Here is my pretty simple formula for maximum guest post approval on the “right” sites. *The right ones being the type of sites you are most interested in.

1.) Go to AllTop.com or Technorati and find sites listed under the niche/topics/tags you are interested in. List them all out in a text editor or a spreadsheet application.

2.) Go to each site and check to see if it shows off its subscriber count. If it uses Feedburner and doesn’t have the subscriber count, add ~fc to the url before their feed name, and if Feedcount is active, it will show you their count. (http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed becomes http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/myfeed)

3.) Do a quick scan to see how many comments its articles get. This can also be a great way of judging popularity, if feed count is not available. Sites with more comments can be more popular and thus usually gets more inbound links.

4.) Remove sites from your list that don’t fit what you are looking for or filter them away to be done later when you have more time.

5.) Take the sites that are left and check their Google PageRank, Alexa, and Compete rankings. While not a perfect judge, this too can help you determine the size or popularity of a site, especially in the USA and even more so when creating a measuring stick for sites in the same niche.

6.) Next, take the ones you’d like to target and run their sites through PostRank. Look at their more popular posts over the last month or two, and start leaving comments. Don’t spam! These comments, because they are popular posts, give you the best chance of creating conversations, and gaining a little traffic through the link in your comment associated with your name.

7.) Once you’ve left comments for about a week or two, (might only be three or four, but fewer great comments are better than many forgettable comments) contact the author and ask if they’d be willing to publish a guest post from you on their blog. Be completely honest about what’s in it for you, and make sure to give them a good idea of your skill, expertise, and potential topic choices.

8.) If they say that they are interested, make sure to have the guest post ready quickly. I sometimes write guest posts before hand, and then fine-tune them for the site that it will be published on, thus saving time, and making it easier for me to get things published on sites willing to run my content.

The great thing about guest posts is that both people get something from the content. Guest posters get a platform that might be larger than their own, access to a community, and even a chance to get a natural looking link back to their blog. The blog owners get free content and hopefully a boatload of traffic and links.

While everything I’ve listed might not always be a factor in your guest posting work, I suggest making each guest post count for as much as possible towards your marketing and community growth efforts. In my experience, the acceptance rate is usually around 75% and up, and so for every ten sites you ask, make sure you have around eight posts or post ideas ready to go.

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.

My post today isn’t about my involvement with WordPress though. Instead it is about WordPress itself, and the unfortunate state of the WordPress community today. It isn’t the WordPress community of a few years ago. Things are a mess, and I feel like I need to stand up, one more time, and go over my thoughts on the current state of the WordPress project.

What Made WordPress Great

The things that made WordPress great included its community, the open source ideal, the low barrier for entry, its simplicity, and the excitement of something new. WordPress and its community, back around the time of version 1.5, was energetic. Many people felt like the decisions they were making were helping build a great product, one that would be used by millions of people. Even those that only contributed a theme could eventually find themselves famous within that community. A great example of this, in my mind, is Michael Heilemann.

Many of you might not know this, but the default theme for WordPress was designed, developed, and released by Michael. He spent a great deal of time on the theme, and was honoured to have it become a staple part of WordPress. Everyone thanked him, and nearly every community member, at that time, knew who he was, and where to find his blog Binary Bonsai. Then, as things continued to move forward, everyone forgot about his contribution, and as WordPress aged, people got bored of the default theme. Today, I would hazard a bet that less than five percent of those using WordPress know of Michael Heilemann, and so, it is of no surprise to me that his blog now runs on Habari rather than WordPress.

Automattic: Good and Bad

Back when WordPress was a young project, the idea of creating a corporation around it probably seemed ridiculous to many community members, especially since it was open source, but Automattic came to existence without asking the community if it was a smart idea, or even needed, and it became the controlling power behind WordPress and all related brands.

Then in January 2008, it received Venture Capital funding, and not just a few thousand, or a few hundred thousand, but instead twenty-nine point five million dollars (via GigaOm). Surely, they spread this money around to everyone that has contributed to WordPress, right? Nope, they used the funds to purchase web applications, hire staff, and build out WordPress.com.

