In this post, I mostly talk to myself, and to readers who appreciate good ideas (not really to guest bloggers). You see, I run a successful blog which I am taking seriously, most of its content provided by guest bloggers. I must say managing a multi-authors blog is not an easy task because there is a lot of communications and editorial work to be done before getting posts published on the host blog. So if you are planning to accept guest posts on your blog, prepare yourself for some serious work.
Managing Guest Bloggers Is Not Easy!
Things have changed, and guest blogging became more popular. So, in my opinion it's no longer about how to attract guest bloggers to write for your bog. It's more about how to actually make them write and submit quality contents for the blog. I say here “Make Them” because it's totally in your hands, if you accept low quality content, you are simply attracting more low quality content writers.
For a long time now I have been thinking of a way to reduce the workload, perhaps transforming FamousBloggers.net to a “do it yourself” blog, and try to automate a large part of the acceptance and publishing process. This would give guest bloggers the power to hit the publish button and get their posts published by themselves. That's what I want to discuss with you today, hopefully I can get some more inspiration. So, let me tell you first about my first steps toward this idea.
I planned the new Community News section to achieve two blogging goals!
The first goal is to get more easy fresh content to the blog, and the second goal is to help trusted bloggers to get a quality backlinks with their choice of keyword to their own posts. This will help ranking their posts higher in search engines. I decided to allow only trusted contributors who actually have accounts on FamousBloggers.net and have published at least one guest post on the blog. I didn't want this section to be open to the public, at least not yet!
You see, I have an issue with trust that I will talk about later on in this post, and that's the main reason I keep most of my ideas private and accessible only to people who I actually know and have had a little chat with before.
I call it the Guest Blogging Automation Project
So, just to let you know, this is not an imaginary project, this is something I would love to see for real one day. However, the only part that is missing in the project is trust!
Yes.. I sadly don't have enough trust in bloggers!
Please, don't get me wrong, and read on…
Like anything else in this world, the guest blogging automation project has its own advantages and disadvantages, or to be more accurate, I probably should say it has dangers and high risks!
Advantages of Guest Blogging Automation
Let's talk first about the advantages… Why I believe this project is worth it:
1- More power for bloggers
Just imagine that you can publish your posts yourself – you write the content you like (as long as it fits into the host blog categories), you publish it at the time you prefer, you have as many links as you would like to (if it's all relevant), in short you have the power to hit the publish button! Sounds good eh?
2- More content for the host blog
So true! This is one of the best advantages for the blog that accepts guest posts. In my case I try to avoid publishing more than three posts daily on the blog. This gives the chance for those posts to appear on the front page, which means more reads, and possibly comments and engagement. Also I try to save content for the coming days.
3- Increase publishing average
The blog could jump from 1-3 posts per day to 5-10 posts per day, you never know! It could even be much more than that. Do you know what that means?
It means search engines will visit the blog more often, which leads to a faster indexing. Search engines will simply fall in love with the blog, and probably will rank it higher. This will allow any post to compete with monster blogs.
4- Getting more traffic
From the points 2 and 3 above, when a blog gets more updates, and increases its content, it makes a lot of sense that organic traffic (Visitors referred by an unpaid search engine listing, e.g. a Google.com search) will increase as more posts are indexed in search engines. Also there is a big chance that direct traffic will increase (Visitors who visited the site by typing the URL directly into their browser), this is because of blog visitors who will notice the quick updates, thus they know that your blog is truly active, they will memories, bookmark, and visit it more often as they get fresh content each time they visit.
Disadvantages of Guest Blogging Automation
This is the part I hate most but let's talk about the disadvantages for the project as I see it.
1- Nobody read!
To me, this is a really important point. Let's say you have written the most clear guest blogging guidelines in the whole world, you will sometimes face the fact that people don't read them. Even if they do read them, some of them will try to game you by ignoring those guidelines, and even worse than that, some people will try to abuse your blog.
A human factor has to interact and deal with those who ignore your guidelines to put them on the right direction, or simply to reject their accounts.
2- Getting a lot of crappy content
Here I can explain why I said I don't have enough trust in bloggers. Of course not all bloggers are the same, there are many bloggers out there who have a message, and actually knows what they are doing. But there are a bunch of jerks in every niche that you really want to avoid at any cost. Again, the human eye is necessary!
Plus, some bloggers just don't know when to start guest posting for other blogs, once they launched a brand new blog that has no value for the reader yet, they starve to see their posts published on popular blogs. I am afraid mostly of those who call themselves bloggers just because they own whatever blog!
3- A chance for duplicate topics
If you are getting a lot of content, chances that two bloggers will write about the same topic is high. Especially if it's about a hot or trending topic, so you won't be able to control it, your blog will certainly have duplicate topics or even worse, you could have duplicate content in some cases.
4- Bad links, or another link farm!
I can easily say that most of the bloggers, SEOs, and links builders will do their best to abuse the blog, and take advantage of being powered members to get more links to their client's sites. So, the blog could turn into another link farm!
Full Guest Posting Automation, could it work?
I keep wondering if my idea could ever find the light, or if it's just nonsense and I have to forget about it. I know this project requires a lot of trust, and it shouldn't be open for everyone!
Can I trust you?!
I keep wondering, why so called guest bloggers keep trying to prove I am wrong!