If I received a guest post from an unknown player in my niche, I would delete it almost as if it were spam.

My energy is better spent focusing on long-term relationship strategies as opposed to a few links.

As Barry Deutsch mentions in his comment, the yield of cold calls is very low and often it’s a bigger waste of time on our end, because of the poor quality submitted, than for the application/submitter. This brings me back to the daily emails of writers interested in a paid blogging gig that land in my inbox. Let’s start the week with a selection of how not to ‘cold call’ apply for a blogging gigs. The best of 8 months of email applications and yes it’s a list. It’s also Monday.

Words fail me. Maybe it would be a good start NOT TO SHOUT AT ME WHEN TRYING TO LAND A BLOGGING GIG!!!!!1!!!1

How to get started, how to land a blogging gig via an open application? That’s the question. Maybe it would be a tip to at least submit a link to your to your website, call me old-fashioned but it makes things easier for me.

Now we have the issue of ‘that link’ sorted, let’s move on and look at the kind of sites and info you throw at us when applying. If you are going to send me to a pink blog, your mugshot welcoming me in full real screen estate size (OK, I exaggerate, I don’t have a netbook), how about first learning to use your keyboard properly. Apparently you have not discovered all keys yet, how do you expect me to offer you a gig and pay you for your art, knowledge if you even haven’t discovered the [Shift] key yet? Let me help you, you can find it at both left and right side of most keyboards and you have to push it at the same time as you hit the key of the letter you want to capitalise. It looks like this.

Somehow your email still managed to tickle my curiosity. 8000 Readers, even on a blogspot blog, I should be dumb not to check out your site, right? I wished I never did, it would have saved you a listing in this entry. Do you really think that with 17 Blogspot followers your 8000+ readers are believable or did you want to tell me that your almost 300 entries have received more than 8000 views in total, over almost 3 years? You go, girl! NEXT!

Dearest Ashu,

Thank you for getting in touch and making me feel important. I could indeed do with a virutal assistent but you see… the issue is that I am not the best author. Just liek you I liek mudkips I am foreign and Engliss izn’t me first language. Nevertheless I have discovered that my prefered internet browzer the habit has of decorating my entries and emails with red dotted liens. It’s a spell cheque aid.
I hope that my virutual assistend lesz tipos makez than I do. Thank you for yer tiem.

This email went on for another 3000px but even before the ‘Skills’ listing started I had already fallen asleep. Suffice to say that this is the internet and there is no need to provide me with your full address details, your objectives, complete resumé and I don’t know what else you all planned including. Be short, concise and link me to your content. Don’t make me fall asleep. If you can, capture my interest in Twitter alike style, 140 characters make you a better writer.

Dude, wouldn’t that be lovely?!?! You just said everything I dream of and I will gladly send you an apple and an onion, I assume you meant onion and not opion, right? Sadly I do not think TSA and Customs will agree if I Fed-Ex you an apple, let alone an onion.

Who Did Make It?

According to Gmail I received more than 1100 cold call applications in almost 6 months. Six (6!) applications I shared with my editor colleagues, one person was hired and will soon start here on BloggingPro. And the winner is…

This application email is perfect: short, call me old but I do appreciate the necessary ‘email niceties’ and also included is a list of sites I can find entries written by Jennifer. If one, I would have loved to see 3-5 links to reference content but within five minutes after I replied to Jennifer, I received a good selection of links to published content: reference guest entries published on influential sites within requested niche, all without using (too) formal language. Jennifer will soon publish her first entry for BloggingPro.

That’s it, folks. That’s how to land, or not to land, a paid blogging gig and write for 16k subscribers. If you don’t know how to contact site editors and site owners to at least tickle our interest with your ‘cover email’, you don’t have what it takes to be a successful blogger.

You have 30 20 seconds to impress me with your initial email.

In this post, I’ll share my favorite method of guest posting that’s given me a lot of link building success. I call it the “Cold Call Guest Post Method”.

It’s probably not the best name since cold calling has bad connotations. But the method has worked very well for me and the bloggers I targeted have been very happy with my guest posts.

Guest Posting Made Simple

Basically, you find a blog with good stats. Next, read their last couple of posts to get an overview of their type of writing and their audience.

Then, send the blogger a guest post that fits their blog and their audience. If they use images, find good images. If they write in a scholarly formal tone, use the same tone. Of course, do not stray from the blog’s topic.

That’s all there is to it. You don’t have to make guest posting complicated to be successful.

Some people advise on building a relationship first before sending a guest post. This advice is great because networking does yield many benefits. But if you just want to build many quality links as quickly as possible, I would skip the networking stage and just send them your guest post.

