Guest Posting – Yey Or Ney?

Need some help from experienced bloggers! If you have 5 minutes, I’d really appreciate your advice :-)

I’ve recently decided to start writing guest posts for my fellow beauty bloggers and also to offer the same possibility on my site (BeSpotted). I thought it would be a great opportunity to meet new people, introduce myself to some new readers and gain some exposure.

So far, I have such mixed experiences, I still can’t decide what I think about guest posting.

I did meet some great bloggers. And, though I had to invest a good amount of time and effort, it seems it finally starts to pay off. But it’s so hard to find the right blogs and I’m starting to run out of ideas on where to look.

But with people who want to write guest posts for me, I feel like I’m just wasting my time. Do you have any idea how long it takes just to go through all the emails I get? (By the way, why people think if they write a really long email, you won’t notice it’s a spam?)

I’m trying to be reasonable and open-minded, but most things I get are just ridiculous.

Does anyone here have any experience with guest posting, as a writer or a publisher? Do you have any advice? Especially on how to find good websites to write for? And how to recognize spammers – I’ve almost made a couple of pretty serious mistakes. Seriously – any piece of advice would be appreciated, I’m getting desperate here.

Also, I read somewhere that for SEO purposes it is good have a lot of external links. Of course, only where it makes sense, to give some more in-depth information about the topic. But now I hear external links can actually damage your SEO. Apparently, that’s why many bloggers don’t allow guest posting on their blogs anymore. Does anyone know something more about this?

This is my guest posting page where I tried to explain what I expect from guest posts and some general rules. Is there anything I’ve missed to mention? Would you do something differently? I’d appreciate any suggestion.

Thanks everyone upfront…