If you have a popular blog with decent traffic and a community, you probably accept Guest Posts or at least some one would have emailed you if they could post in your blog.
Well, accepting Guest Posts is a good idea – you get a different view point, free posts, and some additional promotion from the guest authors side and so on.
But things can go bad sometimes; make sure you do the following checks
Two Important Checks for Guest Post Publishers
Check if the Post is Original
It totally sucks to see one of the guest posts you published on some one else’s blog. Many people think guest blogging as article submission. They write a post and sends it out to many websites that accept guest posts.
So how to check if the post is original?
1. The easiest way to check is by asking the author himself. Ask him, if the content he submitted is unique and has it been published anywhere else.
2. Google with a portion of the text from the post. If the post is sent to multiple blogs, the content is probably the same. Copy a whole paragraph and Google it. See if you get any exact matches.
3. Use Copyscape once the post is published. See if any matches come up. Then take down the post immediately and notify the author.
Check if the Post is Good
Biggest problem with Guest Posts is the post quality. It would seem hard to say ‘No’ to many guest post requests esp. from friends or acquaintances, but remember, its your blog.
Lately, I got over this problem and now accept posts only I think is good.
I turn down about 30% of the guest posts that reach me, and I haven’t seen anyone who is very unhappy. Majority of the times they get back with better posts and I get them up here.
Over to you – What do you do before deciding which post to publish?
P.S: If you like to write a guest post here, check the guidelines first.
I am a WordPress product developer and creator of Image Attributes Pro. I am passionate about solving problems and travelling the world.
Perfect timing! I’m going to publish my very first guest post later today and these tips are really valuable for bloggers like me. What are your thoughts on the number of allowable links in the post?
Thanks for sharing!
I allow two links to any of their posts and one link in the by-line. Total Three. Its up to you, 2 to 4 is healthy.
Thanks. I’ve also resisted having them create their own user login because there’s always that chance of getting hacked into. I prefer them emailing me instead.
OMG, Never do that, esp when you don’t know them well. Actually I wanted to add that to the post, but thought it wont match the title.
One idea would be to create a new profile named, Guest Author and you can log-in and post it yourself. This would avoid the mismatch of names in the author field and by-line. Hope you got it.
Good luck with guest posts.
Yup that’s exactly what I did! 🙂
A couple of times I created a new profile and password for each guest, using their email so that the author profile has their avatar and the comment notices go to the guest writer. I don’t give them the password — I had to create the post from email.
For people that I expect to be regular contributors I give them a ‘contributor’ profile — they can create and edit drafts but not publish. So I don’t see the problem if the blog administrator controls publishing and can delete the profile/password at any time.
I liked that first part, though its a lot of work especially when they are not returning, it sounds like a fool proof plan 🙂
Guest Posting is a very good method to generate content for your own blog and also give some exposure to the writer. The points that are mentioned here are the typical checklist that everyone has to follow.
Beware of article spinners. It’s just one way to fool Google but on the other hand it is asking for dangers to your blog’s reputation.
Rightly said kamal, re-posting is dangerous and big G wont forgive if he catches us once.