Guest blogging has evolved over the years but 2012 has really pushed those who take part in guest blogging into thinking outside the box and going the extra mile to achieve the best quality links. If you are looking for a little inspiration, these handy hints have been compiled with you in mind.

400 Words Doesn’t Cut it

Anyone who creates guest posts on a regular basis will be familiar with the 400 words rule, but it has always been a minimum rather than an example of the perfect guest post length. Posts that just about meet 400 words come across as rushed and many of the more reputable blogs now expect posts of between 600-1000 words so keep this in mind as your benchmark.

Google authorship is a great way to add a layer of personal branding to your posts and hopefully increase the click-through rate of those posts when they appear within Google’s SERPs. In this post I’m going to talk about the importance of Google authorship(verifying yourself as the official author of content with Google), and how to do it.

Importance of Google Authorship:

Say you do a Google search for “Search Engine Optimization Tips” and you see the following two results at the top of the page.

Result 1:

Result 2:

As a blogger, some days and even weeks I guess, I diagnose myself with writer’s block and struggle to think of ideas for posts I can write. One way I’ve discovered to help remedy my problem is to skim over my old blog posts to see if I can take a concept and adapt it to a new topic. Just seeing the general idea and adapting it to something I’ve seen on the news or been thinking about is often all the inspiration I need to get started. Remember, it’s easiest to write about things you’re interested in, rather than painfully forcing yourself to write about something you aren’t.  Detailed below, I’ve listed eight different types of blog posts you can write and ordered them from low to higher level complexity.

Blogs are everywhere. Everyone has one. I’ve said this more times than I’d like to admit, but “everybody and their cat has a blog.” Literally. Just go type “cat blog” or “funny cat pictures” into Google. Personal blogs were supposed to revolutionize online communications, democratize it, and give everybody a voice.Now the problem is making yourself heard above all the other people who are talking.

One way you can rise above the crowd is by being new and original. Originality is the currency of blogs, social networks, and just about anything else taking place online. People want fresh new content all the time. They want something that they’ve never seen before. If you can give it to them, then you can get their traffic, their business, or whatever else you are looking for.