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The world of blogging is separated among the lucky few salaried or outright paid writers, and the vast majority of bloggers who are constantly scraping to find the next gig to help pay the rent. If you’re not in the elite former category, you know what a drag it is to provide relevant links to the editors who want to see samples of your work.

Some bloggers maintain a website with all their links while others incorporate them into a spreadsheet, but both ways are clunky. A little known feature in Google+ can actually make your life a bit easier, as it can readily track and display your contributions for all to see!

All your blog sites in a column

Google+ may not have reached the critical mass of Facebook, but it has quietly been charting its own unique course which sets it apart from its more universal competitor. One of these little-heralded features is the Contributor To section which has received as much fanfare as a local lawn growing competition.

This little nugget is of specific interest to bloggers since the site can show your prospective editors all the sites you’ve written for, all properly organized into a column on the side of your education and employment information.

7 “Easy” Steps

In typical Google+ convoluted fashion, accessing the Contributor To feature takes a bit of clicking around, but the results are well worth it:

  1. From your profile page, click Edit Profile
  2. Click About directly under your images
  3. Click Contributor To on the right
  4. Click Add Custom Link
  5. Add the name of the site
  6. Copy and paste the URL of your blog
  7. Click Save, then Done Editing, and voila, it’s there!

If you’re inputting several URLs you can do it sequentially and get it all done at once. Keep in mind that the order that the sites will be displayed will match the order you input them in, so make sure that you input the Wired guest blog first and leave the one you did for BubbasCatfishNoodling.com last.

One entry per site

Even though they may have a $200 billion dollar market cap nothing is quite perfect in the GooglePlex, as if you did more than one article for BubbasCatfishNoodling.com you’ll have the same label and that ugly “catfish dangling from the redneck’s arm” logo over and over again. There is no way to differentiate one linked blog from another in this Google+ listing. On that respect the Contributor To feature falls flat, so you’re better off to just list the best blog you wrote for each site and let the other ones fall by the wayside.

In all fairness, the Contributor To is intended to be a list of the sites you’ve contributed to, not the individual blogs, so you don’t have to get the lynching party on the bus for Mountain View. Chances are if an editor wants to see more of your work they’ll just ask you for it, and you can provide the specific links that best suit them.

Get editors to follow you

There’s a sneaky reason to use the Google+ Contributor To feature, and it’s one you might not have thought of. When you send your prospective editors to your social network profile, they might decide to follow you.

If you manage to get enough editors from major sites as your followers, the next editor who clicks on your profile and sees his counterparts from BusinessInsider, Engadget, Gizmodo, Mashable, and Gawker will be mightily impressed indeed… that may significantly increase your chances of landing that prize blogging gig! On that respect you might even want to leave Bubba right off the list, as one catfish noodle might eliminate the benefit of one TechCrunch!

Directing potential hiring editors to your Google+ profile to gaze in amazement at your list of prestigious blogs you’ve Contributed To can help you land more gigs to fill your list even further. That means more exposure, more money, and less catfish on the table in exchange for Maine Lobster with truffle butter. Happy fishing!

About Hal Licino

I'm an award-winning freelance writer, the author of several books, and an email marketing expert for Benchmark Email, a leading, global email marketing service.

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