There are two primary ways you can do guest blog posts. You can write a base of guest blog posts and simply send them out to blogs and offer to let them post it. Alternatively, you can contact bloggers and offer to write them an article – without sending them the article itself.
The question is: is one method better than the other?
==> The Pros and Cons of Pre-Writing
One big benefit of pre-writing is that you don’t have to wait to write. If you had to get the green light for each and every article, there’d be a lot of waiting time. By contrast, if you just went ahead and wrote the articles, you could easily blast through a dozen of these articles all at once.
You can also outsource part of this process. Naturally you don’t want to outsource blog posts for high PageRank and high traffic blogs. However, the posts for smaller blogs can often be outsourced.
Once you have a steady system of getting guest blog post gigs, it’s not inconceivable to get half a dozen of these gigs every week. If that happens, it helps to have a whole bunch of these articles in your pocket ready to fire off.
==> The Pros and Cons of Getting Permission
The permission-based method of writing articles involves contacting blogs with a list of potential topics, getting the green light and then only writing guest posts once they’ve expressed interest.
The upside of this method is that you can really put some effort into writing a great guest blog post. Once you know someone is interested in a topic and will post it if you do a great job, you can really pour your heart into it.
The downside is the lack of scale. It’s much harder to scale up this method to get 30+ guest blog posts out there a month, for example.
If you have to correspond with 30 different blogs and keep track of where you are in the sales cycle of each one, then write articles only once you get the green light while making sure you deliver them quickly for the ones that want post, it can quickly get overwhelming.
==> What’s the Best Method?
The best method is a combination of both styles.
It’s absolutely a good idea to have a reserve of a dozen or more articles that you can just whip out. Use these for low traffic blogs or for blogs where you’re just doing a guest post for the backlink.
On the other hand, for high traffic blogs or for blogs whose backlinks you really want, custom write each and every article.
In other words, use a mix of these two techniques to get both scale and power. Use pre-writing to help land you a lot of backlinks, but custom write articles for the best sites.