Guest Blogging with BlogSynergy

I have previously discussed the benefits of guest blogging, and would highly encourage any blogger to make use of guest posts as a way of driving traffic to their own blogs as well as keeping content fresh on your own blog by encouraging people to contribute their own posts.

I recently got the opportunity to interview Dan Harrison a UK-based blogger who has recently launched BlogSynergy – a great service that makes all aspects of guest blogging simple.  Without any further discussion from myself, here is the interview (my questions are shown in blog and Dan’s responses are shown below):

Hi Dan, thanks for agreeing to this interview. First of all, could you please give the readers a little background to yourself?

Sure. My background is as a software engineer, having done a MEng in software engineering at University. Whilst I was at Uni, I started learning how to muck about with websites, which was basically for a bit of geeky fun. After Uni, I joined a large software company, doing a number of different roles, including software testing and systems administration, however, it wasn’t where my passion was.

In my spare time at the software company, I was running a few websites, making some extra money here and there. Over time, I’ve become better at creating popular websites, but link building has always been a particularly challenging aspect of creating successful websites. I learnt about guest blogging from somewhere online, can’t remember where, and I started contacting websites asking if I could write a guest article for them in return for a link. I quickly found that guest posts were very effective in getting good deep links from quality websites, as my search engine rankings started improving.

When I was contacting websites, I was only getting responses to about 10% of my emails, so I thought that there must be a better way to find potential host blogs for my articles! And that’s the setting for how BlogSynergy came about.

So, BlogSynergy was created in order to fill a gap that you had indentified in the market.  I’m quite shocked at the small 10% response rate, especially as you are offering free written content for other blogs.Did you spend time formulating a plan for the development of the website or was it a case of having the idea and then just building the website and features as the ideas came to you?

People have many different reasons for ignoring an email. Apathy, suspicion, lack of interest and spam filters. However, 10% was still enough to do some good backlink building.

The original idea was pretty obvious to me. Being a user too, I was able to drive the initial requirements of the system. I worked with the developer to construct an initial list of requirements and prioritised them. We’re now rolling out changes incrementally. The features are currently based on what’s the most useful to users to start with. The flashy stuff is coming a little later.

I’m currently counting 52 active blogs within the Blog Synergy system, which is great considering the age of the platform. Have you had many applications that you have had to turn down? If so, what is the main criteria that is resulting in the rejection?

I’ve had to turn down about 6 so far, so just over 10%. This is because the blogs looked incomplete (e.g. only 2 posts!!), extremely adsense or affiliate link heavy (some adsense/banners, etc are fine), or the user submitted a website, not a blog. So nothing very strict, just blogs that were far from the spirit of BlogSynergy.

For the people who have had their blogs accepted, what tips could you provide for them to make the most out of the system as both somebody writing guests posts or somebody requesting guest posters.

For people wanting guest posters, write a great description of your website. Basically you want to convince prospective writers that your blog is a great blog that has a great readership and great content. If you only write a couple of words about your blog, you won’t get any writers. With the writing requirements, be as specific as possible, as that guides writers to actually write something you want rather than what you might need to reject. To help writers find you, make use of the tags feature. As the site grows, tags will be come more important (as it helps to find related blogs).

For writers, look at all tags/categories that relate to your website/blog, rather than just in your very specific niche. It helps to find blogs that are related, but not in direct competition with your blog. e.g. if you have a blog about clothes that you design and make, look for craft blogs, fashion blogs, eco blogs (if you use natural sustainable materials), parent blogs (if you make products for kids), etc. The wider your net, the more links you get and the larger the community you build around your blog.

For both, I strongly recommend checking the site every week or so, as there are new writers and blogs being added daily. We’re hoping to make an auto-suggestion notification tool in the future, but that won’t be for a little while.

Thanks for sharing those great tips, hopefully people new to the system will find it beneficial and will get more from it.
You mentioned the future implementation of an ‘auto-suggestion notification tool’, are there other features that are planned/in the works that you are able to share with everybody?

We’re looking to have blog statistics (so information about traffic, ranking factors such as Alexa rating, Compete stats, etc). The remaining features will be designed to make the site easier to use, so adding a more useful feedback system, top rated blogs, etc.

This blog statistics would definitely improve the website and provide a series of ways by which people can choose the blogs/bloggers that they wish to work with.
We touched upon the membership numbers earlier, what forms of promotion have you attempted so far? Has any particular method worked better than others at this stage?

I’ve been cautious not to over-promote the site so that I can iron out any issues with the site, as well as add any features we didn’t consider adding at the outset. No point getting lots of visitors who cannot use the site effectively.

Therefore my promotion methods have been low-key for the moment. This includes posting on forums with regards to link building ideas, as well as networking at business events. (I have some great looking
business cards for BlogSynergy now!). We also had a spike in visitors as someone had posted about BlogSynergy on a closed forum too. So basically what’s been working has pretty much been word of mouth
advertising.

As the site matures, I intend to get involved with some larger blogs to help spread the word. There might be a competition or two as well!

The use of competitions could certainly be a great way to encourage many new active users and by getting a prominent blogger to make use of the system you are very likely to grow your user-base greatly!

As BlogSynergy grows, I can imagine that the administration of the website will increase. In the BlogSynergy FAQ’s there is a mention of a subscription for ‘advanced’ and ‘heavy’ users – would these users gain any further benefits over the free accounts or is it purely based on the volume of work that goes through the system?

The details of the advanced/heavy users are far from decided, however, the general idea is that they will get access to the best features (such as statistics, recommendations, etc). The key difference is that
the basic free users will get a limited, but usable, number of blogs or writers that they can contact each month. The subscription-based members will have no limitations of what they can do. The subscription
fee will be realistic, but again, nothing is finalised yet.

As the site evolves, it’s going to be free for all users for quite a while. So I suggest to your readers that they take advantage of that whilst they can!

Thanks Dan. I suppose that seems to be a logical place to end the questions. Is there anything else you would like to add? Would you like to briefly mention anything else you are or have been working on?

No, I think I managed to cover everything. Great range of questions. Really enjoyed answering them!

Again, I highly encourage anybody with a blog to start making the most out of guest posts – sign up to BlogSynergy and get yourself started!

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