I call it the cold call method because you’ll be targeting total strangers. This tactic may not seem like it would work, but bloggers love free content as long as it’s well-written and relevant to their blog.

Again, the key is relevance. Obviously, you want to write a high quality post. But you’ll really catch the blogger’s attention if your post fits their blog and is valuable to their audience. One way to do this is to include relevant links in your guest post to old posts on their blog.

A great example of this is on Copyblogger. If you look at the guest posts there, you’ll see that they link back to old Copyblogger posts.

Rejection Just Means a New Opportunity

What happens if you get rejected or don’t receive a response? Well, I’m glad you asked.

It defintely doesn’t mean you wasted your time. You have a great post you can publish on your blog. Or you can find another similar blog and send it to them.

Over to You

Have you ever sent a guest post to a total stranger? If you have, how did it work out for you?

The issue is obviously an important one, especially for many bloggers who make a living from their content, but at the same time it is a total and utter waste of time and takes away from what self-employed online authors should be doing, write valuable content. Some content producers even go as far as calling adblock users ‘thief’.
The issue of adblockers, and ‘lost revenue’ is rather simple to break down and although I entirely support sites relying on ads revenue, all I can say about this is to Get over it.

Before you get upset now, let me honestly tell you that my blogging revenues depend mainly on ad revenue, but I also use ClickToFlash to improve my web experience and thus regularly block ads. Feel free to call me a thief, if I steal I also steal revenue of myself.

Decisive About Adblock Usage Statistics Is The Niche You Are In

The main decisive factor about the popularity of adblockers on your site is the niche you are in. When your content is tech focused, whether about new gadgets or about blogging (platforms), you probably will have more readers using Firefox and other standard compliant browsers, and also adblockers. Chances are high that you have also used an adblocker, during your many years online, or use a plugin such as ClickToFlash to at least limit the annoyances of Flash.
Tech minded users, surfers are the most active and often most prolific ones. They read sites such as Lifehacker and usually stay up-to-date about what the fastest browser is and how they can tweak their browser and internet connection, or network settings, to enjoy the fastest browsing experience.

But at the same time they also are the most prolific readers and often the most active participants to many a site. They use several social media accounts and chances that they still use locally stored bookmarks are very small. They will tweet, submit your great content to Delicious, Stumble and/or Digg your content. Or comment on your entries.

If your content revolves around philately or you run a popular ‘mommy blog’, chances are that you have a higher percentage of Internet Explorer users and less Firefox/Google Chrome/Safari or mobile users even among your readership. Most of your visitors might never have heard about adblocking technology.

They are the ‘influential’ users you need to get buzzed and go viral with your entries

Although I do not have any statistics about the more active and prolific participation of more tech savvy, and ‘addicted’, users in social media we all know that this is true. Being often online for more than 12 hours ourselves, just think about what your own online habits are. When was the last time you saved a bookmark locally but how many times have you (re)tweeted a good post you read instead? Ultimately you have to think less shallow-mindedly and trust the avalanche effect.
These maybe 5%-10% of regulars, often also fastest readers/absorbers of your content, who use any adblocking technology probably represent up to 80% of the first submissions and early votes on the social sites. They are the ‘influential’ users you need to get buzzed and go viral with your entries. To help your content reach the masses, masses who do NOT use any adblocking technology and thus actively generate you revenue. Once you have that base of tweets, stumbles and diggs your valuable content is more likely to be shared on Facebook, linked in local communities/forums and on smaller, less known blogs. Read by people who aren’t tech savvy and don’t know what an adblocker is. People who actively generate you money. People who will click your affiliate links without even knowing it’s an affiliate. People from whom you don’t have to hide/cloak affiliate links.

What Should You Focus On Then?

If you have to lose time trying out the best method to block these extensions, you’re doing it wrong. Instead you could try out alternative ad models, do some A-B testing about the location and popularity of your ads, but most of all you should return to your post editor and/or notebook and start focusing on your content again. If your content is great, the biggest content ’spunges’ will also promote your content. Remember that these are probably the same ones who read your content from their feed reader, a rather ad-free environment and if you have ads in your feed, these have the worst conversion rate of all anyway.

Why did they come to your site? Maybe because they wanted to comment on your content, participate to your community, but instead you just annoyed them, hijacked their browser experience. Remember that one annoyed customer will share his/her experience with everyone who wants to hear about but you need more than five satisfied customers to tell their friends about you.

Lesson learned: get over it and move on. We had the exactly same discussion in 2005 with feeds already, today most of us have more feed subscribers than daily page views.

