You can bet I will be entering the Blog Engage $500 Guest Blogging Contest #1 and have already submitted my guest article and am waiting for it to be published.

Blog Engage just recently awarded $1,000 cash to Kira Permunian who runs SEOGeekster which was an amazing prize!  He had won the 2011 $1000 Guest Blogging contest.

Blog Engage always awards impressive cash prizes for bloggers who write the best articles and those who are able to bring in the most engagement in the form of comments, shares and such.

It will be good to compete again with many of the bloggers I have known for 3 years, these are all a great bunch of bloggers and I am hoping that I can get an early head start on this contest and help push me to the lead.  Note, if I win the $500 guest blogging contest #1, the first place prize is $250.  If I win it, I will probably use most of the money to host another giveaway on DragonBlogger.com (Maybe another Kindle Fire?).

To get in on the $500 Guest Blogging contest now you must be a Blog Engage Member, now is a good time to sign up as the membership dropped to only $9.99 or you can get free membership if you subscribe to the Blog Engage RSS Syndication plans which give you backlinks, exposure and is well worth it.

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I will tell you how to benefit from your existing content, which might leave you wondering if I am going to talk about article marketing. However, anyone who has read any of my articles on article marketing will know I would never promote it. I firmly believe that low quality articles hosted by low quality sites is a system set up to fail. It amazes me that it’s still promoted as a system of value. It’s simply not true.

No, what I want to talk to you about is entirely different. You can take your existing content and repurpose it to make it work harder for you. Imagine drawing in additional readers and generating new customers, all while building your reputation with Google.

What’s great about this method is that you can use this technique with any topic you choose to write on such as landscaping, computer software, or a Bestar Hampton corner computer desk.

There is Power and Benefit Lurking within Your Knowledge

Are you aware of the value in each of your website pages? If not, finding out is easy with Google Analytics. The number of views, low bounce rates, and even the time people spend on each page is readily available through this service. Knowing this information is key to successfully converting your existing content.

Now that you have that information, figure out how much time you spent in creating each page.

If they are well-read pages then you probably spent far more time on the research than on the actual writing. In fact, about three times the amount of time. I knew that because that’s the average for quality articles. Although the more you write on a particular topic, the less time you will likely need to spend on research. Just keep in mind it’s an important element in writing anything of value.

With proper research you will be able to produce an informative piece that is high in quality, as well as value. It’s an asset to any writer’s files.

It’s considered an asset, or an investment, because you can get many miles out of your existing research and content by repurposing it. Repurposing simply means you can turn out another original article out of your current material, numerous times actually. Perhaps you can lead new traffic back to your site by placing a couple anchor text links within the new piece. Brilliant, isn’t it?

It works. Continue to learn more…

Multiplying Your Content with Little Effort

As I already mentioned, to say that I am not a fan of article marketing would be an understatement. My disdain for it drove me to get the message out to those who are being mislead by those who are pushing books, software, and courses designed to ‘make you rich’, when in reality it doesn’t work. I just couldn’t stay silent about something that I am passionate about.

So, I dove in head first into research, collecting all the information I could such as data and quotes using the highly regarded Google process. I spent hours on research, then combined that information along with my own experiences to churn out a detailed and lengthy outline.

The next thing I did was to create two separate articles out of that outline, with one article approximately 1,900 words and the other at 3,700. This wasn’t ‘article marketing’, because each had their own angle. I then turned to ComLuv.com and FamousBloggers.net, both reputable sites accepting guest content, and submitted both pieces.

What happened next was astounding. There was an abundance of retweets and comments on both articles, as well as an influx of activity on my own website. AffiliateABCs, a widely known podcast took note of them also, and invited me to do an interview on their show, which was also successful. In fact, GeekCast.com chose to rebroadcast the interview as well.

That was just the beginning, because I then hired a freelance writer. I asked the writer to create 3 additional pieces from that outline, with varied angles to avoid repetition. These articles were then submitted on 3 more top sites, each of which allow guest content. Also, AffiliateABC granted me permission to air my interview on my own Coffee Talk show.

The end result was that my initial investment, the time spent researching and drafting my master outline for just one topic, turned into a huge payoff. Just over 3 hours, and some creativity, generated 8 pieces of original content articles, and 3 podcasts. All of this from existing content. Amazing, isn’t it?

Pull Out the Hidden Value in Your Finest Content

If you have invested time and energy into quality content, then you should try to get the most out of it by repurposing it. This is not spinning, but instead discovering new material out of your existing content for a new purpose, and then submitting to sites with favorable PR3 or higher.

If you think this SEO technique is parallel to article marketing, keep in mind that PR3 sites can do more for just one of your backlinks than a low ranking PR0 ‘content farm’ can do for 1,000 of your backlinks. It’s also worth mentioning that linking to sites without any value can be a significant disadvantage to your website.

