blog.
Here are the two articles I ended up publishing:
And, that in a nutshell is how it works and why I have used it only in limited fashion. The effort to find, offer, accept and publish an article is at least as much time and effort as it takes for me to write my own blog post, which I can use with my own links. In other words, unless I can find a way to speed up the process, there isn’t going to be much value for me, as a professional writer to use the publisher side of My Blog Guest.
Next up, I’ll see if I can get more value out of writing some guest blog posts and get them published somewhere.
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