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Get The Best Guest Authors for Your Blog
In the past 3 years I have served as the host to over 150 guest bloggers. I opened up the blog to guests as a way to give back to the blogging community. Many new bloggers, as well as seasoned blogging veterans, get the opportunity to promote themselves and expose their writing to a new audience.
The other benefit for guest posting (and hosting) on Basic Blog Tips is that it helps to strengthen and grow the community. The guests feel a deeper connection to the blog and they interact and engage with one another in a familiar place.
The Down Side To Hosting Guests Authors
As with everything in life you have to take the good with the bad and there is a down side to offering guest posting on a popular blog. One of the biggest challenges I faced was that my inbox would be flooded with requests on a daily basis.
If you have the standard contact form on your blog, most of these request will come from "link builders" who have no idea what your blog is about or what your readers are interested in. These random requests will come in from hired writers who only have one goal and that is to get links for their clients.
In the podcast and in the presentation slide posted below you'll discover how I avoid that problem and keep those requests from over-taking my inbox.
My 5 Tips for Vetting Guest Bloggers
1. Require a Human Gravatar
2. Verify the Google+ Profile
3. Get Samples of Previous Guest Posts
4. Set up contributor accounts in WordPress
5. Reward Your Guests
Best Ways To Reward Guest Bloggers
Give your guests access to their own profile and display it in a bio box. The good thing is, because you already vetting your guest carefully, there is no need to worry about them adding "questionable" links in their bio. This will also help you in the long run - as your guests build their Author Rank, your blog will build Publisher Rank.
Install Premium plugins so that your guests will get exposed to plugins they might not have on their own blogs. I recommend having SEOPressor Version 5 and CommentLuv Premium.
Support the post by submitting to blogging communities and directories. This will send traffic to your blog as well as your guest's blogs. When your guest logs into Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools sees all the referral traffic coming from your site, they will be sure to submit more posts and they will save their best content to post on your blog.
Bonus Tip!
Install the SpeakPipe widget and take down the standard contact form.
If you are new to blogging and the concept of accepting guest posters, start off by inviting your friends to do a guest post. This will help you get your feet wet in the process.
