UPDATED: April 2012 Check out my Postrunner V2 Review . I will update this these once the new Postrunner is live
OK I am seeing quite a few questions about Postrunner – The Keyword Academy’s link building tool – so I thought I’d throw an extra post into my Keyword Academy Case Study series detailing the how and, probably more importantly the why of using the PostRunner system (formerly the Guest Posting System, GPS). Even if you aren’t a member this might be helpful if you don’t understand why some of us get excited about giving away our content for free!
This post is about Postrunner from an article submitters point-of-view. If you are interested in being a Postrunner Review for publishers – see my second post about Postrunner– Adding a Site
What is Guest Posting?
There are lots of ways to get links – but high on most lists is “guest posting”. You contribute as a guest on another blog and in return get a link back from the site and maybe some traffic as well. Here’s a guest post I did recently: Building an Online Income.
Now, finding places to contribute guest posts, if you are in the niche of freelance writing or make money online or similar, is not really that hard. I don’t accept regular guest posts here – but many other sites do. Frankly sites like problogger.net would have disappeared long ago – but for the guest posts!
Why? Because the niche is dominated by people who think its important to publish regularly to make your blog popular. Its not – but that’s another post.
But what if your niche is not make money online? Have you ever tried finding blogs to guest post articles about college education or health? Now these are popular subjects – but its still hard to find blogs that will accept your free content. What if you write about tap washers or hair loss in women? Gonna be harder, a lot harder.
Its not impossible – there are a number of sites that I regularly use to post content to – I highly recommend Post Your Own Articles. You can sign up for free – but read the instructions to authors.
Wizzley works too, so does InfoBarrel and other Web2.0 properties, again they all have different rules and you need to be familiar with them all.
Do you see where I am going with this? Every site is run by a different owner – has different rules and you need to be up to speed with each of them. If you don’t find that a pain – you obviously aren’t doing enough guest posting!
The sites I’ve mentioned above are all great but once you have an article link from each of them what’s your next best use of your time – multiple links from the same site – or links from new sites? I think the later which is why I think PostRunner is worth the cost of the Keyword Academy alone.
What is PostRunner?
Technically its an interface written in WordPress which allows you to submit guest posts to participating blogs. Practically its an enormous time saver.There is exactly one set of rules for PostRunner – here they are:
- content must be at least 300 words long;
- content must be unique and written by a human (no article spinners please);
- no more than two anchored contextual links are allowed per an article
You add articles in a “normal” WordPress interface – which you should be familiar with. You can chose to either publish a post immediately or schedule it for the future. You then select a site to publish to and hit submit.
Your article will only appear once the site’s owner has approved the post. This can take up to 7 days. If there has been no response after 7 days the article is returned to you and you can resubmit to another directory. You get an email notification when you article is approved/declined/returned.
You can use the interface to see which articles you have published for which of your sites and where these are published. You can also filter the list by status (not sent, sent, live (published), scheduled). You can export a list of the article titles, urls of where published and site linked to from the article.
Set-by-step adding a Post to PostRunner
- Click “Add Post” and cut and paste your article in as you would normally. Don’t forget to add your links! (Sometimes I do). To add a link just select the text you want to be anchored on e.g. blue widgets click the link button and cut and paste the url of the page you want to link to);
- If you don’t want the post to appear as soon as its approved click “edit” next to “publish immediately” and change it to the date/time you want (I think the dates’ time are on Utah time);
- Click “choose publish location”. This will bring up a new screen listing available directories – the default shows all the “General” category directories but you can use the top right drop down to select from other categories (Health, Shopping etc). For each directory you will see PR – a title – which you can click to go the site, any links you may already have from that site. Use the select button on the right to chose the directory you want.
- This will disappear the directory selection screen and you will be back on the basic WordPress post screen.
- Now click “check and save draft” – this should come back with a message saying you have passed all the tests. If you haven’t passed they will tell you what’s wrong.
- Once you have passed the checks you click the submit to directory and you are done.
How I Chose a Postrunner Directory
When I am building backlinks for a website I am trying to get as natural a link profile as possible. Most websites are PR0, PR1 at most. So although I look at PR when I am choosing a directory I am not exclusively interested in high PR – I am just as likely looking for the 80 PR0’s to balance out the PR4 or PR3
I am looking for sites that are indexed. Now all of them should be – but ocasionally we get a bad one – if its a new site I will google site:sitename.com just to check. If you do come up with a site which is not indexed report it to support.
This google listing will also tell me some other interesting stuff like:
- how many pages are indexed, less than 10 I move on – its a bit new for my taste, otherwise more is better;
- click “options” and look at the “latest indexed” option to see if the most recent articles are indexed – if they are that’s good – if they aren’t and the latest article is more than 10 days old that means the site is not being crawled by Google very often;
- if I am worried about the speed of google crawls I will check the cache (again just google http://sitename.com – and click “cache”). If the cache is more than 2 weeks old and/or shows a completely different site I don’t use it. This tells me regardless of the PR the site has probably just been set up and Google isn’t visiting regularly so my article won’t get indexed easily, and the PR may well disapear in the next update too;
The site’s front page design. Page rank is all about page not site rank. If your article will never appear on the front page it will be harder for it to get indexed and to get PR. I don’t use sites which have static front pages on which articles don’t appear – I don’t mind a single static post with other articles below but I am not interested in ones that don’t reference articles at all on the front page – not even the title.
I couldn’t care less whether the site has an atrractive design or not – but if they haven’t set the permalink structure to be postname or similar I again move on and find another drectory. Whether the directory has advertising or not doesn’t matter to me either.
Does that cover most of your PostRunner questions? If you have any other questions about guest posting or Postrunner in particular do please drop me a comment below so I can clarify – I have been using this for so long its hard to remember what confuses initially and what does not.