Day 12 – Start a Guest Blogger Program Today!
What can I say…. Day 12 is here on the new WordPress Website and I want to bring in more Authors immediately! Today, along with writing a new content “Page”, I am opening the door to bring in a group of people, who are interested in providing content to the site visitors. Not only are they being invited to be a Guest Blogger, I have installed a plugin that allows them to share the revenue generated from the entire teams content!
Many of you may recall that on Day 5, I wrote a single paragraph inviting anyone with content of their own, to submit it for posting on the DIY Reviews website. I did receive one post from David, in reference to using a French Pot Press Coffee Pot to brew your own Gourmet Coffee. As you can see, his post was well written and helps the site visitors find information on topic! In addition, he linked to his own site in the post, which will provide long term credit for his expertise and contribution.
Invite Guest Blogger to your Site
Allowing Guest Bloggers on your site has many benefits to both parties! most importantly, it invites those who may have more knowledge in your niche, to provide relevant content for your visitors and continually feed the search engines that great content they starve for! in addition to the obvious benefit of constantly updated content, it reduces the load on you as an individual, to provide 100% of the content on your own and opens the breadth of topics for more visitors!
Building a Team of Contributors by Offering Equal Incentive!
If you visit the Guest Blogger Program page on the DIY Website, you will immediately notice I have put together way of rewarding contributors who contribute equally to the overall efforts of the site! The simple adsense plugin works in a very basic way and once Authors have contributed the required amount of content, they receive 100% equal share of all AdSense revenues generated on the site!
Why it benefits the Site Owner
- Constant flow of fresh content!
- Reduced load on posting duties!
- Expands topics that are beyond your knowledge!
- Â Free up your time to Promote site in other ways!
Why it benefits the Authors
- Exposure to a NEW Audience!
- Dedicated Author page!
- Inbound links to relevant content!
- Revenue Sharing… another way to Monetize your Skills!
- Develop better writing skills through each review!
- Promote local business Websites!
Set and Follow some Basic Rules
When you decide to allow others to post to your site, never forget it is still yours! You have invested the time to build it, the money to host and promote it etc. You have to retain all editorial rights over the content they provide, in order to make sure it meets the needs of your visitors! Create a clear set of guidelines to avoid spammers from filling your inbox with junk and duplicated content, and make sure you review every post, every time!
Even though I decided to use an revenue sharing incentive with my authors, it is not required. Many would be happy to provide their unique articles only for the link value it will receive as the site grows. By requiring guest bloggers to contribute 10 posts before they can be a part of the revenue share, it assures me they will take this very seriously and not submit spam to the site.
What Will I Do Today?
- Publish the Guest Bloggers Wanted Page
- Visit Other Guest Blogger pages and submit the site for their readers.
- Bookmark the page in my Soc Bookmarks
To learn more about the Benefits of Guest Bloggers, Visit:
- Why Guest Bloggers make Sense
- Five Guidelines to Guest Blogging
- Benefits of Guest Blogging
- Why you Should Have Guest Bloggers
Do you allow Guest Bloggers on any of your sites?
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Google & Amazon Partner Up On the Blogger Platform!
- eBay Affiliate Program Doesn’t want your Lame Traffic!
- eBay Takes Affiliate Program Inhouse – Good or Bad for Build a Niche Store?
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
Ah, like content pages like the one I posted here. Too bad he had to use the “Content Link” page from his CJ account. Do you really think it was original? Does it matter?
Guest writers or posters, whatever you want to call it, is a good idea, but how do you keep the momentum up? How do you keep writers coming back? About.com was built on the premise of revenue sharing and shared content. You could “apply” to become one of their contributors and have your own niche type of page, one that you were an expert on. The idea took off and look at the site today.
I don’t mind content builders and people who contribute to my site, but duplication and site ranking drops are also a real problem. Maybe we should focus a little more on deep linking, seo and a little good old fashioned marketing.
What a great idea!! I’ll definitely have to try this on some of my sites that I don’t know a lot about the subject matter.
Does the widget manage everything for you, like the weighting of the authors, or is that a separate thing?
@ Jim –
It looks like the site owner did you wrong for sure, by adding his/her own link to your post. My intent is to develop a group of people who realize the benefit of writing unique content.
