First of all, please don’t banish me from the blogosphere for writing this article, but I really think that the idea of passionate guest blogging is greatly overrated.

I know that every – and I do mean every – blog about blogging tells you that the first mandatory trait you need in order to succeed is passion towards the thing you’re writing about, but I beg to differ.

And it’s not that I have anything against passion, per se. On the contrary, I’m actually passionate about guest blogging and the possibility to have my work published all over the web. But there’s just one detail that doesn’t fit in the general scheme of things, and it’s this: passion is not the only element that drives us through most of the activities we do in life.

For instance, people who go on a diet don’t do so because they suddenly become passionate about healthy eating. They do it because they want to achieve a certain result. They are ready to fight the initial resistance and avoid the common temptations because the result is worth it. (There’s no passion anywhere in this picture.)

Trust me, everyone would stick to junk food if there was some mysterious way of remaining healthy while eating it.

Be careful with passion

A popular opinion states that turning your passion into a job is the worst thing you can possibly do. There are tons of passionate writers who failed at blogging and guest blogging solely because they took too much work upon themselves and didn’t realize that the whole project can turn out to be that demanding.

But isn’t passion for writing an important success factor? You ask.

Well, let me explain this with a completely different example. Just because you’re passionate about guitar playing, doesn’t mean that you’re also going to be passionate about guitar blogging or other forms of writing about guitar playing. What’s even worse is that with time, the lack of passion for the latter can even kill the passion for the former.

So don’t worry if you’re not feeling particularly passionate about guest blogging at the moment. It’s not something you need in order to succeed. In fact, it’s quite overrated.

Here’s the thing. Whenever someone teaches us that passion will drive us through a given project, what they actually mean is that our passion will remain stronger than the small failures we’ll be experiencing along the way, so it will help us keep going.

But contrary to what we might think at first, this isn’t a good thing. Most people do guest blogging to achieve certain business goals, and if those goals are not being met, passion shouldn’t be relied upon to keep the project going. In case of trouble, you should in fact, pivot, change your approach a bit, or even ditch the whole project completely and start doing something else.

In other words, passion shouldn’t be one of the factors in your decision process.

So, what is better than passion when it comes to successful guest blogging?

The business mindset

I strongly encourage you to treat your guest blogging campaigns/efforts just like any other business project. Here’s what you can do, step by step:

1. Set your business goals for the project (e.g. increasing your traffic, building your brand, improving your SEO).
2. Make the goals measurable (e.g. if traffic is what you want then what’s the growth rate you’re looking for?).
3. Calculate the potential gain in profits/revenue that those goals mean for you.
4. List the cost of running the project (e.g. hiring the bloggers, getting articles published, etc.).
5. Set up tools for tracking the results (depending on your goal, you need to be able to track whether it is being achieved; for example, for traffic, you have tools like Clicky, which can report the number of visitors coming from a certain source).
6. Get your guest blogging campaign launched.
7. Track the results and measure if they’re worth your while.
8. Pivot if needed.

Now, the point that’s still a big question mark on this list is #6 – getting your guest blogging campaign launched. It’s surely much easier said than done, as good guest blogging itself involves a lot of planning and market research.

Which brings me to …

Publishing posts with a purpose

Every guest post you’re attempting to get published should be done with a specific purpose in mind, and not because you’re somehow passionate about the topic.

For instance, depending on your main goal, not all blogs out there will be able to deliver this goal to you. Just to give you two of the possible scenarios:

• some blogs offer a lot of user interaction but not that many direct visits to your site,
• others are great for direct traffic but very poor for exposure through social media.

To make your efforts successful, you need to pay a lot of attention to how you’re researching the sites where you want to post, as well as how you’re crafting your guest posts themselves (or how the person you’ve hired does it).

Only combining good research with good execution will give you the business results you desire. Of course, the road to success can be long and bumpy and passion can be an extra helper, but it won’t be the deciding success factor. If your plan is good and you’re dedicated to carry it out, then you will reach your destination eventually.

Don’t get blinded

Focusing too much on passion only makes us blind in our actions. Precisely, it’s thinking like “all I need is passion” that gets us in trouble. We become so focused on passion that we don’t notice the other things we need to do and the indicators that let us know about our efforts not going in the right direction. This is how people fail.

The strategy presented here is something that can work like gangbusters and it’s surely way better than relying on passion when guest blogging.

Just like I said in the weight loss example, people decide to go on a diet because they want to achieve a certain result, not because they’re passionate. Yet, they can still be extremely successful.