Branding David

I’ve been thinking about Problogger.net for some time now, and watching how Darren is evolving the site, and one thing that has always bugged me is how many guest posts he features on his blog. Most of us aim for Darren’s success when we think about our own Problogging careers, and as such, getting a post featured on his site must feel amazing for those involved, but is Darren getting more than he’s giving?

Guest posting can be an awesome way to build up your own blog, and getting your posts on high powered, top tier blogs can be amazing for growth, but I haven’t heard much from those getting a guest post on Darren’s site about the effects on their own brands, sites, and goals.

Taking a look at the last month, from November 9th, 2009 to December 9th, 2009, I looked at the posts, and found twenty-two of them to be by Darren, and eleven to have been by guest posters. Out of the twenty-two posts by Darren, one was a video shot by someone else that he added a small commentary to, and a few were focused on Problogger.com updates, his re-launched newsletter and his e-book. Two were in depth reviews of blogs, leaving around fifteen posts written by Darren to help teach.

Fifteen posts in a given month of unique, original content organized to reflect on things he’s learned and help you blog better. I’d hazard a guess that most of us would still be deeply interested in his writings even if his blog only featured these fifteen posts, but with the addition of the posts done by guest bloggers, I begin to wonder what effects they have on the overall brand.

Darren gets more content, thus providing a stronger attachment to his own brand, and bigger net of keywords for grabbing search visitors. Guest bloggers get their content posted on an upper tier blog with a loyal audience.

Even if you wrote the best blog post on Problogger.net, I wonder how long it would grab people’s attention before Darren either adds another guest post, or puts up something of his own?

Also, as a reader, I wonder how these posts are being edited, filtered and controlled? Are we really receiving the best content available? Don’t we visit Problogger.net to read Darren’s insights?

Still to this day, despite Darren’s hard work to change this issue, people assume all posts that appear on the site were written by Darren. When this happens, it is probably a testament of how well written the guest author’s post was, but if people make such assumptions, where is the brand benefit to the contributor?

If more blogs were run in the same way, what would be the net effect for guest blogging as a whole? Would you give up one third of your blog to guest bloggers? Would you give up one third of your blogging time to write guest posts?

For me, I think it would be more valuable to my audience and brand building to have Darren guest blog on one of my sites rather than spend my time to guest blog on his.