Massive Guest Posting

I never had a guest post before. Although I blog for more than 3 years, I just didn’t have any. This is why part of my intended promotion strategy was to include guest posting in my second half of the year as a full time blogger. But I wanted something different. Guest posting seemed like a very good promotion strategy, but I had to come up with something new. And several weeks ago I came up with this the idea of massive guest posting. Now, what is this thing and how it’s different from normal guest posting?

Massive Guest Posting

Regular guest posting means publishing one of your articles on another blog. Massive guest posting means

• publishing several of your related articles
• at the same time
• on several host blogs.

In my case, the related articles emerged naturally as a spin-off series from one of my most read articles: The 7 Ages Of A Business. That was an article with a good potential. And even while I wrote the article I knew I can add a lot to it. There was so much left to be said. So, I thought to write a separate post for each business age with more details.

But instead of publishing all the 7 posts in my blog I thought it could be interesting to publish each post on a different blog as a guest post. From here it was pretty simply, I contacted several good personal development bloggers and pitched them. After 2 weeks, I had a complete lineup of 7 host blogs and also a structured approach to it. I intend to write a bigger article about massive guest posting once this experiment will be done, in which I will analyze what went right and what can be improved. For now, I will just announce that the massive guest posting is live.

Beyond the benefits of normal, atomic guest posting – and by atomic I mean one guest post on one blog host – massive guest posting offers a very interesting potential: connections at the blog hosts level. Since the posts are related, if one reader would want to know more about the exhaustion stage after reading the enthusiasm age, can visit directly that specific blog host. The content is spread over 7 blog hosts which are creating not only a semantic web of links, but also expectation and value.

As far as I know, there wasn’t yet any experiment like this. Guest posting is almost as old as blogging, but I haven’t see any massive guest posting in the last 4-5 years, forgive me if I’m wrong. And by massive guest posting I understand spreading more than 4-5 related posts at the same time on more than 4-5 different blogs. There was a little bit of a leg work to make this work, but I’m thrilled to make it happen.

The 7 Ages Of A Business In Reality

Just a short disclaimer about the theme of this series: the described ages of a business are not always surgically identifiable in the real world. Most of the time there is a blend between two or more ages at the same time. For instance, if you’re just starting your first business, enthusiasm and naivety stage can coexist happily in the first few months. If you are more like an experienced entrepreneur, you’ll stay longer in stages like attention, maturity, expansion and leadership. Those ages are also mapping the entrepreneurship behavior, experienced by me and by the entrepreneurs I met and done business with during my 10 years as self-sustained business man.

Massive Guest Posting Hosts

Here are the blogs in which you’ll find the posts. Must say beforehand that all of these blogs are very dear to me. I constantly read them for many months now, and I also have a very good relationship with the authors.

AttractionMindMap.com

The post about the enthusiasm business age is published at AttractionMindMap.com, a blog created and maintained by Evelyn Lim (@evelynlim on Twitter). I always enjoy reading Evelyn’s posts, she has a way of writing about spirituality in a very earthy manner. I feel a deep connection with what she writes and I am also proud to be one of her Akashic Readings client. More about Akashic Readings in a future post. AttractionMindMap.com is an inspiring place.

SmallBizBee.com

The post about the naivety business age is published at SmallBizBee.com, a blog created and maintained by Matthew RInger (@SmallBizBee on Twitter). Writing about business in an understandable manner is not an easy task, but Matthew does it brilliantly. I like the fact that almost articles are quick and clear. And the ones that are longer are usually interviews in a project called Featured Entrepreneur. SmallBizBee.com is a fast growing and useful small business resource.

AdvancedLifeSkills.com

The post about the attention business age is published at AdvancedLifeSkills.com, a blog created and maintained by Jonathan Wells (@mrjWells on Twitter). We’re all students of life, as Jonathan says on his blog and we all need advanced life skills if we want to make the most out of it. I like the clear, crispy style of Jonathan and I’m also becoming a fan of his ebook “7 Simple Steps – Life Transformation Guide”, but more on that on separate blog post.

StevenAitchison.co.uk

The post about the maturity business age is published at StevenAitchison.co.uk, a blog created and maintained by Steven Aitchison (@StevenAitchison on Twitter). This is one of the most resourceful personal development blogs not only in terms of high quality articles but also special support materials. If I would be you I wouldn’t miss the excellent guides about lucid dreaming and making friends, those are really great resources.

RatRaceTrap.com

The post about the expansion business age is published at RatRaceTrap.com, a blog created and maintained by Stephen Mills (@ratracetrap on Twitter). If you’re after new, exciting and powerful ways to extract yourself from the rat race trap (a dull, boring, 9 to 5 day to day perspectiveless life, that is) and you’d like that served in an exhilarating yet compelling style, than Stephen’s blog is what you’re looking for. If you don’t have the courage to do that yet, start by Developing The Courage To Take Risks.

MyWifeQuitHerJob.com

The post about the leadership business age is published at MyWifeQuitHerJob.com a blog created and maintained by Steve and Jennifer (@mywifequit on Twitter). The blog documents the business journey of a young couple after Steve’s wife decides to quit her job in order to raise their beautiful daughter. One of the most constant and well written blogs about personal development and about having and running a small business. Read their full story about opening a successful online store.

LearnThis.ca

The post about the exhaustion business age is published at LearnThis.ca, a blog created and maintained by Mike King (@Mike_King on twitter). This was one of the first blogs about personal development I started to constantly follow and I often congratulate myself for that. Mike’s universe is filled with great ideas and articles about self learning, career, leadership and life improvement. One thing you could really do to get in touch fast with his work is to access his free resources page.

Now it’s time for you to read and enjoy. Once done, remember to come back here and share your thoughts about the massive guest posting idea. Feel free to leave your comments on each of those sites as I will monitor all of them and answer to you there.

The 7 Ages Of A Business

I had a business for 10 years. I started it from the scratch, financing it by using the 3 F’s (family, friends and fools) and managed it until I decided it’s time to sell, buying my own freedom. It was one of the most interesting periods in my life and one of the most fulfilling either. In today’s post I’ll share something I learned during this 10 years: the 7 ages of your business.

Because, like every other thing which is born, raised and fulfilled, every business has its own life and its own stages. The following is more or less an entrepreneur perspective, it’s a view from somebody who decides to start his own business, but it can be also applied to any other perspective (investors, managers, employees).

1. Enthusiasm

This is the first stage of your business. It’s the first weeks or months, a period in which the deep, almost irrational exhilaration is simply unbalanced by any other feeling you have. The joy of being your own boss, the fascination of seeing your ideas coming to fruition, the faith that everything is possible are simply overwhelming. During the first weeks of my business I used to compare this stage with sex, in terms of thrill. Entrepreneurship being better than sex, of course.

In this stage you don’t know almost anything about the processes in your business, nor about your clients. You don’t have a clear understanding of the cash-flow notion, hence the cash-flow will be almost invisible. You may start it with an initial funding or you can start it out of nothing, as I did, but it’s certain that in the first weeks or months, you won’t really have a cash-flow. And you also won’t give a dime on it.

Also, in this age, you act out of gut, rather than calculus. It’s the most intuitive part of a business, and most of the time you are right. The most important and effective employees I had were hired during the first, enthusiast phase of my business. I didn’t know how to run a hiring interview and all I knew was: “Do you know to do that? Let’s work together!”. And it worked.

During this stage you don’t have visible results either. All you have is a deep desire to change the world and prove your value.

Read more about the enthusiasm age in this guest post I did at AttractionMindMap.com. (more…)