So, being the curious cat that I am :), I did some investigating.

I looked at the search engine results page (SERP) for the most relevant keyword and saw that my post was not in the top 50 results. Instead, a site had scraped (copied through automatic means) the opening sentences of my blog entry and was ranking on the third results page. Also, they cloaked their post. In other words, they redirected it to a unrelated product.

Fighting the Cloaking Scraper

Usually, it takes time to fight a scraper that’s outranking you for a long tail keyword. Sure, you can go to Google and ask them to fix the results since you’re the original content creator. But Google is a big company with millions (billions?) of search results. The chance of them manually fixing the result is pretty low. You can contact the scraper and hope they stop but people are reluctant to give up their traffic. Oftentimes you just have to build links until Google’s algorithm trusts and ranks your site.

In my situation though, the scraper was also cloaking. Cloaking is a black hat tactic that Google frowns upon because it tricks the user into thinking they are visiting a page but instead they are redirected to an unrelated page.

I went to Google’s spam report page and reported the cloaked post. It took a few days but Google removed the offending post from their index. As a result, my post made the top 10 and my traffic increased.

If you read about linkworthy content, you’ll often find articles about the qualities the content should have. For example, some SEO experts talk about using humor or controversy. Others say you should be the first to scoop the latest news while there’s another camp that recommends giveaways and contests.

While these tips can definitely help, I favor a more pragmatic approach. I like to look at the content in my niche (including my own) that’s already getting links and then create similar content. I like this tactic because it takes a lot of the guesswork out of the equation.

What’s Already Working?

First, check out your referral stats to see what types of content are already attracting links. Also, you can look at the trackbacks in your comment section.

A couple weeks ago, I did a quick scan of my stats and found that 90% of my natural links were pointing to a certain kind of resource post. With this information in mind, I started publishing more of these posts. As a result, my links and traffic have gone up significantly.

Second, when examining the links of competitors, look at the blogs with mid-level traffic instead of the super popular blogs. The A-listers tend to get links because of the sheer size of their audience even if their content is not particularly link worthy.

Once you’ve looked at a couple blogs, you should have a good idea of what attract links in your niche. Then, publish similar content and you’ll be on your way towards a strong link building foundation.

This strategy of guest posting is not only effective for SEO and referral traffic, but it also builds your reputation, brand, and credibility.

If you want to have a successful guest posting campaign, consider these 3 rules.

1. Relevance

Your post should fit the overall flow of the blog.

Read the last couple entries to get an idea of the style and tone of the blogger. Some blogs are very informal while others have a traditional writing style. Some blogs use many images while others don’t use them at all.

One of the best ways to be relevant is to read the previous guest posts on the blog. Look at what they have published before and create a post that is similar.

2. Quality

Create something so good that it can’t be ignored.

About a month ago, I found out that a PageRank7 blog with 1,800 subscribers and 80,000 monthly visitors was looking for guest posts. As you can guess, the blogger had pretty high standards for the content on his site. I started working on a guest post since PR7 links are hard to come by. I came up with a topic but after 3 hours, I realized the post was not going to be good enough so I scrapped it and started a new post. It took me 7 hours to complete. I did a lot of research and wrote four rough drafts to get the post just right.

I sent off the post and the blogger really like it. He published it within a week.

You might balk at the thought of spending hours creating one post, but oftentimes that’s what it will take to get popular bloggers to notice you. Now you may not have to spend 10 hours like I did but don’t underestimate the time and effort it takes to produce quality content.

3. Persistence

The old saying goes, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

If your post gets rejected or you don’t get a reply, don’t give up. Send it to another blogger. You worked hard at creating a top-notch post, so someone else will be willing to publish it.

About three weeks ago, I sent a guest post but the blogger said they already had similar content. I thought my content was unique but I didn’t say anything. Instead, I moved on. I did some research and found a blog with better stats. I sent them the guest post and they published it within a week.

For some that includes blogging, which might explain many of the “how do I start a blog” questions that I  receive, as well as all the costs associated with starting one (at least for those who choose to self host their own content).

While there are many excellent blog platforms out there that do not require a person to have a server, for some the price range might be beyond their budget (especially those with monthly plans).

After scouring the internet for more hours than I care to admit, here are four blogging platforms for aspiring probloggers that cost less than $25 a year.

Note: I based this list on 4 criteria: customization, cost (under $25 which is about $2/month), security and the ability to insert ads.

Blogger

Backed by the muscle of Google, Blogger has become the most popular blogging platform in the world.

Users can easily customize the template (or import their own), as well as host the site upon their own custom domain.