Automattic as a company isn’t bad, evil or negative, but they have positioned themselves, especially one of their employees, as gatekeepers over WordPress, and as an open source, community project, I don’t feel that it is entirely right. All corporations, no matter how good their public relations, are focused on one thing: increasing profit.

Do you think that the poking and prodding that Automattic does regarding WordPress, WordPress.com, Akismet, BuddyPress, and the half a dozen other projects they manager, are solely for our benefit? I am not against a company making money, but I think far too many people have an idealized version of Automattic and its pursuits. I’ve found people treating the company as though it were Apple or Linux in such that they feel that the company or idea can do no wrong.

When was the last time that Automattic worked to bring a new project to the foreground, and I don’t mean one that they acquired? They are a business and should be treated as such by the community. I’d hate to see WordPress split in many directions like Linux is today, but we’ve all witnessed what happens in the Linux world when a company decides that their corporate version is the best. I mean, when was the last time anyone installed Red Hat Linux on their desktop? Oh right, the free version doesn’t really exist anymore, and Red Hat Enterprise Desktop is around $80 (Yes, I know about Fedora), and that’s just one of many examples of the commercialization of an open source project.

Think that WordPress will never go commercial, then take a look at WordPress.com. Domain mapping is $10 per year, custom CSS is $15 per year, no ads is $30 per year, and access to VideoPress video hosting is $60 per year, and that isn’t all of the potential upgrades you can purchase.

Matt Mullenweg: Smart Business Person

Matt Mullenweg is probably the smartest person I’ve ever met. His ability to manage his brand image is almost supernatural. Fighting against any ideal he comes up for the WordPress community seems to be like fighting mother nature herself. Matt has made himself the word of God when it comes to WordPress, and millions of people follow that blindly.

When WordCamps started, I wondered how long it would take before the Church of WordPress was created. Matt traveled the world like a holy crusader, talking to his flock about the good that was WordPress. He was their Messiah, and saved them from the horrible web publishing systems of the past.

He isn’t infallible though and has made mistakes. The issue today is that most of the major mistakes he has made either happened before mass adoption of WordPress (Pre-2.0) or have been relatively unknown as they’ve happened behind closed doors, or outcries have only existed on smaller blogs.

Say anything wrong about Matt Mullenweg, and the hordes of his followers would descend upon you taking you to task. Say anything negative about a choice he has made, and you’ll find millions defending that choice, even if they themselves don’t fully understand it.

Back in 2005, Matt added thousands of pages to WordPress.org for the express purpose of using its immensely high Google PageRank to earn money. (Source – Waxy.org)

One great question from that post that really struck me was:

First, do organizers of open-source projects need to disclose how they’re making money off the project? Matt isn’t disclosing anything about this activity to the community. I don’t think anyone would be upset about Matt trying to support Wordpress with outside sources of revenue, but as an open-source project, they should be held to a higher level of transparency. Without the users and developers all working for free, it wouldn’t exist.

Sure, he has apologized for this since then, and swept it under the rug. It has been a long time, but he continues to make project-threatening mistakes which could easily be managed through a small council of source code submitters looking over decisions that could effect the project, the brand, and its future.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve met Matt on a few occasions, and seen him speak. I think he’s a smart guy, and a savvy business person, but the “nice guy” persona that he puts out there doesn’t seem to be quite the same as the person behind the scenes, away from the microphone.

Drinking the WordPress Kool-Aid

So many people are fooled into believing that WordPress is the best blogging platform of our time, but to me, that is like saying Microsoft Windows is the best operating system of our time. While most fans of WordPress will probably fight me on the comparison, I think the similarities are too many to ignore. We have a company that works back room deals in order to get big players on board, makes a fair bit of money through its self-serving attitude, brands itself as something that it isn’t, and is run by a single voice that feels somewhat like a dictatorship. Just because it is everywhere, and there are lots of additions that make it more useful, that doesn’t make it the best.

