Blogging isn’t a purely introspective activity, yet it attracts the kind of self analysis and reflection that a lot of private forms of writing fail to achieve. Despite the ‘marketing’ often attached with blogs, personal and non-professional blogs often draw incredible amounts of academic discussion, intellectual activity, and self-depreciating discussion that truly helps people improve.

This is a guest post by Mathew Carpenter, a business owner and entrepreneur from Sydney, Australia. Mathew is currently running Tisme, a design agency which is quickly becoming one of Australia’s top website design and development firms. Follow Mathew on Twitter: @matcarpenter

One reason for the success is that blogs force ideas to become public. When you blog, you’re not noting down ideas and thoughts in a private journal; you’re making them public for the whole world to see. Blogging, by its nature, is self-selecting and meritocratic – great ideas are promoted through word-of-mouth and social bookmarking, while ideas that don’t inspire are left relatively untouched.

However, under all this there’s an overwhelming desire for every blogger to be noticed. When even the most personal of ideas draw the attention and appreciation of the public, the desire to feature in people’s discussion more often becomes greater and greater. This is where self-promotion becomes a major point of blogging. From professionals wanting to establish their services online to wannabe authority bloggers looking to boost their page views, almost all bloggers write for self-promotion purposes, at least to an extent.

Owning your Google results

One reason to blog is to establish yourself as an authority, or at least something more than an anonymous voice. Even an infrequently updated free blog is indexed by Google, allowing almost any blogger to establish themselves as an authority in the eyes of Google.

When people search for your name, what comes up? For some people, it’s the online presences of other people who share their name. For others, it’s likely a profile on a social networking website or online community. Think about it from the perspective of a potential client or employer. What would they want to see when they search for your name?

It’s not your Facebook profile, especially the one where you’re pictured in a halloween costume with a beer can centered in the frame. Even an infrequent blogging presence is enough to promote yourself indirectly through search engine results. Self promotion start with letting people know who you are. Let potential clients, employers, and contacts learn who you are by building a blog that gets your name features in the search results.

Natural Self-Promotion

There are ultimately two types of self-promotion. Natural self-promotion is based around writing content for the online community, and letting them promote it for you. Sure, there’s certainly a little bit of active promotion involved, but for the most part natural self-promotion is about creating content that’s designed for other people to spread.

Then there’s engineered self-promotion. Thanks to occasionally shady SEO tactics, engineered promotion often gets more negative feedback than it deserves. From self-organized social bookmarking to endless Twitter promotion, there are hundreds of ways to market yourself without relying on other people.

In the end, the best way to spread content is to use strategies from both worlds. By all means, spread your own content around, but don’t make it a habit. The blogging world will always be more trusting of a voice that’s perceived as independent and unbiased, and promoting yourself time and time again could end up limiting your long-term potential. Once you’ve built up a reliable audience, put your self-promotion into the post itself, and let them take care of the rest.

Guest Blogging

There are three types of guest posts; ones that worthwhile for the blogger, ones that are worthwhile for the guest blogger, and ones that are worthwhile for both. Generally, there are elements of each type in every guest post, but some tend to clearly fall into once category or another. If the situation is in your favor, a guest post can be a great way to achieve some natural self-promotion, along with expanding your online influence into other communities and subjects.

The first type of guest posts are commonly found on shady ‘make money online’ websites. You know the type – you click through an Adsense link and end up at a page loaded with testimonials, marketing network ads, and pictures of cheques. A lot of the bloggers behind these pages make their living through pageviews and referrals, and any guest post is valuable content to them. They’re worth it sometimes, but are generally best avoided.

The second type of guest post is loaded in your favor, whether intentionally or not. Sometimes bloggers just need extra content, and will happily accept a post that doesn’t necessarily add any value for them, but helps you out all the same. These are great for generating links to your website and possibly building a new audience, but are typically rare and difficult to find. Worth it once in a while, but again, don’t make a habit out of them.

Finally, the best types of guest posts are those that are mutually beneficial. When you can create guest content for someone that’s an authority in their niche, you’ve got a chance to establish a long-term professional relationship and bring in some great traffic for yourself. Guest posts are supposed to be about this – generating real connections and providing real value – and it’s worth going out of your way to make these kinds of connections.

Becoming an authority blogger isn’t just about promotion and popularity. True authority comes from active promotion, a wide audience, and great content. Focusing on one piece of the puzzle can help you generate short-term attention, but for long-term blogging success you’ve got to assign time