Guest blogging is one of the best ways to get a blog or website known and target new audiences, we all agree with that. Welcoming guest posters is also a great way to provide fresh content to your readers and target the crowds the invited author already appealed to. By analyzing these two sides of the guest blogging scene, you can easily tell this is a win-win promotion practice.

No wonder it has spread throughout the blogosphere and it has created a need for the proper tools! A while back I wrote about the launch of My Blog Guest, a place where guest posters and blog owners could meet, connect and see how they could help each other out. It looked promising and I decided to try out Ann Smarty’s project and see for myself how it worked.

I started by asking for guest posts for Words of a Broken Mirror, the very PR and marketing blog you’re currently reading. Except for a couple of offers, most were spot on, with suggestions of articles that fit my blog perfectly. Even it the case of those whose ideas were not a perfect match, we managed to reach common ground and come up with a blog post idea that would work. After the initial hype around my form post on MyBlogGuest, which got me plenty of guest posts, some of the authors wanted to write more while new ones kept approaching me after finding my profile.

With TravelTweaks.com, I tried a different approach. Rather than waiting for people to come up with topics that I could approve, I used MyBlogGuest’s Article Gallery. This is a section where premium users post their latest articles. Bloggers accepting guest posts can then place an offer with an estimated publishing times, and the author chooses the outlet the fits best. In a few months I have published several dozen guest posts this way. I can do that with Travel Tweaks without looking like I have abandoned it only guest authors write there because this particular travel news site publishes 4-5 stories per day, features exploring certain destinations and the latest news in the travel and tourism world.

MyBlogGuest has a great system to get great guest posters the recognition they need – a voting system for those publishing their work. You can thumb up or down a certain author, letting future blog owners know just how good they are. To filter out one time users that only want to trash someone or vote for them just for fun, this system is restricted to users that are active on the MyBlogGuest forums.

Other than providing the obvious gathering place for those in need of content and authors of guest posts, MyBlogGuest also encourages members to connect on social networks and help each other promote their blogs and posts. It is also a great resource for guest blogging tips and best practices, helping newbies and experienced bloggers alike.

What I particularly like about the MyBlogGuest community is the willingness of members to help and how open Ann and her team are to suggestions, answering to questions and tips faster than I would have expected.

I strongly recommend it to blog owners in search for fresh views from new authors and to bloggers wanting to make a name for themselves and getting their blog news to guest posting.

Have you tried guest posting so far, from either end of the deal? How has it worked for you so far and what tools are you using?

Passion for food is something a lot of people share, regardless of gender, location or cultural background. We all need to occasionally indulge our taste buds and linger in the flavors of a delightful meal, alone or in the company of others. Following that passion to get people to write and share their thoughts on food and what it means to be cooked well is bound to turn into a quite interesting social media project.

Chef and No Reservations TV show host Anthony Bourdain has had this wonderful idea of a crowdsourced library of essays on food and launched the Medium Raw Challenge. People are faced with an apparently simple, yet rather complex question – Foodies: What does it mean to cook food well?. They write their essays and post them on the challenge website and hope to win the Special Added Prize of $10,000 to the Grand Prize Winner and have their writing included in Bourdain’s latest book, Medium Raw.

Those foodies who enjoy cooking, eating and reading about food can still have a blast by browsing through submitted essays and voting their favorites. The social media challenge is powered by a vibrant Facbook community page that already has a 8,6000 user crowd around it.

Is this a smart way to promote the new book? Of course! Is it working? I’d say yes. And it’s working because Anthony Bourdain seems to be getting it. He actually reads the entries and posts comments expressing his opinion. He’s present and people don’t feel like they’re talking to some minion handling his social media presence.

The community engagement is indeed impressive and it’s easy to lose yourself while browsing through entries, especially if you enjoy food and don’t only eat stuff to keep yourself alive!

While browsing through my LinkedIn account, I just noticed this question about apps that allow you to schedule tweets. Some of the answers stated no one should ever schedule tweets, as it is spammy. Automation is bad, don’t do it. And I started wondering. Is it really spam? Or is it just a way to make work easier and give your followers a break? And the answer is, like always, it depends

I should first say I manage a few Twitter accounts. On some I schedule tweets, on others I don’t. On those who are there to provide news on a certain topic, I do schedule tweets. I usually find the news all at once and just sending them all out at the same time is actually more spammy to some users than scheduling them throughout the day. That does not mean I ignore the conversation. I check the stream every couple of hours, check what others are saying, retweet, reply, thank people for their comments and retweets.