Matt Mullenweg was great for the project back when it started. He helped it gets its footing, and took care of the project. He was able to quickly navigate the business world so that WordPress could grow into the massive project that it is today, but I think it is time for him to step back and allow those with the community focused ideal that he once held to take over so that he can focus on building his company, and maybe join back in on the community aspect that he seems to enjoy so much.

His single minded approach of what is good for the community is only going to be its downfall. He needs to let go and let the community vote for what it wants. If any portion, no matter how small, wants to purchase themes, plugins and whatever else, then Matt should have no bearing on their decision. His job should be to inform them of their options, market WordPress to the world and contribute code to the project.

Should that code usurp work that premium theme and plugin developers have created, then that’s within his right, but he shouldn’t have any bearing on those third party projects through manipulating the community to see the additions as a negative thing, removing them from the community focal points, downplaying their work, or directly fighting against them in back rooms.

The WordPress community, if it is going to survive, has to evolve, change and meet the needs of everyone, not just those that believe they have the right to vote on behalf of everyone, and especially not by those that want to uphold an ideal.

GPL: It’s the Law

One of the biggest issues in the community right now is GPL. It creates a divide that shouldn’t exist. The idea of GPL is to promote community, and I had hope that it was why Matt stuck to his guns when defending GPL, but unfortunately, GPL does not a community make. If the idea was to promote open source, and give back to the community, then why wouldn’t Automattic release the source code behind Akismet, or the code behind other online services they’ve acquired?

In December 2008, over 200 WordPress themes were pulled from the Theme Repository because they didn’t fit either GPL licensing, or the spirit of GPL licensing. The second half of that sentence is the giant power hammer that Matt Mullenweg and Automattic have over the community. Some themes that were pulled complied with GPL but the creators used the themes to promote non-GPL compliant themes on their own sites. The fact that the themes on the repository had no real bearing on Matt’s decision to have them removed because there was potential to lead people astray from his GPL ideal.

It is assumed that becoming GPL gets you in good graces with Automattic, and after they put up a page for Premium WordPress themes on their site, everyone applauded their decision. Matt had been against Premium themes for a long time, but quickly his tune changed as nearly every developer announced their GPL compliance.

Earlier this year, some Premium WordPress plugins started looking at how they could feel the love from the WordPress community, specifically Automattic, in hopes of having their own page on the illustrious community site, but while Matt changed his tune regarding themes, he was quick to stand fast against any paid plugins for WordPress. His worry that the extendability of his beloved software would become commercialized lead him to publicly state his dislike of such developments.

Plugin developers went on the offensive and made their new additions GPL compliant in hopes of pleasing Matt, but even their hard work to follow his rules left them feeling the cold shoulder.

It isn’t GPL that has become law in the world of WordPress, but instead the ideal of GPL. The “spirit” that things should be given away for free if they are a product, and businesses should be built around service. This “spirit” protects Automattic from having to give away any of their prized jewels, and allows them to charge as they see fit. It allows them to hide behind a shield as they work against companies that seek only to provide powerful additions to the WordPress community. Additions that require one hundred times the effort of earlier plugins, themes and extensions on the WordPress platform.

Conclusion

WordPress and its community has matured. The ideals of Matt Mullenweg and Automattic are becoming a limitation and a hindrance. While they are still great at spinning positive press, and continuing to appease the masses, they’ve lost the spirit of WordPress somewhere along the way, and it is my hope that someone out there will take blogging to the next level through true community building, and the ability to keep an open mind as things change.

WordPress is still a great piece of software, despite all of the flaws in leadership, community, and in the system itself. I have no doubt that it will continue to expand all the while lining the pockets of Automattic, and fulfilling the ideals of a young developer that can’t let go of his community project.