Remember converting your existing content can be a noteworthy payout for your website, whether your topic is that cover glass corner computer desk, marketing and research, or dog grooming.

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I needed plugins that allowed for maximum efficiency that helped me do things easier, notify and assist new writing staff as well as make coordination and notifications automatic.

So after almost a year of testing plugins for multi author WordPress blogs, I have whittled my list down to the following favorites:

Admin Author Filter

I need a modification to my WordPress edit post screen that would allow me to only list posts by a specific author for a month, and Admin Author Filter works perfectly.  Need to know how many posts “PERSON A” wrote in June 2011?  This is the easiest way to find out.

Samir contributed a lot of posts to DragonBlogger.com July?

• Download Admin Author Filter now!

Category Reminder

I have a peeve about writers who forget tags, descriptions and categories.  This is partially solved by Category reminder by Rob Felty is perfect and simply pops up an alert telling guest bloggers they need to select a category.  This simple plugin even catches myself when I write and try to schedule too quickly without selecting a category.

• Download Category Reminder now!

Dashboard: Pending Review

When you have contributor accounts you will want to have Dashboard: Pending Review which will show you right from your Dashboard which posts need to be reviewed and scheduled for publication.  You can either do it yourself, or have one of your editor’s do it, but either way it is good to see if there is a pending review queue right from the dashboard.

• Download Dashboard Pending Review now!

Dashboard: Scheduled Posts

Not only do you need to easily see which posts need to be reviewed on your WordPress dashboard, but if you are a blog which has articles scheduled days in advance like mine you want to see what posts are coming up soon.  Dashboard: Scheduled posts shows you what posts are going to be published and what days right from your dashboard.

• Download Dashboard Scheduled Posts now!

Members

On my site I have a team of dedicate writers who I want to separate out from normal guest bloggers, I needed to give them enhanced permissions like the ability to upload images into articles and use iframe code…etc.  This required setting custom roles and permissions for my writers.  The Members plugins lets you create or modify WordPress roles so that you can broaden or restrict permissions for various account types.  This is essential for tweaking and making a role that you want to be more than a contributor but less than an author for example, or maybe a partial admin but without full admin rights.

Members is easy to use and simply using check boxes to control what permissions your custom WordPress roles have makes it a breeze.

Download Members now!

Peter’s Collaboration E-mails

This plugin is one of my all time favorite because it emails the post author whenever there is a status change on a post.  So if you schedule a post the author will be notified when it is scheduled for and again when the post actually published.  This is the best plugin so every one of your writers know exactly when their articles are set for and when they are published.

This plugin also notifies administrators and defined editors when a post is submitted for review.  This allows you to always get an email when someone submits a post for review which is a great reminder.

It also will notify them if you put an article back into draft for re-edit.

No doubt about it, Peter’s Collaboration E-mails keeps people notified about post status and is essential for multi-author blogs.

Download Peter’s Collaboration E-mails now!

Peter’s Post Notes

There is also a companion plugin called Peter’s Post Notes which allows you to put notes in the sidebar of posts and it will automatically include those notes when it emails the post author status updates, as well as they can read the notes in the sidebar.

Download Peter’s Post Notes now!

Revision Control

Revision Control isn’t specifically for Multi Author purposes but it definitely helps when you can restrict the number of previous versions of an article.  When having multiple authors you can have auto-saves and post versions add up fast and making sure there are only a set # of previous versions can help keep your database trim.  The only disadvantage is if someone works on posts for very long or needs to do many re-edits before publication, they may not be able to restore back to a version old enough so find a good balance of say 5 previous versions maximum.

Download Revision Control now!

Viper’s Video Quicktags

Some writers don’t know HTML or WordPress very well and you want to make it quick and easy for them to insert a video into their article if they have something on YouTube, Vimeo or some other media site they want to share.  Viper’s Video Quicktags will let them click 1 button, simply paste the URL of the video and it is embedded.  It can also be expanded to customize width/height but this is optional.

I also liked this plugin so much I did a video review showcasing it:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Download Viper’s Video Quicktags now!

This was my top list of WordPress plugins for guest blogging or multi author WordPress blogs.  There are some extra plugins that help with post authoring in general but weren’t specific to multi user which can include WP-Syntax to help with writers who sometimes need to add code to posts, as well as ReplyMe WordPress plugin which will email readers and authors whenever someone replies to any comments which helps facilitate two way communication.

If you use any plugins not mentioned here to help manage a multi author blog, feel free to share it in the comments as I am always looking for ways to improve productivity and efficiency.

If you have any other questions on WordPress plugins or would like me to try a plugin and provide feedback let me know as well.  I am always experimenting with WordPress plugins.