Users can upload up to 1 GB of images as well as video (the latter which thus far has no limit), and supports mobile blogging (especially on the iPhone).

Price: Free, although users can pay $5-$20/year for 20GB-80GB of image space.

Live Journal

Considered one of the oldest blogging platforms around, Live Journal has an interesting history which includes being acquired (and then sold off) by Six Apart.

While Live Journal does offer a basic account for those who embrace all things free, the platform really only begins to shine once users take advantage of its premium features.

These include the ability to customize the layout, as well as insert ads (like Adsense) upon the blog.

Price: Premium features costs $25/year, although users who embrace automatic drafts will only pay $19.95/year.

OnSugar

Powered by Drupal, OnSugar made what was once regarded by many as a CMS for geeks to an elegant blog platform for the masses.

Users of OnSugar can customize the template of the site, as well as use Getty images without the threat of being sued (provided you maintain the onsugar domain name).

OnSugar (to my knowledge) does not offer a premium feature of any kind, although that may change once the platform becomes more popular.

Price: Free

Tumblr

Sometimes seen as a cross between Twitter and a traditional blog, Tumblr embraces a “keep it simple” approach when it comes to blogging (or microblogging as the platform blurs the line here).

Despite its simple layout, Tumblr natively supports video, audio and imaging uploading, making it a full featured blog platform that (in some ways) rivals the previous three mentioned above.

Price: Free

Any others?

If you know of any other sites, feel free to enlighten us in the comment section below.

As far as the sites above, all of them allow users to blog upon a custom domain, which should help users short on cash compete against those who choose to host their own content.

Have you ever tried to cook a steak without checking the time, temperature and (most importantly) the steak itself?

As silly as that sounds, the same is true when it comes to analyzing your blogs traffic and stats, which can provide invaluable feedback on the health of your blog.

For those fortunate enough to have an iPhone, here are four apps you should consider owning.

Analytics App (price: $5.99)

If you are a Google Analytics freak (note: I say that in love) then you will enjoy this app.

Although Analytics App does not have the greatest user interface (when compared to rivals like BAM Analytics), it does offer one feature that you will not find elsewhere on the app store–the famous “Today” stats, allowing me to view stats that happened today, rather than glimpsing at yesterday’s traffic.

Analytics App supports multiple accounts and despite the steep price, is worth every penny.

iEarn ($1.99)

Believe or not this is NOT my favorite AdSense App (truth be told SenseEarn is).

However, with iPhone password cracking slowly gaining popularity, I have made it a general rule that all financial apps require an “in app” password for security reasons, a feature iEarn has (that it’s rivals do not).

Security aside, iEarn does contain a few interesting features, the main one being the ability to see your earnings in different currencies.

While basic compared to other apps, the developer is promising to add extra features (RSS, search and mobile earnings) which should make it more appealing for stat geeks (like me).

Stat Fever ($0.99)

Created by Paranoid Ferret Productions, Stat Fever is in my opinion one of the best apps for FeedBurner addicts.

Stat Fever allows you to analyze your subscribers via graphs and numbers (the former which I’m a huge fan of).

While not much has changed since I last reviewed this app (which is unfortunate), Stat Fever still retains its crown as one of the most elegant and powerful FeedBurner apps thus far.

Statistics for WordPress ($2.99)

For those of you sporting the WP brand (and fear Google “knowing” everything about your blog), Statistics for WordPress is a perfect alternative to Google Analytics, and perhaps has the best user interface as far as analytics apps go.

What I like about this app is that it supports multi-touch, allowing you to compare different data points (which is useful if you’re trying to spot a trend).

Any others?

To my sorrow I was unable to find apps supporting a few other analytical apps or ad networks (i.e. for Yahoo! Publisher, Pheedo, Sitemeter, Quantcast, etc.),  although hopefully more will appear (unless they are all holding out for the upcoming iPad).

Getting quality backlinks is the best competitive advantage you can get in SEO. Backlinks are a major part of the search engines’ algorithms and it’s much harder to copy someone’s backlinks than their keywords.

You can focus on keywords but keywords are easy to implement. Once a webmaster figures out that they are important, he can look at the free keyword tools, find relevant keywords, and then add on their website. Compare that process to building links on quality sites.

That’s why the search engines place a lot of value to backlinks on their algorithms. With the early search engines, you could just place keywords on your site and you would rank pretty quickly. Savvy SEOs realized this and created many low quality sites that dominated the search results. Google became the best search engine by focusing more on links instead of keywords on a site. This focus helped Google create search results filled with more quality sites than their competitors.

