The idea behind guest blogging is that one blogger, or even only a site owner, writes a suitable high quality post and offers it up as a unique piece of work, to another blogger to publish on to their site. There are even a few web sites appearing that allow you to find posts and sites for this purpose, or you could just approach other bloggers directly.
As the guest blogger, as this is where I expect most people will start, you will track down a couple of suitable web-sites to guest site on. Have a look more than them and see what they generally write about and the style. There is no point submitting a dead pan serious post on a site that is always funny. Also check that your knowledge could add to what they already post.
Then you write a top quality post and review it! It must be brand new and your best potential writing, so that readers of the post are tempted in excess of to your website. Then email a copy of the article, ready for them to cut and paste, and request that they guest post it.
There is a good reason why it must be brand new and on the whole, you will agree that you will not use the article elsewhere. Once you give it to another blogger to use as a guest post and they accept it, you must not syndicate or publish it elsewhere. The reason is that unique content, rather than duplicate content, provides huge search engine benefits. By publishing your unique work, the blogger is hoping to keep the interest of their readers going, whilst tempting the search engines to send them more visitors.
But you have to take care when you pass over your best budding writing more than to another blogger to publish on their weblog. You should make it clear what you expect back - that they will link back to you and keep the links in place for as long as the post is up. Plus, they do not have the rights to distribute the article to other sites. You want your article to be unique, you do not want them copying it to other web sites and getting the benefit for your work!
Once you have your article written and approved by the other website owner and have an agreement in place, it is ready for the other owner to publish it and you might then only keep an eye on the post. Have an occasional look through your website statistics to see if that site is sending you new visitors. If the traffic slowly start to dry up, then it might be that the post is too old and it is time to write a new post for that website. If you never get any traffic, then maybe it is a blog best ignored.
So, guest blogging is writing new posts and getting them published on other people’s blogs in return for visitors and links.