The blog now has three posts on, two of which are from possible staff writers for the blog. I e-mailed a dozen candidates early in the week to let them know they were finalists, and told them I would pay them for their submissions. Each one was sent back a notice asking them to send in a post that would display their writing style for LifeSnips. Out of these dozen final candidates, there are only four staff writer positions available, and the competition is fierce.

I have also been able to find the time to get a post up about buying a computer.

I hope you’ll all check it out, subscribe, and if you have something interesting you’d like to cover, or see us cover, please let me know through the contact form on that site.

I’ve been beta testing the plugin for some time now, and have found it useful for a variety of different needs, and the more I use it, the more ideas I come up with on what it could do for me with regards to taking in information from visitors and displaying it to me.

The first thought that people have is that Gravity Forms is “just another Contact Form plugin”, but it can do so much more than that.

Want to do a visitor survey? Want to do a “send this post to a friend”? Want to have user guest post submissions? Gravity Forms can do all of that and more. I’ve even used it for a basic product inventory system, as well as a tool to sign players up for an online RPG. The uses for the plugin are wide, and according to the Rocket Genius team, they’ll continue to expand.

Gravity Forms is a premium plugin, but I like to call it the first “extension” of WordPress, because I feel like marketing it as a plugin is too limiting. It does so much more. There are three price points for Gravity Forms, $39 gets you a one-site personal license, $99 gets you a five site license, and $199 gets you the unlimited developer license.

The Developer license comes with Priority Support and Free Add-Ons and allows you to install it on as many sites as you want. This is the license I will be purchasing, and the one I hope you’ll all purchase as well.

Why go for the Developer License?

It might seem pretty pricey to shell out nearly two-hundred dollars for a WordPress plugin, but I assure you, there is more than two hundred dollars in value that you’ll receive. If not from the initial 1.0 version, then from future version, the free add-ons and the priority support.

What other plugin will allow you to quickly and easily make contact forms on all of your blogs? What other plugin will make it easy for you to take feedback, guest posts and other information from your users? What other plugin will allow you to make a basic help-desk? We are just scratching the surface of the types of input and data management this plugin will allow, and you’d be silly not to try to take full advantage of what Gravity Forms is offering you.

Affiliate Offer

Yes, the links in my post are affiliate links, and you too could sign up, receiving a 20% commission on any sales you generate. I think this is very fair, and look forward to hearing from the Rocket Genius team how this does for them.

Follow the Rocket Genius Team on Twitter

If you are like me, and want to keep up to date on everything happening with Gravity Forms, make sure to jump on Twitter, and follow the following people:

• Rocket Genius
• Kevin Flahaut
• Carl Hancock

Don’t forget to check your server first to make sure Gravity Forms will work on it. Use their Gravity Forms Server Test plugin to double check, or just make sure your server is using WordPress 2.8+, MySQL 5+ and PHP 5+.

AltSciFi.com – This used to be a science fiction blog, in the same vein as a previous one I had. I am a huge fan of science fiction, but I’ve never been able to maintain a blog for the topic, as I’d rather read posts written by others.

BloggingWeight.com – I’ve put on a fair bit of weight over the last four years. In part, I am sure, due to being stuck to a computer desk, my office only thirty-feet from my bed. I blogged on here about my efforts in loosing weight, as well as various other related things. I’ve thought constantly about relaunching this blog, as public scrutiny and accountibility made my weight loss easier.

CellSnoop.com – Maybe a cellular phone blog (like there aren’t enough of those in the world?)

CheatBase.com – Cheat code repository (again, super saturated, but something I am interested in)

CSSFuel.com – CSS/Design Gallery with blog. Many people don’t know this, but at one point in my career, I was responsible for running one of the first design galleries, CSSVault and the site did rather well with my choices.

FeedSEO.com – Maybe something about RSS feeds and the limited search engine optimization issues surrounding them, or a site about SEO, and how to feed it into your site? Not sure, just felt like a good purchase at the time.

HealthNewsFirst.com – Health site, with news from all over North America. With my wife becoming a nurse, these types of topics interest me more and more, especially from a technology standpoint.

