A Different Kind of Guest Post

I had a guest post published today on ChristianPF.com.  You see, Christian Personal Finance was looking to add another couple staff writers to their blog so I figured I would send an email and ask about it.  It turns out that there were many, many responses to this post offering these 2 positions.  In fact, there were about 100 responses. 

So the owner of the site decided to hold a little guest posting contest.  The editors narrowed down the field to 10 bloggers based upon previously submitted writing samples.  I simply provided the link to my blogs and HubPages articles thinking I didn't have much of a chance against 100 others.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I had been included in the top 10.  The next portion of the "interview" was to write a guest post for publication and let the blogosphere help make the decision.  Of course, the deadline for sending in the post happened to be midnight on the evening that we were driving back from Dallas where I had crappy internet access and little time for writing.  At least the deadline was midnight Central time.  Since I was in the Eastern time zone, I had until 1 am to get it done.  When I sat down at 11 pm after driving for 16 hours, I got an extra hour to get it in.

Let me tell you that writing a post late at night after driving home 900 miles from Dallas is not that much fun.  I certainly wondered if I should even bother, but I have always been one to do my best no matter the circumstances.  Besides, the worst that could happen is I get a guest post published along with a link so that I might get a new reader or two to my personal finance blog.

On the other hand, I could end up picking up a staff writing position and making a few dollars per month for blogging while reaching a much wider audience than I can currently.  Either way, I was honored to be considered as one of the top 10% of writers who had expressed interest.  I still consider myself an amateur writer and blogger so to be considered is a great accomplishment for me.

Anyway, if you want to read my article on lessons we can learn from Solomon, please feel free.  I would be honored if you consider it worthy enough to comment upon, tweet or retweet or digg or stumble or share on facebook, etc.  If not, then that is OK also.  I am just pleased to be making progress one day and one post at a time.

Thanks for reading this blog as well as my other writings.  I really appreciate it.

My First Guest Post

As you know, I have been working on a new site since the Panda update.  It is through Weebly and I had to pay for the domain name and hosting for a year.  It cost me all of $40 but half of the AdSense views go to them and half to me.  It is a format with which I was familiar having written for the "content farms" which share revenue.  Since that model is broken, I decided to start my own site.  My only goal is for the site to break even by next February and then I can decide what to do from there.

I have been working hard to develop traffic by doing blog commenting and regularly interacting on other personal finance blogs to develop my name and personality.  I decided to contact one of these blog owners about writing a guest post.  He was receptive to the idea so I sent him a post, he liked it, and posted it on his site.  I am so thrilled!  It has a link to my site.  I can use Google Analytics to report on the impact later.  I am sure you are curious so here is the post:

Options Trading: Intrinsic Value and Time Value

Mark at buylikebuffett.com has a great site.  He is a professional investor and writes great posts.  If you have any interest at all in stock investing, be sure to check out his site.  He is also a great blogger.  I appreciate his willingness to let someone untested guest post for his site.  I do need to get busy later today and write the follow up piece.  I will let you all know when it is up and let you know about the results as well.

Anybody here ever write a guest post?  What did it do for your traffic?  Did you keep any regular readers?  Hope everyone has a good weekend.

Photo credit: The McClouds