As a marketing director, blogger, or business owner, you know how important it is to have high-quality content on your website.
The content you create for your site helps build trust with your readers, boosts SEO, and keeps people engaged with your brand.
Finding the time and resources to generate fresh content for your website, however, can be a challenge.
That’s why allowing guest bloggers on your site can be such a great option. Not only will it help you create new content quickly and easily, but it will help expand your reach and introduce new voices to your audience.
Let’s take a closer look at why allowing guest bloggers on your site is beneficial.
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Why Allow Guest Bloggers?
While it’s not the right solution for everyone, there are plenty of reasons you should accept content from guest bloggers on your site.
You get the “be our guest” reference, right? 🙂
With that outdated joke that likely didn’t hit the mark out of the way, let’s take a look at four of the top reasons you should accept guest bloggers.
1) Expanded Reach – Allowing guest bloggers on your site has the potential to expand the reach of your website significantly. With each guest blogger comes their network of followers–people who may not have found out about you otherwise–who can become new members of your community.
When someone submits a guest post to your site, they’re likely to share it with their own social media following, link to it from an article on their site or in a future guest post, or otherwise spread the word. This helps your legend grow and gives your brand a boost.
2) Increased Engagement – By bringing in different perspectives from outside sources, you are creating an opportunity for increased engagement with both existing and potential readers because they are being exposed to new ideas or topics that they may not see otherwise.
Everyone is coming at things from a different perspective. If you only display your own perspective on your blog, it limits the conversation. By allowing guest bloggers, you have new voices and new perspectives, so let the engagement begin.
3) Quality Content Creation – Having quality content on your website is essential for building trust with readers and increasing organic search engine rankings. Allowing guest bloggers on your site can help ensure that this content is consistent without relying too heavily on one person or team.
As long as you properly vet the writers you allow to contribute to your blog, you’ll wind up with new, high-quality, informative content that adds a ton of extra value for your readers.
4) Different Perspectives – Introducing different perspectives from outside sources can add valuable insight into what’s going on in your industry or niche as well as provide unique ideas about how to approach common problems. It also allows for more creative problem solving by introducing fresh points of view that you may not have considered before.
Let’s look at this from the perspective of a blog about marketing (yep, you’re on one right now).
We’re in the business of helping other businesses grow through digital marketing and other online promotional tactics. We’re super busy keeping our clients happy, so there isn’t always time to draft a blog post for our own site.
That’s where guest posts come into play, helping boost content production when you are focused on other things, or if you don’t have the resources in house.
Our readers benefit from bringing in guest posts from experts in niche specialties like SEO, graphic design, web design, content marketing, and any of the other many areas of marketing. You can benefit in this same way.
How To Assess The Quality Of Guest Bloggers
Now that you understand the “Why” part of guest blogging. Let’s take a look at how you can ensure the guest bloggers you accept know what they’re talking about and bring their ‘A’ game to the table.
To get the most out of having guest bloggers post articles on your website, it’s important to assess the quality of their work before publishing it online. To help you with your vetting process, here are some tips for assessing the quality of prospective guest bloggers:
1) Check Their Experience – While there is no guarantee that someone with more experience will produce higher-quality work than someone who is just starting out, checking their experience level can help give you an indication of whether or not they are up for the task at hand.
To check a guest blogger’s experience, you can look at their social media presence. LinkedIn is a great place to start, as it serves as an online resume. Then dig into the rest of their activity online and see what others are saying and how they engage.
2) Review Their Writing Samples – Requesting writing samples from potential guest bloggers is an effective way to gauge their level of expertise as well as their writing style before committing to working together.
At GaenzleMarketing.com, we have a “Write For Us” page that lays out the guidelines for publishing on the site. As a part of each of those pages, we ask prospective contributors to submit three samples of their work.
If they have been published on high-quality sites and their previous work looks good, it’s likely they’ll produce on the same level for you.
3) Ask For References – If possible, try getting references from other websites or publications where they have contributed in the past so that you can get an idea of how reliable they are when it comes to meeting deadlines and producing high-quality work consistently over time.
If you can talk to the site owners or editors of those sites, that would be ideal. They’ll be able to give you an idea of how much editing they had to do, whether they see the guest blogger as a true expert, and what it was like working with the person in question.
4) Offer An Editing Process – Finally, offering an editorial review process after a blog post has been submitted can help ensure that any mistakes are caught quickly and corrected before being published online so that only high-quality work makes its way onto your website in the end.
Use a tool like Grammarly to get suggestions for updates and catch any errors, and make sure to check manually as well to make sure you cover all your bases.
Final Thoughts on Accepting Guest Bloggers
As a marketing director, attracting guest bloggers for your website is one way to maximize its reach while ensuring that there is consistent high-quality content available online at all times.
By following these tips, you should be able to assess the quality of prospective writers quickly and effectively so that only top-notch material ends up making its way onto your website.
Anthony is CEO and Founder of Gaenzle Marketing. He is a two-time published author and digital marketing influencer. He has helped brands both large and small grow and thrive across multiple industries through strategic marketing campaigns and leveraging a powerful network of influencers.