PodCastSponsor.com – A service to bring podcasters and businesses together, to try to come up with sponsorship opportunities.

RootBeerHero.com – Yes, I am a Root Beer fanatic. I’ve already put a few posts on here. This is just one of those “fun” things.

SolarHype.com – I love the idea of solar technology, and wish the awareness regarding solar was higher. I don’t feel like there are many good blogs talking about solar technology exclusively. Usually, solar technology is just tacked onto other alternative energy sites.

TabletWatch.com – Tablet Computer blog, maybe Apple Tablet Rumours.

TheBlogJob.com – Blogging related jobs. I’ve attempted to do this before, using WordPress as a platform, but I gave up on it way too soon. I’d love to be the reason why people are able to get a job doing what I’ve loved for the last four years.

I haven’t given away the details of the story anywhere yet other than to the person helping edit the first round draft of the book. I hope to create something worthy of being published before the summer of 2010.

I hope you’ll all check out Vanish Effect (and keep up to date via its own Twitter account @VanishEffect), and if you know anyone looking at picking up a writer such as myself, I’d really appreciate it. After I finish Vanish Effect, I am considering applying my years of experience into writing a non-fiction book as one of my greatest passions in life is teaching, something that I am struggling with in my fiction writing, as I continually want to explain plainly, rather than surround people in the world I am creating.

And while I’ve mentioned it on my Appreciation page on VanishEffect.com, I’d also like to add a few words here thanking both Patrick O’Keefe and Phyl Good for their support and hard work. Patrick spent a lot of time talking to me about his experiences publishing a book, and Phyl is my on-the-go editor that has been helping me keep focused, and continue to push out pages. She is also helping make those pages “work” better and pointing out the times where I tell rather than show the various gadgets that I want to have propagate my society.

I have over twenty different ideas, and already have the domains to follow through on them. Here are just a handful of project ideas that I think have potential and that I’d enjoy doing. I’ll write about more of my ideas in a follow up post.

BuyWPThemes.com – Information on Premium Themes. I would create a gallery of the current theme options available in the premium WordPress theme marketplace, while also tracking changes, updates, news, and maybe even include a few interviews with the creators. I know more than a few of them well, and could put up some interesting details on what they have done, and continue to do. I could also use this as my own personal coupon database for Premium Themes, since I am always spending money on them.

The content would primarily come from the creators of the themes, with my own thoughts, ideas and dedicated posts to fill the gaps. I would also look for people willing to guest post, and pay for some contributions, as there are more thoughts regarding premium themes than just the ones that I have.

The potential for profit might not be very high, but that depends on how many premium WordPress theme affiliate companies I sign up for, and then how many themes I sell through it. Also, if premium theme authors found my site to be decent, some may even purchase advertising.

CelebReader.com – I think of this as being a PopURLS for Celebrity sites, focusing in on the niche, and showing off a handful of the most popular sites latest post titles, images from various sources, and video links from a few popular sources. It would mostly be automated and wouldn’t need much interaction from me besides setting it up, and constantly expanding and improving it.

With content growth next to nothing, since it will be close to a single page site, with no archive, Celebreader might not do well on search engines and whatnot, but could become highly viral if I pick the right blogs, images and videos to put in one place. I worry though that this niche is highly saturated, and those seeking this information will be savvy enough to use an RSS reader or have all of their own personal favourite sites bookmarked already. Growth might be slow, and as such, potential for profit through ad sales on the page would be low, especially in the short term.

LifeSnips.com – I used to own LifeSpy.com, a site I really enjoyed owning and managing. I am a sucker for lifestyle tips, tricks and answering questions. I’ve even already had a design done for this site by James McDonald, the designer that did this blog as well as Blogging Pro. I haven’t yet had the design coded, but it does look amazing.

Content would come from myself, quoted from other similar blogs, and from a stable of bloggers that I’d hire to keep it flowing fast. This niche is also very saturated, but I enjoy it, and I think that because of my passion, it could do very well.

