The More the Merrier

• By Erica V.

I love the idea of guest posting. In addition to exposing your own blog and writing to new audiences, it helps build community and relationships between bloggers. It’s a bit like blogging hospitality: your blog is your home and you can welcome other bloggers you respect into your writing abode.

Likewise, when you guest post on someone else’s blog, it helps you to stretch your writing skills. When you share your perspective from someone else’s platform, you get feedback that you wouldn’t normally receive. For readers who liked your post, you may gain devoted new followers. For those who didn’t, you’ll get some good ideas for how to improve.

If you think guest blogging is something that you’d like to pursue, whether inviting someone to your own blog or vice versa, the best way to get started is by doing some research. When inviting someone to guest post on your blog, give them some context: what do you usually write about? What’s your audience like? What kind of length and deadline are you looking at? When proposing a guest post on someone else’s blog, take a look at their previous posts. While you want to stay true to your style, it wouldn’t make sense to post about a recipe on a blog that deals with politics. You’ll also want to let the blog owner know the timeline you’re thinking of and stick to your own deadline.

Once you’ve gotten all the details sorted, how do you actually get everything set up? You’ll want to be added as or add your guest blogger as a user to your blog. On WordPress.com, this means going to your Users > Invite New page and inviting your guest blogger to contribute. (Full guide available here.) There are a few different types of roles available. You’ll probably only want to add your guest blogger as a contributor, which basically means they can write a post, but you’ll need to approve it, add images, and are the only one who can delete it.

Once you’ve written up your guest post, share it with your own audience. Don’t forget to moderate and reply to the comments. Especially when acting as the guest poster, communicating via comments helps you take full advantage of the experience by interacting with and getting feedback from new readers.

Have you written any guest posts yet? If so, did you find it beneficial?