It’s not just the quantity of links that today’s modern search engines look at. Quality of links is much more important. In fact, if you get too many low quality links in proportion to your other links, you could get penalized and lose your rankings. That’s the main reason I often talk about quality sites.

Therefore, we need to figure out what quality means to the search engines. I gave the following metrics in the previous post:

• PageRank
• Number of backlinks
• Number of links from unique domains
• Age
• Traffic from popular keywords

These numbers aren’t perfect but they do give a good picture of the quality of a site from the search engine’s perspective. Once you’ve found some quality sites, you can apply that knowledge. Here are some common ways:

Guest posting: I’ve written that guest posting is the best SEO method for bloggers. You can maximize your guest posts by sending them to quality blogs.

Link requests: At the beginning of this month, I wrote that the key to successful link requests is researching sites, figuring out the type of content they link to, and then creating that content. Once you’ve done those steps, you can confidently ask for a link. You can increase the effectiveness of your link requests by sending them to quality sites.

Reciprocal links: Getting reciprocal links is not a powerful strategy by any means. Still, it can give you a small boost in the rankings. But the most important thing it can do is let the search engines associate you with quality sites. Of course, for this to happen, you need to know which sites are the quality ones.

Buying sites: This application is not as common as the others. But if you ever find yourself in the position to buy a site, it can be very profitable to buy a site with a lot of authority. Also, because not every webmaster focuses on keywords, there are many sites with good links but poor onpage keyword use. Ycan quickly improve the search traffic of these sites by doing keyword research and including those keywords in strategic locations like the title tags.

Although there are are plenty of video editing apps available on Steve Job’s favorite geek toy (after the iPad of course), users may be wondering which photo apps (out of the hundreds available) are worth their hard earned cash.

While many photo apps pretty much duplicate each other (whether it comes to cropping, hue effects, sharpening,searching, etc.) here are 7 from the app store that have really stood out from the rest.

Cooliris (Price: Free)

Unless you are a master of the camera, sometimes finding an image online is difficult–especially with many of them being copyrighted (to the delight of lawyers everywhere).

Instead of paying “fair use” fees, you may want to checkout Cooliris (who also has an Android app).

Users can easily search across various search engines and photo sites, as well as visit the domain where the image is hosted (which can help you determine whether or not the image is copyrighted before you hit the download button.

Facemelter Pro ($2.99)

Facemelter Pro is one of my favorite photo editing apps as you can alter the appearance of your favorite politician picture, giving it an unique look that will attract the attention of readers on your blog.

If spending $3 is a little too much for you, you can always check out the original Facemelter app (for $1.99) or the lite version for free.

Photogene ($1.99)

While this app comes with many of the standard photo editing features (crop, black & white, filters, etc.), what makes Photogene stands out from its rivals is the fact that users can place speech bubbles, as well as text upon the image.

Photogene also allows bloggers to post images directly to Facebook and Twitter, as well as email (which is handy for those of you on Posterous).

iRetouch ($0.99)

iRetouch is one of the few apps that actually convinced me to avoid purchasing Photoshop (especially after they launched an iPhone app).

Similar to Photogene in many ways (except a lot more advanced), iRetouch’s notable feature is the ability to add various shades to portions of an image, without affecting the rest (like black & white or in an ugly shade of green).

FX Photo Studio ($1.99)

Created by MacPhun, FX Photo Studio allows bloggers to apply over a 100 different photo effects upon an image giving one a “zillion” ways to alter a picture through various combinations.

Photo Studio’s vintage effects stand out the most when compared to other apps, and its social connections (Twitter and Facebook) have made it a favorite for micro and pro bloggers alike.

PhotoForge ($2.99)

If there was one photo editing app to have, Photoforge would be it! Created by GhostBird Software, this app has the best user interface out of all the photo apps out there (save Photogene) without sacrificing on power.

Several features that I love about this app is the ability to crop at odd angles (instead of just 90 or 180 degrees), as well as a color picker.

Although there are many apps with the ability to clone stamp, PhotoForge seems to have worked out the “kinks” regarding this feature.

Photo Paper ($0.99)

While Photo Paper does not come with many bells and whistles, the one thing I do love about this app is the ability to combine up to 6 different images together and merge them into one photo.

The effect is best used with 2 images (in my honest opinion), and can be handy when you need an image comparing two products against each other (say a Google phone and an iPhone).

Conclusion

Although there are many other photo editing apps out there, these 7 apps are pretty much the only photo editing apps needed for a blogger’s iPhone, and should help make it easier to blog on the go without having to use your laptop, desktop–or even your fancy iPad. :-P