Letting other people provide content for your blog is a double-edged sword – you might end up losing more than you are winning. On the one hand, you are giving them more exposure, and they are thankful for that (and you feel like a decent human being for helping out a fellow blogger in need). In return, they are providing content you can post so you can spend more time working on your projects without keeping your readers waiting. You are also showing different perspectives and introducing some more variety to your blog. However, this can easily backfire if you don’t have good quality control. Since I’ve seen many bad guest posts in my day, as well as people asking me to post their copied content, I have decided to write this article in order to tell you about the benefits of guest posting on your blog and how not to let bad content ruin it.
Quality control
I’ve already mentioned the part about quality control. I am going to talk about it again in an attempt to emphasize it even more. Believe it or not, not all bloggers are good. I know it’s a difficult concept to grasp, especially when you’re used to writing everything yourself, double-checking it, proofreading it, and doing everything you can in order to make sure that what you are producing is quality content. Not all bloggers are like that. Some want the coverage without even thinking about what a bad post might do to your reader’s base. Some even copy/paste things from the Internet and pass the work as their own (with a level of impertinence it’s almost hard to believe exists). Even if they mean well, some bloggers are just not good. There are even those who don’t have a good command of the English language but still want you to post their content.
For those reasons alone, you should carefully check every post. Look for grammatical and spelling errors, phrasing, and overall writing style. If you like how an article or a post sounds, and it’s not filled with mistakes, you can then post it because, odds are, your readers will like it, as well. Of course, sometimes there are minor errors the writer might have missed when proofreading (when you read your work, you know what you meant to say and are sometimes blind to your mistakes), so if it’s not something huge, you can correct them and post it.
Also, it’s a good idea to check the content with CopyScape in order to make sure that it’s not copied.
Benefits
You’ve done all of the above, and now you’re ready to introduce your readers to this new writer. Updating your blog regularly with guest posts will give you more time to work on your posts without thinking about the fact that you haven’t published anything in four days. This way, you will be able to tackle many more interesting, complicated subjects without leaving your readers wanting. An important thing to take into account is the fact that you shouldn’t post guest posts more than your content (unless, you know, that’s what you want to do). After all, this is your blog, and people are reading because of you. You can upload a guest post here and there, but you shouldn’t forget working on your own. You don’t want your readers to think you don’t care about your blog anymore and that you’re using other people’s work because you’re lazy. If you’ve done everything correctly, you can start collecting the benefits right away – giving and probably receiving more coverage, improving the quality of your content, and reducing stress. It’s pretty neat if you manage to pull it off.
