Selecting guest bloggers
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As a rule, it’s important to be able to produce a stream of informative and entertaining blog posts consistently that will keep your audience coming back for more and to attract new readers. The upswing is that by keeping and following a regular schedule, you welcome search engines to continuously index your blog while keeping your readers happily informed and entertained. And a happy audience can lead to your site traffic heading northbound.
The downside is that there are simply unforeseeable events and situations you cannot avoid that’ll keep you away from your blog’s CMS. And as you may know, failing to regularly could mean disappointment for your regular visitors, and eventually a significant trickle down in your precious site traffic stats.
For these, we highly suggested leveraging on guest bloggers to fill your shoes. Sure it’ll all be convenient, but it’s best if you can select guest blogger before any schedule inconveniences even occur. Here are a few pointers to help you choose the perfect wordsmiths to keep your blogging saddle warm.
Why A Guest Blogger?
Being an auxiliary content generator is merely one of many reasons why welcoming a guest blogger aboard can be beneficial. Your intent should pretty much dictate who you should enlist and what kind of blog entry he or she should fashion. For instance, you may want an insider’s point-of-view for a post that features a specific movie, contacting either a known movie critic or one of the stars to blog is a logical option. Or for an album review, you can bring in an audio engineer, a local musician or someone from a guitar manufacturing company; each would provide a unique take on the album in question.
Review Your Comment Section
From within your own blog’s comment section, you can find a wealth of possible candidates to be your guest blogger though it can potentially take some time. Scan each of your blog post’s comment section to find and keep tabs on readers who actively participate in most discussions. Good conversationalists who share objective views and are able to defend their chosen stance are great qualities you should also look out for. Keeping a list of names would definitely help.
Check Blogger Background
Reputation is indeed important online, whether you’re getting a squeaky clean comedian to write your posts or a dark and controversial morning show DJ. All this would, of course, come into play based on your intended purpose for even having a guest blogger. Simply visit their site and read a post or two, taking careful note of grammar skills, articulation, wit and opinion objectivity. For the latter attribute, look for posts where they review movies, writing and music (among many other topics) and those where they comment on various issues. From these, find out which sides they take on and how they relate to the topics.
Sponsorship
Among your list of possible guest bloggers, take note of those who are being paid or sponsored by specific companies. Depending on the topic they are tackling for you, these bloggers are usually riddled with restrictions so as to not step on their advertisers’ toes. If the best ones you’ve decided on are indeed backed by a company, it’s best to assign a general list of topics they can choose from that are unrelated to the business or field of their sponsors/advertisers. Otherwise, whether the both of you want it or not, the blog post can sound like a plug, which may or may not go against your intent and your brand’s reputation.
This is a part of a series of posts about writing content specifically for blogs. We’ll present you with a few blogging essentials, updates and maybe a technical trick or two to enrich your blog. Stay tuned to SEOP.com for more. Or better yet, sound off on the comments below and subscribe to our RSS feed or daily mail for notifications of new posts.
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RSpears @ July 15, 2010
Thank you for the tips. Finding guest bloggers have been a challenge and your suggestions make a lot of sense. I will give it a try.
Yes. It’s a challenge especially since your brand’s online reputation would be in the guest blogger’s hands. It really pays to know your way around the social Web and actually be out there to listen to conversations and engage with people to find guest bloggers.
Hey, ok, I get it, I guess - but does this really work?
Damn, that sound’s so easy if you think about it.