How to manage guest posts for your blog
Guest post is a practice that can be very useful for your company. Surely you have considered writing for other people or, you have even received requests from companies and individuals who are interested in appearing on your business blog by writing a post. Has it ever happened to you?
Guest post: what is it and what benefits can it bring to your company?
Guest post is understood as the practice of writing a blog post with a theme related to that of our company as guest authors. This practice is becoming popular in Spain, imported from English-speaking countries.
Guest posting is one more of the inbound marketing strategies since it is based on the generation of useful content for your followers. Many advantages can be extracted from this practice, advantages that affect both the invited author and the company that receives the post.
On the one hand, for guest authors, blogging for certain companies can help them earn a name and get their message across to a wider audience. That is why authors choose very well in which blogs or websites they want to appear since they need to be sure that this collaboration is going to be positive for them.
On the part of the company, having external collaborators, the rate of publication of posts on the blog can be much higher, so it would be more fed. In addition, external collaborators will share their content, so by doing so they become a speaker of the company among their followers, something that will improve your brand image and give authority to your page. Keep that in mind!
How to manage the guest post within your website?
So far so good, they are all benefits for both parties, but … have you thought that if many collaborators write on your page, is this the one that is exposed?
It is possible that each collaborator has a style, wants to talk about their preferred topics, and, all this, can create a medley that affects your company image, in such a way that users cannot identify your business, your posts, and your style when writing.
At InboundCycle we have received many suggestions from guest authors who would like to blog. The problem we were seeing? From the marketing team, we want to continue controlling the content that was published on our blog, without losing the essence that characterizes us and without this entailing a lack of freedom for the authors.
That is why I am going to teach you the work methodology that we carry out in InboundCycle to be able to carry out the collaborations that we carry out:
Style guide
It’s great that you accept collaborations, but in the end, your blog is your brand and all the content that comes out from it must bear your stamp since they will always identify it with you.
That is why you must create a style guide that allows invited authors to know how they should approach their articles: length of the text, communicative tone, focus, type of vocabulary allowed, topics …
In short, a guide that collects everything that you are interested in passing on to the authors so that, when they write, your brand essence does not get left behind. So you can see an example, from InboundCycle we created this guide.
Structure communication
The forms can help you structure the communication you want to follow. Think about what information you need to collect from each of the invited authors and create a standard form to help you extract that information.
Structure of the team
It is important to have a continuous team structure over time that is in charge of managing collaborations. The importance of this lies in having greater control of who publishes on the blog and what is published, in addition to monitoring that the content complies with the proposed style guide and the theme presented. In our specific case, we are two people who manage the collaborations.
In my case, I am in charge of managing all the proposals that come in. Once the collaboration form arrives, I am in charge of setting, together with the invited author, the following topics:
- Realization of the proposal of the subject that is going to be treated in the writing of the post.
- The chosen keyword will be worked on in the post. This is important to us since we must not lose sight at any time that these posts can also help you improve your organic positioning.
- I am in charge of sharing with them the style guide that has been created.
- And finally, the delivery time is set in such a way that I keep track of all the posts by guest authors that are going to be published on our blog, so none of these overlap.
To work on all these aspects and carry out good coordination in all cases, we work with several tools that I present below in case they are of interest to you. If you know others, I invite you to share them with me!
Publication schedule
It will allow you to have control not only of the posts that you are going to publish and thus organize your blog but also of the follow-up that you will be able to do with your collaborators. Space the articles of collaborators with those of the team in such a way that you can intersperse them to get a more attractive variety for your readers.
CopyScape
It is something that you take for granted when you establish a collaboration, but to make sure that everything is original and Google is not going to penalize you for duplicate content, you can check it with this tool. It will save you more than one trouble!
As you can see, having collaborations on your blog is a good option to endow it with wealth while helping it to spread more. Of course, if you are going to choose to include a guest post on our blog, make sure before you have a good structure and planning so that these collaborations always add and never detract from your brand. Good luck!
