If you’re like the majority of content managers and SEO professionals, you likely have guest posting on other sites as part of your marketing strategy. But how about incorporating guest content on your own site?
You know the benefits of blogging for your business: increased traffic to your website, opportunity to showcase your brand personality and deepening customer relationships. Unfortunately, content creation takes time. That’s where accepting guest content comes in.
Since you can’t add a 25th hour to the day during which you can write more blog posts, you need to consider accepting guest content to expand your operation. In addition to increasing the amount of content on your site, allowing guest posting is a way to freshen up your blog and potentially reach new audiences.
However, allowing guest posting isn’t right for every blog, and managing guest content can be a lot of work. Ultimately, you will need to decide if accepting guest posts is right for your site. If the answer is yes, you must put a plan in place to manage that content effectively while still maintaining your brand identity.
Pros and Cons of Accepting Guest Posts
Before diving into the keys to managing guest content on your site, it’s essential to understand the pros and cons of accepting guest posts.
To start, the pros of accepting guest posts include diversifying content, increasing publishing frequency, and reaching new readers. Not only can you stress less about content creation, but accepting posts from contributors means more variety and the potential to hear from experts. Your contributors will likely share the post with their own audiences, thus increasing your site’s reach. Furthermore, accepting guest content is a chance to network with other content creators in your field and could lead to opportunities for you to contribute to their sites.
On the other hand, the cons of accepting guest posts include making your site vulnerable to more spam. Additionally, while allowing guest content could decrease the amount of content creation you’re doing yourself, managing contributions could become a full-time job. The posts and posters will need to be vetted, and you could find yourself with nothing new to publish when someone doesn’t follow through.
With these pros and cons in mind, you should consider where your blog fits into your business. If it plays a significant role in your brand and you’re committed to making it grow, then you should invest the time and energy into managing a guest post program. But, if your blog only serves to keep your site “fresh” for Google and you don’t spend a lot of effort on it, then accepting guest posts might require too much work on your end.
Still not sure if accepting guest posts is right for your site? Simply put, the majority of blogs stand to benefit from allowing guest contributors. Give it a try for six months to test the waters and then reevaluate.
What to Look for in Guest Content
Above all, the guest content you accept should fit in with your blog theme. There’s no point in taking posts that won’t benefit your readers. The content you say yes to should be detailed and unique. Don’t accept content the author has published elsewhere. Anything other than original and value-packed content could negatively impact your personal brand.
Some frequent guest posters will try to spin their content to get more mileage out of it, so utilize a free service like Copyscape to check for duplicate or similar posts on the internet. When you’re considering a guest post submission, you should also look for spam, links, and depth. You want fluff-free content that is around 1,000 words in length and doesn’t contain links to spammy websites.
Of course, not every outgoing link is spammy. Allow contributors to link out to as many sites as are beneficial to your readers. Guest posts should contain a minimum of four links plus one to two links in the author bio for their website and preferred social media profile.
How to Manage Guest Content on Your Site
When it comes to managing guest content on your site, understand that the most successful guest post programs have specific guidelines and are in place to work toward particular goals. Such a program will require effort on your end to ensure that the guest content your publishing provides genuine value to your audience. It’s helpful to have guest blogger qualifications that you can refer to when evaluating submissions.
Especially when you’re first launching your site’s guest post program, you want to carefully review submissions before publishing them. Not every submission (far from it) will earn a place in your content management system. To limit spam, think about using a contact form instead of providing just an email address on your “write for us” page.
Even if you trust the contributor, never give out author accounts that allow someone other than you or a team member to post content. Instead, receive guest content as either Word Docs or Google Docs. To avoid corrupting a Google Doc submission, open the file on file on Google Drive. You can edit there as well as leave comments for the author.
Make it clear that when you agree to publish a guest post on your site, you, not the original author, own it. If the author wants to link to the guest post from their own website, that’s perfectly acceptable. But it’s not okay if they publish the same piece of content on their site or another one.
Lastly, to help maintain brand identity, communicate in your guest post guidelines that authors will be expected to help build and support your community. That means their contribution doesn’t end when the guest post is published. Let it be known that guest contributors must reply to comments. This is especially important if your community is an essential part of your brand identity (which, if it’s not, it should be).
Accepting guest posts is a solid strategy for enhancing the quality of your blog, but for this tactic to work for your site, you must have a plan in place for managing guest content. With the right guidelines and focus, allowing guest content has the potential to boost your blog’s success.