The Ultimate Guide to Accepting Visitor Posts on your Blogging site James Dunaway wrote this publish on March 22nd, 2010 in Blogging Suggestions, Visitor Posts, Crucial 14 Remarks
This can be a visitor post composed by Ann Smarty, founder of My Weblog Guest, a neighborhood for visitor bloggers.
Accepting visitor posts on your web site is a superb solution to give your website new insight and also to provide some assortment. The vast majority of well-liked weblogs in any area of interest get benefit of visitor contributions to get a few causes:
Guest authors provide in new recommendations and special type. Additionally they contribute some new information and facts you had been not aware of (and as a result make your blog site detailed). Here’s a simple example: as a search expert I am conscious of quite a couple of search tricks few people know or use. Therefore my post on using Google creatively to save money on a famous personal finance blog seemed so clean and interesting to the website author and the readers.
Guest contributions allow you to consider a day off. No, seriously,
Microsoft Office Professional Plus, blogging can be described as continuous commitment. It is so refreshing to consider some rest and relax while keeping your blog site updated. I do agree you shouldn’t overuse that because your blog site might lose voice but keeping one day a week for visitor contributions is an excellent idea,
Windows 7 Ultimate! Visitor contributions can be an awesome source of inspiration. You site daily and a day comes when you realize you don’t know what to write about. You have no suggestions and everything that comes to mind have already been covered. Now imagine that a new person enters your local community and offers something completely different. Or maybe he even writes something that you have already mentioned – but he uses a special style, a different perspective and a new format. And your readers find that awesome! Now you feel inspired! You feel you know how to re-use your previously published concepts to find new ones and how to re-think your previously published opinions to spur new discussion. So I guess, the benefits of accepting visitor posts are quite clear. Now, let see how to do that painlessly, almost effortlessly and to the maximum efficiency.
1. Clearly Invite Visitor Posters
People reading your website will most likely want to visitor submit one day. Or at least they will know that you accept visitor posts and will then invite their friends who happen to look for visitor posting opportunities. Therefore making it clear that you are looking for guest contributions is such a good idea.
The best method to encourage visitor articles is to do the following:
Submit an announcement at your site inviting visitor contributors.
Create a static page explaining how to submit a visitor publish and link to the page from your blog page main navigation menus. A good solution to name the page is one of the following:
"Submit a guest post" (if you are looking for one-time contributors);
"Write for us" "Become an author" (if you are more interested in regular contributors). This will both tell your readers that you accept guest posts and also will help those using Google to find visitor posting opportunities to come across your weblog.
2. Clearly State Your Guest Post Requirements
Visitor posting is not a new concept but the process as well as rules are still undefined and can vary from site to blogging site. Besides, you don’t want to spend plenty of time editing the submissions, so you need clear guidelines to keep the low-quality guest posts to minimum.
I don’t like long lists of rules because people tend to never read them all, so be sure to only list what is really crucial.
Consider the following guidelines to be included for example:
Required topics (This especially makes sense if you only want contributors to write on some specific topic that you want to cover in your blog but don’t have expertise in);
Minimum post length (This one may seem superfluous because it somehow limits the author’s creativity: people can actually be brief and provide terrific content at the same time. But per my experience, this one is required to cut down on short incomplete posts created for the sole purpose to get a link back).
Publish formatting requirements (Would you like the submit submitted in HTML? Do you use H2 tags?)
Requirements to publish images (Would you like the author to submit a related image? Would you like the image to be properly licensed and attributed (I bet you would!))
Re-publishing terms (I for one always require that the post remains never republished for the lifetime of my weblog for the fear of duplicate content issue and also to maintain my resource uniqueness and quality). By-line requirements: How many links are allowed from the author’s bio? It is also advisable to let the visitor posters know about your editing policies. I usually state that I will only edit the posts for minor grammar mistakes and add contextual links to the related articles from my web site.
3. Clearly Describe the Post Submission Process
The easier the process of submitting the publish, the better. People prefer doing it in various ways from emailing the post to adding each visitor contributor to their WordPress blog page authors (I myself use all of the ways for various blogs and purposes).
Right here are the two ways that look convenient both from the blogger’s and author’s perspectives:
1. Grant access to your blog WordPress wp-admin and let contributors upload posts.
The method has two good advantages:
It is very handy for managing regular contributors who submit posts monthly or weekly. This way, they can easily log in, upload and format posts to submit for your review.
It is very encouraging for the guest authors to submit more posts. Next time they have a solid submit idea, they will come and write the submit for the blog they have access to. If you choose this method, be sure to check my submit listing some essential WordPress plugins that make the process of reviewing the visitor post and notifying the author of the status easier and faster.
2. Create a form for submitting visitor posts
It is an ideal method for those looking for quick one-time submissions. I have such a form for one of my blogs inviting to submit short actionable search hints. You can go with a simple form most of us have for contact page but to ensure high-quality and thorough submissions you’d better create a form that:
Allows to upload or attach images;
Has a separate fields for the post title and the author’s bio;
Has a reliable CAPTCHA (but the one that is possible to pass for any human being);
Supports HTML (or even has an HTML editor); CformsII is usually a good plugin to consider for that.
And how do you encourage visitor contributions and make the submission process user-friendly?
Ann Smarty can be described as search blogger and social media enthusiast. If you are serious about guest blogging, join the forum started by Ann – My Blogging site Visitor. My Blog page Visitor is often a good place for those who plan to accept guest contributions on a regular basis or look for visitor posting opportunities on well-known weblogs in various niches.Follow Ann Smarty on Twitter: @seosmarty.
Publish image by JoshuaDavisPhotography. COM
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