Looking for some advice | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Hello to everyone on the forum – I'm new to all of this so please bare with me :)

I'm looking for a few ways to improve my guest-posting and how I express my ideas when I write. I thought a good place to start, would be to ask what you look for in a guest post and what different writing styles work for you; as a publisher and as a potential guest-poster for another site.

I'm also interested in how you all personally like to be approached; do you prefer using social networking to make things a bit less stiff or do you prefer mailing potential publishers formally, through things like gmail?

Some thoughts I have on my own style:

-I like to write based on my own experiences as I feel readers really connect and learn when the content is something they can relate too.

-I could get better at using statistics to strengthen my arguments

-I often write first-person which is good for some audiences, but I realize it's not for everyone.

I would appreciate all and any insight that people can share with me.

Thank you in advance!

Dan

Hey Dan. Welcome. Always write with your voice and from your heart. I would also say (being that you are new) get to know some people and feel it out. There is no rush in guest posting. 

To make my point clearer if you were to meet a new person today chances are you wouldn't be invited to be a guest for dinner. However after about the 5 or 6th time of interacting and hitting it off you might. 

I would get to know some of the awesome folks on here and let the guest posting journey come to you. 

Jai you have an exceptional personality, you might get invited to dinner today…  

Post edited 8:58 am – February 14, 2013 by Daniel.Hilsden

I appreciate the responses, thanks!

@Jai –Thank you for your thoughts. I guess I need to be more patient and wait to get invited to dinner!

@MJtM I know what you mean – as a lot of people make money from their sites by having Adsense, or similar – which is totally understandable, as there are a lot of costs and even more time involved in building a good website. I am employed as part of the publicity team for a new site that does provide short-term loans. I do want to be totally honest about this – I spend all day, every day, chatting to blog owners trying to create content that will engage people's readers and genuinely add value to the personal finance debate that carries on online. We want to produce some of the most informative material out there on everything personal finance, and clearly this is a far-off dream at the moment as we're just getting going, so I thought this would be a good community to help me raise my game, as there are some amazing people here! That is why we do what we do.

We are new, and the site is still being developed, but we are going to be working hard on making sure that we are not lending to people who will struggle to pay them back.

We're building a range of budgeting tools, filming a video series and we're up to all kinds of similar bits and pieces. A lot of lenders in our industry are irresponsible, but we're  hoping for more regulation in terms of uniform checks before lending to people etc.

There are still a lot of problems with our industry, and I really don't mean to offend anyone (apologies if so), but we hope some people find our perspective interesting, and there are arguments that say short-term loans are a symptom not a cause of debt – people would otherwise just go further into their overdrafts (incurring charges that have even higher APRs) – payday companies make about a 25% margin on what they're supplying, as a t-shirt manufacturer may buy a shirt for $10 and sell it for $12.50, for a $10 loan, we'd get back $12.50 after advertising costs, bad debt, etc (and clearly, we want this bad debt level to be as low as possible). Clearly, there are arguments the other way – we're making money from people who are struggling (as often do credit card companies or banks), which reduces equality, or that many lenders do not provide clear information on APRs or costs, have a lot of merit too.

I don't mean to argue with you at all, but just to say that we feel that although a lot of people on the payday side are only looking to cash in, we'd love to provide short-term loans in a sustainable, informative and healthy way, helping people get out of scrapes with flooded houses, broken down cars, etc.

Not to mention the business' blog has an average of 3 posts per month, zero mention of yakezie and you aren't even one of the writers lol 

Just a thought on Guest Posts.

I'll also add that I want to have some clue who you are ahead of time. I automatically send away any guest post questions to our sales woman if I haven't ever spoken to you or don't know you. I don't want to be a bullhorn for a bunch of people I don't know.