With the expense of hiring bloggers, I feel that potential profit would be very low, but over the long term, the possibilities with this site look very promising.

OneBigCanada.com – Another PopURLs style site, but focusing solely on Canadian content and news. With sections for each province and territory, OneBigCanada.com would cover the country from coast to coast pointing out the popular blogs, services, and news publications available for each area. It would be part directory/index and part start-page for someone wanting to read all about everything going on in Canada. I might separate each area into its own page, with its own focus. I haven’t thought user interface out yet, but I think there is a strong need for Canadians to promote their own country more, and I hope that is what this site would do.

Competition would be fierce, but this is one project where I wouldn’t be looking for major growth, more as just a service for myself and those that find there is a need for such a thing.

TenTopBlogs.com – TenTopBlogs is really my own realization that certain sites list FAR too many blogs to be useful. I’ve focused in on Geek topics thus far, and the site is already built. It needs a design, logo, and branding, as well as some code refinement, and of course it needs all the categories filled out. TenTopBlogs is highly subjective to me, the person running it, but I think that with a proper submission form, I could add blogs that are highly requested, either filling out the TenTopBlogs list for that niche, or pushing out a blog that people don’t feel belongs.

Each section shows off the five latest posts from the ten top blogs in any given niche. I will probably stick to tech and geek topics as they are what I am most passionate about, and what I feel resonates the most with the tech savvy audience I hope to attract.

Direct ad sales to products and services, not blogs would be the source of revenue once traffic was high enough to appeal to advertisers. Profit would be low, but as this is another project I am passionate and personally invested in (custom coded by me), I think it has potential.

WebHostReality.com – This was a project I was originally going to do with someone else. It was to be a blog and site focusing in on the reality of hosting with various companies. Giving tips, tricks, ideas, coupons, and more regarding various services. I’ve re-launched it already to test out the Gravity Forms WordPress extension. I’ve used dozens of different hosting companies since joining the world wide web.

Content would come from submissions, my own writing, as well as some freelance writers. Potential for profit, if I can bust through the high level of saturation in the market, would be medium to high. The hardest part about running such a site is to not promote solely based on the potential income of the affiliate programs. Some of the biggest payouts are by some of the worst web hosts, and some of the best web hosts, do not have an affiliate program. I’d have to use user feedback to make sure various writings are held in check.

So that’s it for this post. Please let me know what you think of them, and while it might seem crazy to you, ideas come easily to me, it is filtering those ideas down to a point where I have only a few projects to work on so I am not overwhelmed that is hard for me. Also, I really enjoy launching new projects, but get frustrated with longer term maintenance of those projects (though I’ve been getting better about sticking with things over the long term).

Note: I don’t plan to build and maintain all of these, they are just ideas that I have domains for. Some have been started, some have not.

Now it is your turn, let me know what you think in the comments below.

Sure, it might be that I want to be lazy, but I sigh when I have to try to dig through a theme authors code.

Over the last few months, I have been working on a theme system that deals with my own issues in WordPress themes, and today, it is finally being released. The theme is entitled WPUnlimited, and is a paid theme system.

It will be constantly updated, support will be included through a support forum and e-mail responses.

WPUnlimited does two things that I hope everyone will enjoy. First off, it takes plugins out of the hands of plugin authors. I have spent far too much time waiting for plugin authors to keep up with new versions of WordPress as they come out, and by integrating the plugins into the theme, the onus is now on me to keep those features working within the theme.

Secondly, I wanted to make sure I could change the layout, colors, typography, and header image without editing a line of CSS and WPUnlimited allows for this level of customization. The theme truly takes little to no coding knowledge to create custom look and feel results.

WPUnlimited costs $59 for a single user license, and $150 for a developer license. Don’t let the “developer” term scare you though. The license is for anyone that wants to deploy WPUnlimited on more than one blog, either for themselves or their clients.

Check out WPUnlimited today, and let me know what you think.