-Dragon Blogger

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• Objective: Exposure to Larger Audience

Strategy: Especially if your blog is new and has a very small community/readership, it might be a great idea to gain exposure for yourself and your articles by posting them on the well-established and popular blogs in your niche which have thousands of regular readers. For this purpose you need to prepare a list of the most popular blogs with the largest subscription and the lowest Alexa Rank in your niche, followed by regularly sending them guest posts. It is very important that you conduct some research to find out what kind of articles are accepted by the target blog owners to minimize the rejection rate. Once become a reputed guest blogger, getting guest articles accepted by even the most popular blogs won’t be a problem!

• Objective: Getting High Quality Backlinks

Strategy: Getting high quality backlinks is simply getting links to your own blog/website from High Google PageRank Blogs with content relevant to your own blog. Such blogs are pretty easy to find, since most guest bloggers look for high PR blogs for hosting their articles. An important point to keep in mind is that lower the number of links from each page of the target blog, higher the value of each link! Thus, guest blogging on blogs which have nofollow comment links but have high PR pages is the most effective way to get high quality backlinks through guest posting.

• Objective: Driving Traffic to Your Own Blog/Website

Strategy: Posting guest-articles on high-traffic blogs having a targeted audience is perhaps the best way to ensure that you keep getting a steady stream of targeted visitors to your own blog/website. Ever since Google has started downgrading the SERP rankings of article directories, more and more bloggers and webmasters are switching to guest blogging. The best thing about guest blogging for traffic is that blogs which are already popular are most likely to do the SEO for you! That means you can just optimize the articles and funnel a part of the other blogs’ traffic to your own! For this you need to prepare a list of the blogs in your niche/category with the lowest Alexa Rank and getting a steady stream of visitors from search engines and social networking sites.

• Objective: Higher Per-Article Income Through Paid Guest Posts

Strategy: Sometimes high traffic and a large subscriber base do not convert well enough into money. The income per article, or per visitor depends on the niche of the blog and the geographic distribution of the audience/readership. In such a case it might be a great idea to divert some of the best articles to other more popular blogs which report higher income per article. Sometimes blogs advertise for guest bloggers at decent rates per article. Even a semi-permanent position on a popular blog as a writer may ensure a steady income which you can use to keep up your own blog! The income may be through Adsense Revenue Sharing or Cash Payment, or you may choose to leave your own affiliate links based on the blogs’ revenue sharing models. The target blogs should preferably have a predominantly North-American/European audience for maximum revenue.

• Objective: Motivation for Blogging Regularly

Strategy: Some Bloggers, including me, prefer to post more articles on other blogs than their own. One reason is that the more popular blogs have a highly charged atmosphere where ideas flow freely and you remain constantly motivated to generate highly useful and popular content. The readership community of a blog is a very powerful motivator. If you are looking for motivation to keep on blogging regularly, the first step is to find one or more blogs where there are multiple regular authors, indicating that they feel encouraged to keep churning out content, and several comments are posted by the readers asking doubts, suggesting new ideas and participating in debates. The best way to go about building a list of such blogs is to look at the average number of guest articles per author and the number of comments per post. To begin with, even 20-25 comments per post and 10-15 articles per author are good standards.

Please share your strategies and experiences for guest blogging with us.

Guest Blogging for Profits List Price: $9.97 Read Reviews

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This type of interaction allows for greater connection with readers, and I encourage my fans to read my article over on Blog Engage and leave me a comment sharing your thoughts on blogging as well as some of your favorite bloggers:  http://www.blogengage.com/blogger/blogging-to-forge-a-connection-with-readers/

I need as many Retweets, comments and Facebook likes on the article as you can muster as I gain points for each comment, Retweet and Like of the guest article.  The winning prize is $250 cash, and I am hoping to win so that I can give back to my readers.

I appreciate the support from all my readers and fellow bloggers and if I win the contest, I am going to be giving away 50% of the prize money back in a contest on my own blog.

On another note, Blog Engage recently announced that they will be doing a contest every single month for the rest of 2011 and give away over $3000 worth of prizes by the time all is said and done.  Not only should you be signing up for Blog Engage (email me for an invitation contactme@dragonblogger.com) but if you are a blogger and you sign up for their RSS Syndication program you automatically get listed as a sponsor in every contest if you sign up with Gold, Platinum or Business membership.  I upgraded my plan to business membership a few weeks ago because of the value of this.  Not only do you get 6 article submissions and backlinks for every article you write you also get other bloggers writing reviews and articles about your site as a contest sponsor.  This is one of the best offers and with plans starting from $4.99 to $19.99 I highly recommend the Blog Engage RSS Syndication program.

-Dragon Blogger

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2. Don’t Make Guest Blogging About You When guest blogging don't go out of your way to promote yourself and your own content, provide value to the...
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