Guest blogging is a powerful way of gaining exposure. It’s also a great way to expand your contributor base and bring in experts from around your field.
In this article, we’ll talk about how to get guest writers, keep them, and maintain a successful relationship with the best ones.
How to find guest writers
There are several ways of inviting guest bloggers to write for your site.
“One the easiest and main ideas of achieving this goal is by creating a ‘Write For Us’ tab on your WordPress site” – explains Jeff Wilson, Technical Director at ConfidentWriters. In most cases, blogs will make this tab visible to all users. A link might also be placed in the main navigation.
Posting on other sites is another way of getting guest posts. This strategy works best if bloggers are working in the same niche of blogging (beauty, fashion, science, technology, or sports).
Over the recent past, there has been an increase in the number of guest bloggers communities and online forums where participants can share ideas on different guest blogging techniques. Consequently, one can join such communities and share their experiences and gain new insights on how to effectively attract and manage guest bloggers.
3 rules of accepting guest posts and what to avoid
It is essential to determine what’s good or bad once you are getting guest post submissions. This is achieved by the following rules.
- One of the crucial steps is getting to know your keyword and backlinks. According to Richard Carter, Senior Technical Expert at SwiftPapers, most spammers and SEO companies tend to be nit-picky on the type of backlinks they are looking for. In most cases, they do not specify which company they are working for. Besides, one can’t tell by just searching for their emails since they use some generic Google or Yahoo emails. As a rule, it is essential to avoid linking to spammy sites on your WordPress blog. Therefore, not asking these questions on time will lead to them writing you an article and adding these sketchy backlinks.
- Ask for a summary of the article and topic ideas before the final submissions. Most of these spammers and SEO companies have their pre-written articles. Thus, just accepting a guest post might indeed lead to regret since chances are they will send you a post that had been written before that has been published on other several sites. It is always best to confirm their qualifications and ask them to provide a short summary and topic ideas.
- According to Heather Dawson, Content Marketing Manager at Paper-Research, accepting generic or list post ideas is a no – majority of daily posts in a range of 5 to 10 posts are generic. If the guest post seems to benefit your users then accepting it is an option.
Tips for managing guest bloggers in WordPress
Individual guest accounts
This method is done by creating the user’s account in the back end of WordPress and making them Authors. This gives the guest bloggers access to your WordPress backend making things easier to handle. The guest author can format the posts and also upload images.
Choosing the roles wisely is an important thing. However, it is essential to deny users some privileges such as editing published posts, deleting published posts, and publishing posts. Likewise, you can choose to assign them the role of a contributor and give them the responsibility to upload images and files. This technique works best for busy sites with multi-authors.
Attracting guest bloggers to your WordPress site requires enhancing usability features and building relationships with other bloggers.
However, it is essential to protect your site from malicious SEO bloggers and spammers that may hurt the reputation of your site.
According to Ethan Bailey, Chief Technical Officer at SolidEssay, a powerful anti-spam plugin helps deal with all the challenging work. It ensures that the comment section of your is welcoming and appealing to readers.
Consequently, putting an anti-spam plugin on your WordPress and getting to know your guest bloggers qualifications, ideas, and summary of their posts before publishing them are essential steps in managing your guest bloggers. Lastly, creating individual and generic guest user accounts in your site are some of the most effective techniques of managing guest bloggers.
Paul Bates
Paul Bates is a content marketer at BeeStudent based in Fresno, California. He’s an expert in content creation and SEO working on multiple educational projects.
The post How to Effectively Attract and Manage Guest Bloggers in WordPress appeared first on Torque.
