How to Find Guest Bloggers to Feature on Your Website
What if you could drive traffic to your site and establish yourself as a thought leader, all in one go?
This may sound like a miracle for you and your site. The reality is much simpler: you need to be using guest bloggers.
The right guest bloggers builds up your audience and enhances your SEO. There’s just one problem: it’s tough to find good guest bloggers for your particular niche and audience.
Don’t worry, though. We’ve put together a comprehensive guide for how to find guest bloggers to feature on your website!
What Are Guest Bloggers?
This guide is dedicated to helping you find the best guest bloggers for your website. First, though, it’s important that you understand exactly what a guest blogger is.
As the name implies, a “guest blogger” is an outsider who writes a blog post (sometimes more than one) that you can feature on your website.
Sometimes, guest bloggers are paid. Other times, it’s simply a mutual exchange of benefits (more on this later).
This brings us to a bit of good news and bad news. The good news is that there are a ton of guest bloggers out there, just waiting for you to find them. The bad news is that it can be hard to find and recruit the really good ones!
We’re going to get into all the secrets to finding the best bloggers. First, though, you need to understand some of the primary benefits of using guest bloggers in the first place.
Why Use Guest Bloggers?
Before you worry about how to find guest bloggers, you need to know why you’d want to use them. And as it turns out, there are several very good reasons!
First, you can quickly expand the content your website has to offer. The strength of your brand is offering relevant content to consumers, and guest posts let you quickly build more of that content.
Guest bloggers also provide an opportunity to increase the diversity of your website as well. While it’s good to find writers who work in your exact niche, adding work from different writers can increase how many readers you have.
Finally, there’s a lot of room to discover some fun marketing synergies. Someone who writes about home renovations might hire some guests for real estate blogging, and each party will benefit immensely from this collaboration.
Make Guidelines Clear
Now that you’re ready to find some guest bloggers, it’s time for your first step. And that step is nice and simple: you need to make your guidelines clear.
Like we said earlier, part of the charm of a guest blogger is that they bring a new voice and perspective to your blog. At the same time, though, you want their style and formatting to feel familiar to your readers.
There are several ways to share your guidelines, of course. Some people wait until they have hired and guest blogger and communicate guidelines privately. Others make their guidelines public as part of their recruitment process (more on this later).
The Power of Social Media
By far, the hardest part of recruiting guest bloggers is the actual act of finding them. After all, that’s why you’re reading this!
However, one way to make things easier is to join various groups on social media. You can join groups that focus on the same niche(s) you write about, and this will allow you to discover the specialist writers that you need.
As an added bonus, joining such groups will help you with more traditional networking and keep you up to date on any developments in your field!
If You Build It, They Will Come
Most of our strategies for how to find a guest blogger focus on you going to where the writers are. But what if you could bring the writers directly to you?
One way to do this is to turn your website and brand into a social space ver ahora. That means adding web forums and discussion channels to your website and fostering an active community on social media.
This is a great way to generate “buzz” for your blog and help your site get discovered by more readers. And in this community you create, you will discover intelligent and passionate writers who understand your brand perfectly and will make great guest bloggers.
Get Their Names Out There
The guest bloggers who write for your site will have various motivations driving them. However, there’s one thing they all have in common: they are hoping being featured on your site will help their career in some way.
On the most basic level, one way to do that is to feature the guest blogger’s name as prominently as possible. We recommend including it in the title by adding “by author name” to the end.
Additionally, you may consider writing a short introduction for the guest blogger and/or talking them up on your social media. The goal is nice and simple: you want to get your readers excited about having this writer on your website!
Seek Specific Experience
We alluded to this earlier, but it’s important to be clear. You need to be very specific when it comes to the kinds of people you are seeking out to write on your website.
There will be no shortage of people who know a little about your area of focus. However, you don’t want those who know a little: you want to track down those who know a lot!
What you need to do is eventually narrow down your search to a “top five” list of writers that are suitable for your site. And after that, you go into hardcore research mode.
In this respect, you are like any other employer considering hiring someone for a job. You want to investigate their education, previous writing, and overall level of experience to ensure that they will bring the best possible content to your readers.
Fellow Thought Leaders
We know the deal. You’re probably just as frustrated with industry buzzwords as we are. But “thought leader” is more than just the latest bit of corporate-approved lingo.
The best thought leaders have one foot in the past and one foot in the future. That means they are intimately well-versed in what has previously happened within your industry or niche. At the same time, they have a keen understanding of how things are likely to change.
Simply put, these are the kind of people you want to be a guest blogger. As crass as it may seem, try to focus on how many readers they have, social media followers, and so on.
After all, you want them to lend you some of their charisma. So you need to make sure you hire the most charismatic candidates!
The Inbound Method
There are two essential ways of recruiting guest bloggers for your website. The first one is the “inbound method,” and the second (you guessed it) is the “outbound method.”
The inbound method is nice and simple. It means that you use your website to advertise an opportunity to “write for us.” You can then link to your guidelines and even provide a helpful form for submissions.
A primary advantage of this method is that it helps bring potential guest bloggers directly to you. And you still maintain quality control: you’re under no obligation to publish everything they send in!
If your lucky, this method will gain you a wide variety of solid guest bloggers.
The Outbound Method
We mentioned luck a minute ago, so you probably figured this out. Sometimes, the inbound method is not sufficient enough to get the right guest bloggers for your needs.
That’s when it’s time to try the outbound method. The good news? You already know how to get started!
That’s because the “outbound method” is simply a catch-all term for actively recruiting guest bloggers. From trawling social media groups and hashtags to e-mailing your favorite writers, any kind of active recruitment means you’re engaging in the outbound method.
To Pay or Not to Pay
William Shakespeare famously asked us a really big question: “to be or not to be?” We don’t have an answer to that because we’re struggling with a bigger question: to pay or not to pay?
Getting guest bloggers to write for your site is the name of the game. Some of them will do this for exposure, prestige, and networking opportunities. Others, however, may be seeking cold, hard cash.
In fact, unless your site is big and established, offering some form of payment may be your best way of securing a writer. And whatever you pay them is still far cheaper than conventional advertisements would be, meaning you come out ahead.
The Bottom Line
Now you know how to find guest bloggers and the many benefits they offer your site. But do you know how to manage a large stable of bloggers?
At Guest Post Tracker, we specialize in linking blogs and blog writers and making it easy for you to manage and track all guest posts. To see how we can help transform your site, come submit your blog today!