When it comes to blog posts, a lot of what I write is scheduled. And when I set the publishing time and date, I also set the tweet. Basically because I tend to get caught up and I might forget. I do check it, I do interact, as I said before. And I really don’t think programming tweets is a form of spam.

When all your tweets are programmed and you are never there to talk, reply or answer questions, it is definitely spam. You are there to broadcast more or less forcefully whatever you please and you really don’t care what your followers have to say. But from that to saying any form of automation and of rendering your work fast and effective is spam is a long road to be traveled.

What about you? Do you schedule tweets? Do you think it’s spam when others do it? Should we ban all automation, good or bad from social media? I say not, yet it all needs to be approached with great care. And over to you…

Yesterday was the last day when contestants could submit entries to the WoBM Anniversary Group Writing Project Blogging and Relationships – Write about the wonderful people you’ve met. Here’s the complete list of submitted entries. The jury will now go behind close doors and deliberate! Not really, but we’ll be back with the three lucky winners as soon as possible!

Brad Shorr – Blogging Relationships are Gold for the Soul

Sarah Welstead – 7 Rules for Effective Relationship Blogging

Andrew of Good Honest Dollar – Three Special Bloggers

Joanna Young – Why it’s worth sticking with Twitter

CV Harquail – Tweet yourself like the person you want to be

Jacquelyn – How I started the WParent blog

Lillie Ammann – Blogging Friends

Nithya – Building Strength through Support

And my own – Investing in relationships has excellent ROI

There are two periods every year when I stop to analyze what has happened and figure out what I want to do next: the end of a year and beginning of a new one and my birthday. My birthday plays a more important role when it comes to personal resolutions, the new year comes with other tipes of goal settings and plans.

This year I want to state what I want to achieve in 2009, so that this post can act as a reminder, a resource to analyze 2009 when 2010 is close and as a way for me to have a clearer view of what I actually plan to do with my personal and professional life.

Blogging

Words of a Broken Mirror

• publish at least 5 posts per week
• guest post at least once a month
• have some more guest posts on WoBM
• comment more and have more comments on my posts
• get business from the blog
• increase number of RSS subscribers, be it via email or readers
• increase blog traffic, Google PR (currently at 5), Alexa, Technorati and whatever other metric makes me happy

Travel Spells

• revive the blog and post at least 3 times per week
• get constant comments and far more readers
• change the blog theme and upload the cool logo that’s waiting in your email inbox
• and of course, traffic, pr, metrics and such

PRwave Blog (for those of you who don’t know it, this is a PR and communication blog in Romania, hosted by PRwave, the first PR community in Romania. This is where I write about similar topics as on WoBM, but in my mother tongue)

• 2-3 posts per month
• have readers identify me with the blog (as I’ve recently taken over the blog, it is still identified with its former author)
• get the conversation started with old and new readers

New Cool Online Magazine for Women (this is a project I’m working on with a couple of friends, an online magazine built on our idea of what a woman should find in a magazine dedicated to her: more articles that are really based on real life)

• build a launch plan
• find a name and purchase a domain
• launch and work on promoting the magazine

Mirror Communications

In case you’ve missed it, I run my own company now and am extremly proud of it. While the company was founded in mid-2008, it’s been on stealth mode for most of 2008 and I’ve turned it from dream to reality in the last quarter of the year. Now’s the time to really get it up and running!

• Launch bilingual website (English and Romanian)
• Gain customers
• Gain more customers
• Hire people

I know this does not sound as much of a plan, but there’s a limit to what I can actually disclose at the moment. I’ll have to update this section later in 2009.

Blogosphere, Social Media & Networking

• be thankful everyday for the wonderful people I’ve met online these past few years
• Meet new people and build relationships with them
• Stay active on the news, bookmarking and networking communities I am a part of
• Read more blogs, more tweets and more of everything worthwhile on the Internet (and stay clear of the junk)

Personal Plans

• Invest more time, effort and resources in my education
• Travel a little this year
• Finalize list for wedding guest and book a restaurant for the party
• Get Kayla, my lab, the treatment she needs. Unfortunately, she has dysplasia and she will need surgery. She’s too young right now, but we hope everything will be just fine and she’ll be able to go out and play with other dogs soon.
• Keep reading a book a week
• Get back in shape
• Cook more (with the help of Dani, my wonderful fiance) as it’s a lot healthier than the massive amount of junk we both eat.

I hope to be able to reach all my goals. But one important thing I learned in 2008 was that whenever you are unable to keep up with the schedule you’ve made for yourself (due to several issues), you should stop blaming yourself and try again! I’m going to remember myself, as I am extremely hard on myself