SBB Small Spark Contest 2010: Maximize Your Time

Maximize Your Time with Guest Bloggers

When you operate a blog, with or without the online business to go with it, it takes up a lot of your time. Readers want fresh content on a regular basis. Sometimes it is hard to keep up with their voracious appetite unless you have help.

Blogging Help

Seek out writers for your blog. Think of it as another writing project. If you are familiar with ghostwriting services, you can hire writers to write posts for you that you can then publish yourself. With this type of help, you are asking a writer or writing service, to provide you with content for your website or blog. The credit goes to you for the work.

Finding a guest blogger is different from outsourcing blog content. With guest bloggers, they are getting a chance to write for your blog but with the posts being credited to them. You’ve got a few options about how you approach a guest blogging situation.

1. You can look for an ongoing contributor who blogs on a regular basis for your blog. Some contributors will blog for free as long as you’re giving them credit and helping them with their own blog or website promotions.
2. You can hire a writer to write for your blog (this will require payment, especially if you’re looking to claim the content as your own). For a certain fee, you can assign them topics and ask that they write one or two blog posts per week. Usually one is enough unless you are truly busy and need more to fill the space.
3. You can ask other experts in your field to post occasionally to help relieve some stress from having to post yourself all the time. Most of these guest bloggers will oblige and do not require any more than a link or two to their site or products in their posts.

Benefits of Guest Bloggers

Now, you can breathe a little easier. You want to keep your blog fresh and new but there don’t seem to be enough hours in the day at times. A guest blogger can take that pressure off of you so that you can devote your time to other needs:

• Marketing
• Networking
• Administrative Duties

As long as your readers stay happy, you can rotate a guest writer in and out to provide them with interesting content. Guests can also respond to reader comments and build a relationship of trust with your audience. If they have their own traffic from their sites, you have a chance to impress their readership when they come to read the posts. They can also browse your work and take an interest.

At the beginning, you may have to review posts and schedule their publication just until you feel comfortable with the writers and their styles. Once you see they do a good job, let them publish their posts immediately or schedule them without your help. This will go a long way in saving you time.

The first time that you don’t have to write several blog posts over the weekend or in your wee spare time, you won’t want to go back. How long a writer will blog for you depends on your needs, but the extra time may lead you to make it an ongoing thing.

Besides the fact that you are benefiting, so is the guest writer. They gain a reputable forum for their work, possible networking opportunities and greater visibility.