Obviously, the most basic thing any website needs to have is content. The more content you have, the more topics you cover and more people come to your website. However, sometimes it can be exhausting to keep producing content all by yourself. Besides, you are not an expert on everything and it can be quite refreshing for your visitors to see/read a different point of you or hear from a person whose area of expertise is tangential to your own.
Let’s see how you can open your website to guest authors and through that, provide your readers with insightful and diverse content.
Setting things up
Now, people visiting your website are mostly coming there for the content you’re publishing and probably aren’t thinking about writing a guest post for you. That’s why you need to let them know you’re accepting guest posts. Usually, this is done by setting up a separate page called “Write for us” or something like that, something that will clearly show that you’re willing to accept new content from anyone interested. Make sure that a link to that page is clearly visible from your home page.
When an interested party comes to your “Write for us” page, they need to be able to find all the necessary information there. They need to know how long the text they’re submitting needs to be, how many links can be embedded in the text, what topics they can cover and stuff like that. These instructions should be approached seriously because you want a guest post to fit the content on your website. For example, if you’re a travel blog, you don’t want a post about gambling. Additionally, the amount of links and the websites they’re linking to can also have an impact and so on. You don’t want that new post hurting your website in any way.
Mind you, when your website becomes popular and starts hauling in traffic, guest posts can be a pretty nice source of income. People WILL be willing to pay to get some of that sweet traffic sent their way.
Guest post plugins
Of course, all of these guest post you get have to be managed somehow. Luckily, there are plenty of plugins out there that can make your life in this regard a whole lot easier. Getting one of them will allow you to more quickly and efficiently communicate with the guest post’s authors, so here are a few suggestions.
User Submitted Post
User Submitted Post is a great way to enable frontend submission of guest posts (with images). It offers plenty of customizable options when it comes to general information concerning the person submitting the text. Notifications will be delivered to you via e-mail whenever a new post is submitted so that you can always stay on top of things, plus you can select between three different statuses for the post – Draft, Pending and Publish Immediately. More than 30000 installations mean that this is a product you can trust.
Peter’s plugins
By “Peter’s plugins” we mean Peter’s Collaboration E-mails and Peter’s Post Notes. The names are pretty self-explanatory: the former notifies all parties about submissions or changes to the post’s status, while the latter creates a nice window in which editors or blog owners can write their notes and say what they want to be changed. If the two plugins are used together, every note will also trigger an e-mail that notifies the guest post’s author about new notes. Very simple, easy to use, but quite useful.
Websites that accept guest posts
But enough with the theory, how about taking a look at how all of these functions in practice? There is a great list on ThemeCircle of 5000 websites that accept guest posts which you can browse to see exactly how all these people are approaching the guest post issue. The websites have all been sorted into different categories, so you can dive in directly and see what the competition in your field is doing. Or maybe you get inspired and find a place where your text can be published quickly.
Apart from that, however, there are several other interesting topics like plugins and themes, plus they have a blog of their own, so there really is a lot to explore and learn here. Essentially, this is an excellent hub for everything related to this topic. If guest posting interests you in any way, shape or form, this is a place you MUST visit.
Conclusion
Accepting guest posts on your website can be a good idea on multiple levels. Not only do you get fresh and unique content, but you can also earn a pretty penny from that once your website takes off. Obviously, the more you grow, the more guest post submissions you’ll receive, so it would be good to have some kind of tool nearby to help you go through those texts and communicate with their authors more efficiently. That’s where plugins come in – there are plenty of choices out there and all you have to do is pick one. Good luck!