Whether you’re running a blog to help promote products, or just for fun, it isn’t always easy to come up with new and interesting topics to write about on a regular basis. Even the best of bloggers sometimes need a break, but if you don’t keep to a good schedule, you risk losing followers and even ranking over time. That’s why guest blogging is such a great idea. It allows you to keep your site filled with fresh content, without requiring you to do all the work.
In addition, guest blogs will give your readers a fresh perspective that they couldn’t have gotten from you. This helps grow your audience and provide them with a better overall experience. The big question then, is how to get people to write for your site? The following strategies will help bring guest bloggers to your page quickly and easily.
Build Your Audience
The best guest bloggers are looking for two things when they choose which sites to publish on. First, they want a site that has high quality traffic that may visit their page (so they can convert them into customers of their own). Second, they are looking for a high quality back link from a site in a related niche to their own. If you don’t already have at least a small audience that visits on a regular basis, nobody is going to want to write for you.
With that in mind, you need to build up your traffic on your own. Fortunately, this is only a problem for the first few months of running a site. If you do it well, you should start getting regular visitors through search engines, social media, and other locations fairly quickly.
Build Page Rank, Alexa Rank and Others
In addition to just building a good audience, you should try to improve your ranking on the major measurement sites. Google’s Page Rank, for example, can be very important (though it is losing credibility due to the infrequent updates). If you can move your site from a PR0 to a PR1 or 2, however, guest bloggers will start taking your site more seriously. The higher you can rank on these types of systems, the more attention you’ll be getting from top bloggers.
Never let Quality Suffer
Some people are so eager to get some guest posts on their site that they will accept anything. This is a huge mistake. IF someone attempts to submit a low quality guest post, it should always be rejected. You need to review every piece of content that goes on your site to make sure it is providing your visitors with value. Guest posts are only helpful if they are going to improve the overall experience of everyone who comes to your site. In addition, if someone is thinking about guest posting on your site, and they see a bunch of low quality guest posts, they will lose interest. They don’t want to be associated with a low quality page.
Allow Bio Boxes
For the best guest bloggers, a simple back link to their site isn’t going to be enough to attract them. Allow them to add a ‘bio box’ to the guest post. This box is where they can write a brief paragraph or two about themselves and their site. This helps them to become more recognized, as well as attracts more people to visit their sites. This is very valuable to the guest blogger, but costs you nothing, so it is always a good idea to offer this option.
Let them Know You’re Looking
This is one thing that many marketers don’t do, and it is likely costing them big time. If you don’t have a page that is dedicated to asking other bloggers to guest post on your site, you are making a big mistake. Most guest bloggers don’t want to have to go through the hassle of finding your contact information, send you an email, wait for a response and all the other steps that are required. If you have a page that explains that you accept guest posts, and what needs to be done in order to qualify, many people will reach out to you.
