My First Live Post on YouMoz

So, my first post went live over the weekend on YouMoz – woohoo! It’s titled Liberating Your Data from Google Webmaster Tools – a Step-by-Step Guide, and like the title says, is a guide to installing a local server on your own machine and then running a php script to pull massive amounts of data using the GWT API.

I’m pretty pumped about this – SEOMoz is one of the leading sites in the industry, and I hope that this will be just the first of many posts I publish there. After seeing this post go live over the weekend (bummer of timing due to Sabbath observance :(), it’s amazing to see the power of SEOMoz and there community. While Rand talks a lot about the power of community, it’s amazing watching it in action. If I had published it on my own blog here, I would have gotten minimal exposure. By publishing it on YouMoz, some amazing people in the industry who I really respect are checking it out. For instance, Richard Baxter, the head of SEOGadget, an amazing SEO company based in the UK, whose blog I read all the time and have learned lots from. I love his post on using categories in Excel with an awesome formula and guide that he published on SEOMoz. Basically, Baxter is the man and his company rocks! So when I see on Twitter last night that he shared the post with his almost 7,000 followers, you know you’re getting exposure.

This really confirms in my mind the power and value of guest blogging and user generated content. It’s not just about link building and followed links, but it’s much more about exposure in the industry and niche you’re targeting and building brand awareness. It’s been an awesome experience, with the team over at SEOMoz being very helpful and answering any questions I had about the process. I do think a guide to posting on YouMoz would be helpful – maybe I’ll put something together to cover some of the less intuitive parts of the process.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the post. Let me know if you have any trouble implementing the code. Here’s to an awesome week ahead of us!