Photography: Filing cabinet by alexstaubo

This week’s swipe file is going to be a little less organized than usual. It contains ten links of interest, five posts I’ve done elsewhere, and the celebration of a milestone or two for Skelliewag.

Some reflections on guest-posting

My guest-posting escapades started with an open offer on the Authority Blogger Forums to write a guest-post for anyone that asked. The response was far greater than I expected and I still have a backlog of guest-posts I’ve yet to do as a result of that post.

One person who took up the offer was David from PureBlogging, a site I admire and one that’s also a lot bigger than Skelliewag. I wrote a post called ‘A Source of Amazing Images for Your Blog‘ which discusses ways to find and legally use great images from Flickr. It was great to work with David, a lot of fun to write the post, and best of all, most people seemed to find it useful. A number of them followed the credit link back to Skelliewag and ended up becoming loyal readers and subscribers.

The next guest-post I wrote was for the lovely Simonne of AllTipsandTricks.com, who contacted me via the forum thread I created. She said I could write tips on whatever topic I wanted so I decided to take a risk and write on technology, something I’ve never done before. The result was ‘A Very Basic Guide to PC Care‘.

Next I decided to try my luck with one of my favorite blogs about blogging, Daily Blog Tips, which has around 5000 RSS subscribers. I was expecting to be knocked back on the grounds of being a relatively new (and relatively unknown blogger). I tried to counter this by thinking up a solid article idea to pitch to the site’s editor, Daniel Scocco, and hopefully get him interested enough in the idea that he’d give me a chance, despite my inexperience.

Daniel asked me to send along the article and I did so the next day. Thankfully he liked it and my guest-post, ‘7 Habits of the Highly Efficient Blogger‘, was published within a few days. Not only was the guest post incredibly rewarding in its own right, but I was also offered the opportunity to become a paid staff writer at Daily Blog Tips — a situation I never expected to find myself in when I first decided to contact Daniel.

Of course, I pounced on the opportunity to write for a site I love on a topic I love, and to work with a blogger as talented as Daniel. I’ll now be blogging from 1 to 3 times a week at Daily Blog Tips, and my first article as a staff writer, ‘The Secret to Lightning-Fast Feed Reading‘ was published not long ago.

A few days later, struck by a bit of inspiration and still riding on the successive confidence boosting events of the last few weeks, I decided to pitch an interesting idea to Darren Rowse. I wasn’t really expecting a response, not because Darren is uncaring but because he’s very busy and probably didn’t know who I was. To my surprise he wrote back the next day encouraging me to forward my post.

A little under a week later my post, ‘How to Draw StumbleUpon Users Into Your Blog‘ was featured at ProBlogger. I was so excited about this that I told my mother, my work-mates and my friends, none of whom actually know much at all about blogging. I don’t think they quite understood the significance but they could see I was overjoyed and did try to be happy for me. The post stands at 65 comments (a number I can’t imagine getting again), has sent several hundred visitors to Skelliewag and contributed to gaining almost 50 new RSS subscribers in two days.

My experiences with guest-posting so far have been overwhelmingly positive, and the process has been rewarding in too many ways to count. I really think it’s something every new blogger should try. If you have an interesting idea you can get prominent bloggers to notice you, even if you’re relatively unknown. I’ve learned that the key is not to ask them for a favor, but to offer them value.

I decided to discuss my experiences with guest-posting in the hope that some of you reading this will also decide to give it a go. If you get anything published, please link to it in the comments section. I’d love to read what you come up with.

What I’ve swiped this week

Everyone is “Simpsonizing” things lately. I think I have Simpsons burn-out from my younger days so I’ve got no interest in seeing the movie, but I do like seeing the various ways people have applied this tool. At Daily Blog Tips (though maybe I should call it ‘work’?) Daniel took the liberty of Simpsonizing some A-list bloggers — and a now former A-list blogger. The SEOmoz team also Simpsonized themselves on Monday. It’s been really interesting to see how people have been able to apply this craze to their niche, even in places where it would seem incompatible.

How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning — this is a video post/interview filmed by Timothy Ferris which has shattered my belief that he’s only bad at one thing, and that’s hiding the fact he’s a superhero. Turns out he’s also quite bad at holding a camera. The video prompted me to examine my own feed-reading habits and share some tips in tutorial form. It’s a good visual aid for some of the principles in the resulting post.

‘Successful blogging is hard, dirty work’ — thanks to Munir Umrani for sharing this often-denied truth.

College Will Kill Your Entrepreneurial Spirit While Simultaneously Turning You into a Worker Bee — whether you agree with the message or not this post is a must-read lesson in storytelling.

101 Great Posting Ideas That Will Make Your Blog Sizzle — this is a post every creator of web content should save for an uninspired day.

Why Full Feeds Actually Increase Page Views — “Taking value away from users to try to force a specific action is almost always going to be less desirable than providing people what they want.” I couldn’t agree more.

Blog For An Audience… Even If You Have None — I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Jason Kaneshiro’s articles at The Blog Herald and this is no exception. I wish it were mandatory reading for every new blogger or webmaster, because the idea is an excellent guiding principle for all of us.

Celebrating milestones

Today Skelliewag reached 100 comments on 26 posts and passed 100 RSS subscribers. I never expected such interest in such a short time since the blog’s opening on the 26th of July, exactly four weeks ago. Things would not have moved as quickly as they have without help from the lovely people at the Authority Blogger Forums, who gave me tips and feedback which have shaped the blog.

I’d also like to thank the wonderful commenters who’ve provided encouragement, feedback and constructive criticism while adding a new layer of knowledge to the blog, in addition to those people who’ve contacted me via e-mail.

I also want to say thank you to those bloggers who’ve been kind enough to let me have a corner of their blog to myself for a little while. It’s a brave move to support a new, unknown blogger and I owe most of Skelliewag’s initial success to that bravery.