I loved MyBlogGuest, which was the community setup by Ann Smarty previous to the launch of MyBlogU. When I heard she was launching a new community I couldn’t wait to sign up and see what all the fuss was about.

MyBlogU is a content collaboration and idea creation community. I really like the idea behind it, it’s nothing exactly groundbreaking, I mean, you can chat with people and collaborate through many different channels such as social networks, forums or at a local meetup. What I like about about MyBlogU, and what makes it stand out, is that it becomes a central hub for all of this communication that takes place. Just visiting the brainstorm page will give you a ton of ideas, something that would probably take a considerable amount of time if you were to do it through other channels.

MGU is broken down into 3 sections; Brainstorm, Interviews & Media. Due to this being a new website some of these sections are a little empty at the moment but I’m sure things will pick up very quickly.

How it works

Once you have signed up you have the option of Brainstorm, Interview, or Media tabs, the idea behind Brainstorm is that you either contribute your idea to a request or you can post your own request and have people brainstorm that idea with you. The incentive to post in a users brainstorm question is that there are so many opportunities for you to get a link back, the key is being able to leverage what you have into something the requester can use to help solve their question. For instance if someone was looking for some examples of websites that generate traffic outside of organic search, and you just so happened to have a website that get’s most its traffic from referral or social you can send the idea of using your website as a case study and in the process get a link back when they publish their blog post if all goes well.

Interviews work differently and is essentially a way to curate responses from people. It’s great because you get the insight from people in the know and they do the hard work for you by writing their answer which you then just copy and paste into your article (given credit as a reward to the interviewees).

And just in case I didn’t get my head around it, Ann Smarty clarified the difference between Brainstorm and Interview:

• Brainstorm: Simply ask for ideas and resources and write the article yourself (you may reference/mention the people who helped you but that’s totally up to you)
• Interviews: Get the whole article written for you by your contributors (we’ll also add the ability to hold the interview on twitter as well for more discussion and social media signals)

Lastly the media section is for sharing infographics & cheatsheets and is a great resource to find visual communication to go along with your article you are writing.

Why you should use it

MBU is a great way to gain;

1. Authority through interview citations.
2. Backlinks on your specific topic through brainstorming, interviews and media.
3. Insight into overlooked aspects of your topic and niche.
4. Connections with like-minded bloggers.

What I found very powerful was the fact we sometimes overlook aspects of a subject and reading what other people are asking is a great way to try and make sure you have all bases covered if you are writing on a topic. We all think differently and MGU makes a great funnel for all these different questions we ask ourselves. Also trying to think of answers to other peoples questions is a great way of discovering ideas for topics to write about.

Just from looking at the list of questions in the Brainstorm section has given me a few ideas myself for possible articles to write.

Not only is the site a great source of inspiration but there are also users requesting interviews for their blogs, users wanting to review products (great if you have just released a new free tool). There are so many opportunities on the site, and they will only grow as the community inevitably grows.