Guest blogging is a great opportunity for writers to create fresh content for another website that isn’t their own — it allows them to share their expertise and establishing themselves as thought leaders in the space. If done correctly, both site owners and guest writers can enjoy the benefits of guest blogging.
By regularly featuring guest posts, businesses can grow their audience, increase site traffic, and ultimately create more enriching online experiences for their fans.
Should you feature guest blog posts?
Is this practice right for you and your business? Before we look at the technical details, let’s dig into some of the reasons you should consider guest blogging.
1. It brings new knowledge to your blog and readers
Often, you may want to address a certain topic or explore a certain area for your audience, but you feel that you lack the necessary specific, insightful information to do so. By inviting an expert in that area to write for your blog, you can share that knowledge with your fans right on your site so they don’t have to go find it somewhere else.
2. It boosts your reputation and credibility
As AllBusiness points out, guest blogging is a good way to gain new fans, which helps build your reputation. By inviting other writers who are trusted on the internet, you gain some of that trust from their followers. Similarly, your acceptance of guest authors to your blog means they gain credibility with your audience, too.
3. It helps build your professional network
When you invite individuals to write for your blog, and they accept, you begin to build a relationship with them. As you do this more often, you create a strong network of people you can reach out to and learn from as you grow.
Managing your guest writers
The first step toward reaping the benefits of guest blogging is to reach out to folks who may be interested in writing for your site. A good place to start is within your own online community, reaching out to specific subject matter experts within your network.
Once you’ve found someone keen to write for your blog, you’ll need to manage how they prepare the content for you. The most straightforward way would be to add them as a “user” to your blog.
If you’re using WordPress.com, you can do this by clicking on the Add button next to People in your My Site menu. This will open the Invite People form. If the writer already has a WordPress.com account, you can enter their username or email address and then click submit to send them an invitation to your site.
Set the correct User Role to make sure you give them permission to create a blog post on your site. For a guest post, you may want to consider giving them the “contributor” role, so that you can manage when the post gets published.
An alternative is to let them submit their content in another format, such as Google Docs. The downside to this is that you have to manage image uploads and other linked content.
Getting the word out
Once the guest post has been published, it’s time to share it with your fans. This is the perfect opportunity for a social media campaign. Ask the guest blogger to share the post on all their social media profiles, and do the same on yours.
You can also share it a few times over the course of the next few days, at different times of the day, to help with exposure across different time zones. Then, keep an eye on the conversation around the topic of the guest post. If you see someone asking questions that the guest post answers, consider sharing that post with them online.
Once you understand how to manage guest content and start seeing the benefits, you’ll find it becomes easier and easier to maintain a steady flow of good content from your guest posters. You may even find someone reaches out and asks you to contribute to their website.
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