so the first question I have for you John is what do I find guest blogging opportunities I mean there's the there's the easy way in the hard way I mean the the hard way in the most the way that most people do it is I mean you can use Google you can search around you can look at blog roles on on on different popular blogs to find blogs that you similar to those and that the big resource is all top com which is a it's basically a directory of the top blogs in the world organized by topic so you can go over there and you can you can find blogs in just about any topic and then you can look through those two to figure out which ones are relevant which ones allow guest posts were kind of posts they're looking for the easier way is we actually just started providing to our students a a list of the 101 best places to guest post in the guest blogging com course so that's just a time saver but the other way still work too fantastic it was actually something I started doing recently to that I did this for both guest blogging opportunities and link building and I started finding blogs that were relevant to something that um I have a very familiar topic like Derek Halpern for example posts on a lot of subjects that i can also write kind of fluidly about um what I started doing and tell me what you guys think about this it started taking the little tweet button right if you click on that you'll actually see all of the people who shared it well some of those people are really good for guest blogging right yeah yeah that's another good strategy yeah sure um now Carol tice says over at make a living writing that she won't take guest bloggers unless they've been through yours or her own premium training program do you think it's worth buying your way in to get guest blogging opportunities well I mean the guest blogging industry is maturing I mean once upon a time they used to be easy to be over they get a guest post on a popular blog but as guest blogging has become one more popular more more well-known a lot of blogs are becoming invitation only or they are requiring you to go through a course and the reason why isn't that they want to exclude anyone it's just that the majority of the guest posts that people stand then or completely off topic they're they're not written very well and I mean it just takes a huge amount of time to sift through all of those and find the good ones I mean went before we went invitational met copyblogger we rejected Mike I think was ninety-seven percent of submissions right away and the reason I mean it wasn't because the the biggest reason was the majority of them were just off topic where they couldn't be ignored the style of our blog so a lot of the big blogs that more and more of them are moving to invitation-only models or models where you have to go through a course like mine just because that the quality of the content the bin being on topic all of that improves once people have a little bit of training and learn how to do it the right way now Christie you had actually said in one of your articles to that you aren't used you started paying guest bloggers because of a kind of a similar issue right you started doing only paid post because you found that people were your your invite your young people that were just kind of pitching you um we're off topic and weren't trying to do that kind of let me what do you think about that it kind of expand on that a little bit if you could um I didn't actually do the paid guest blogging I've shut down guest blogging completely on my site for right now just because I don't have the time to go through all the posts that I get because I'm i don't i probably don't get the same volume that copy blogger does but i was kind of having the same thing ninety percent of the posts that were coming in were just they were wrong and I was having to turn down people and have arguments with them because they're like why won't you take this and low so I actually just shut mine down but i have seen sites that are starting to pay for post because i think when you start paying for posts you know you have the you have the right to start demanding things just like well if i'm going to pay you 50 bucks you need to make sure this is quality and you need to change this and you change that you can make a lot more demands I guess hmm excellent excellent and where would you where did you find your guest blogging opportunities initially um me I kind of did it I don't honestly I don't remember I forgot some of my beginning ones it was just through them I found blogs that were writing that same thing i did so i was doing a lot of blog commenting at the same time some people would just say hey can you write me a guest post i liked your answer to that question you know can you expand and on that kind of thing so i think it was mostly through just the people i was connected with i would i didn't really kind of seek them out mmm excellent excellent and that's that's it actually that leads into the next question too um when you initially went about building your relationships uh what that wasn't mostly commenting that you were doing and that's for you Christy and then Neal I'm going to throw the same question over to you um it was a combination of commenting and social media stalking expensive essentially because I would connect with people on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and like wherever they were having conversations I try to kind of jump in there and basically just a build like you know people would become really familiar with me that get a feel for my content and then eventually when I wasn't you know when I did want to write a post i could just be like hey can i write a post for your site and they're like oh sure and it wasn't really a having to work at it really hard after you build a relationship with them yeah they'll same same question like how did you initially start going about building your relationships so it was the opposite way for me I knew a lot of the blog owners and before guest blogging got popular I already had the relationships with them because a lot of them are just fellow entrepreneurs that I got to know over the years so what I needed to guess because I was just hitting them up one by one because it's more like buddies right in saying like hey y le on let me you know blog on search engine journal or SEO maws or copy blogger and typically muslim said yes right is very rare that they say no because I wouldn't submit content that would make them look bad right because I'd be doing disservice to my friend and I would never submit a content piece of that was crap because it also made my brand look bad interesting and it's funny christian you and said something about kind of stalking John I know you talked about that in the in the guest blogging course it's actually the first model module is it's all about yes social media espionage is what we call it there yeah yeah yeah I mean it and it's a really good strategy i mean looking at what people are saying on all of the different social channels like Facebook and Google+ and Twitter but also I mean just going to a blog and reading all of the comments I mean that that's kind of the way that I got to be the most or one of the most probably the riders on Copyblogger was I mean I just like read every comment on every post for like three years and usually the writer that understands the audience the best on the big blob like that is the one who has the most popular posts so if your if your posts aren't as popular as you would like them to be in your end you are getting some guest posts it's probably because you really don't understand what's going on in the head of the audience quite well enough yet and so doing a little bit more searchable espionage can be able to good idea and roughly how much would you say how long should you I mean you said three years reading the comments that was before you ever pitched no no that was I mean I had probably been reading them for like three years when I started to become really popular just writer there um but yeah I mean at a bare minimum these days you know spend at least three to five hours really looking over a blog looking at their comments looking at all so what posts are popular which place are getting a lot of comments which posts are getting a lot of shares and usually you're still start sayings and patterns that can tell you a lot about the audience you