Guest posting is both a benefit to your blog as well as to the guest poster. Your blog benefits from having diversity of experiences and opinions to share with the readers, and the guest poster receives more exposure for themselves and their sites. A well written guest post will generate traffic for both your blog and the guest poster’s blog.
As Riches Corner has continued to grow, I’ve began to get a few requests for guest posting through comments or my contact form. In the interest of streamlining the process, I simplified the procedure for becoming a guest poster here at Riches Corner.
If you’re running a blog, you may also want to consider making it easier for someone to become a guest poster on your website.
I began to think about this process after I received several emails requesting to guest post and asking about my guidelines for guest posting. Each time, I had to sit down and respond to the email, write out my guidelines and then go through a process of emailing back and forth over the course of a few days. It may not seem like much, but the process can become time consuming and inefficient.
I wanted to look into a way to make it easier for both myself and the guest poster to submit their posts for my review.
4 Steps to Simplify Submitting a Guest Post on Your Blog:
- Write out the guidelines and sticky them. I wrote out a few guidelines for my guest posts and created a page for them. For my guidelines, I incorporated suggestions from an article by Mike over at eblogcamp. You can see that there is now a link on the navigation menu for submitting a guest post. You can read my guidelines for guest posting here.
- Set up registration for your blog. Under the general settings section of your wordpress dashboard there is a section where you can allow registration on the site. The default is for subscriber. You will need to increase to allow for registration as a contributor. This allows a registered guest poster to submit their articles as drafts.
- Get some plugins. There are a couple of plugins that are extremely useful in setting up your registration process. The first one is Register Plus Redux. This plugin allows you to customize your registration page, allowing the registrant to fill out a more complete profile themselves. It also allows you to set up email verification for some additional protection against spammers. Of course it never fails, as soon as I allowed for registration, I began to get spam members. Bots and other malicious people just love to try and find ways to kill your mailbox. Setting up email verification through register plus was only one step in the process. However, it doesn’t stop bots. For putting a stop to spam, Sabre came to my rescue. This is a basic registration security plugin that allows me to add a captcha phrase to the registration page. Much as I dislike captcha, this was a necessary evil. Between register plus redux and sabre, I haven’t received a single spam member.
- Add an author box to your posts. This is an optional addition to your blog, but I feel like it’s a great way to reward your guest posters. You’ll notice that when you go to my single page posts there is an about the author box at the top of the post under the title. I had to do some searching and teach myself a little bit of coding, but I was able to figure out how to add this author box to my blog. I was able to find this guide online on how to add an author box. I made a couple of my own changes and put the author box before the content instead of at the end of the post. If you wish to automate the process, there are a couple of plugins on the wordpress site that you can find as well.
These are just a few steps that you can take to make the process of guest posting easier for both yourself and your guest poster. Taking the time to add these features will save you time in the future when your blog begins to get popular.
To guest post on Riches Corner, you can read my guidelines here and proceed with the registration process here.
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Richard is a full time professional, husband, father and blogger juggling all the responsibilities of life and running a blog. Richard enjoys writing about life and online money matters.
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