In regard to duplicate content, it literally takes less than 5 minutes to check a page for duplicates. Once it is up on your own site… you have the authority on that content… it can be listed at 5000 other places and hypothetically, it wont matter as long as it was published and indexed on your site first. (According to Google)
People post to ezines every day… possibly 100′s of articles every year and they truthfully get little to no value from those articles. Their Author Bios are no followed or do not even allow homepage links… and the only true benefit to an article directory is n the hopes that someone else picks up your content and posts it on individual sites.
Keeping everyone engaged may be a challenge, but with high traffic and coaching it should be incentive to continue to write. Keep in mind that the site has something for literally everyone to provide content on. Whether it be for your own niche blogs, or even local businesses looking to write a helpful post on anything DIY.
I handle sites for several local companies here in Charlotte and they are already on board to write posts of their own.
@ Alice –
There is really no weighting to it. The plugin manages names, ID’s and the number of times the ads have been displayed. As a new name is added, you either match the starting number to that of the others, or reset the others to zero.
Name : Ad code : Display Number (Grows with each ad display)
Each time an ad is called, the plugin retrieves the username and ad code of the lowest display number, increments the value by 1 point, and displays the ad.
For example – I just installed this plugin this morning. Next to my name (I am the only person in there right now) I have 492 impressions. (display number) If I entered a second author right now, I would either start them with 491, or reset my own to zero.
Mark
Mark,
I want to take this process 2 and a 1/2 steps further. Of course while keeping the editorial rights with me for the best quality and only the original content to be let in, I want to be much more liberal as far as the guest bloggers’ earning opportunities are concerned by letting them treat the posting area as their own virtual property which they are free to monetize the way they want along with google adsense income.
The only challenge is to keep the quality up to the mark!
Mark, you’re saying that submitting articles to ezinearticles and other article sites is mostly a waste of time? There isn’t much link value from the article site itself? I thought that was a good way to get backlinks.
Mark,
Do you know how myblolog.com can help in promoting the wp-blog site?
Sorry,
It’s mybloglog.com
I recently started accepting guests and just received my 2nd article…I’ll have to look at that plugin!
@ GB -
I am not sure if there is a plugin that allows full control over each post like that, but if you formed around only 1-2 different affiliate programs, you could create a set of include files, named after the author, and have them called in the custom fields sections of the posts.
Ex: john_top.php – could be a small file with adsense code. It could be called on TOP of every one of Johns posts.
john_bot – could be a different affiliate code that displays at the end of every post by John.
This would still leave you the editorial control over the display and affiliate offers on the site, as you would have to do the ads yourself.
@ Mark G – NO… Articles are still a good way to get your link out there, but all in all, its a 50/50 situation.
You invest either time or money to produce the article and submit to article directories, hoping it will get picked up and displayed on different sites.
If its picked up by 10-20 people in 6 months… great, you get 10-20 inbound links to your site. If its nto picked up… it was a waste of time. If it is displayed by hundreds… only the first batch end up in organic results anyhow, the rest go into the supplemental index for being dup content.
I am truly torn on article submission.
@ GB – Love MyBlogLog…. been there – done that – many times!
Mark
Mark,
Why do I need a plugin in order to allow my guest bloggers inserting their affiliate links that they want to add to their postings?
Why don’t I let them do it themselves sparing me time to check the quality and originality only before I pass them on for getting published?
Mark,
It all makes sense now!!! I was a little concerned when you selected such a broad niche for your site, but now that I see the direction you are going with it, it makes perfect sense. This is a great idea! I have always wanted to find a way to somehow harness the power of content producers, but had absolutely no idea where to start. Although now I am starting to wonder what other tricks you have up your sleeves…
Mark,
I’m waiting for your answer to my question above.
@ GB –
I had replied to your email direct, versus on the comments here.
I wouldn’t say you MUST have a plugin to handle the sharing of revenue and could just let writers use their own links in posts. You may however want to setup something phpads that would make the authors add the url’s to your system instead of their own, just to make sure you can have some control over the landing pages. i would hate to have a post about coffee pots, leading to a coffee program today, then the writer uses a self hosted redirect 2 months from now to change it to a credit card offer or something unrelated.
In my case, I want to control the overall look and content delivered on the site, so the authors can just write. In addition, I don’t want it to turn into a free-for-all type site, where every post is an affiliate linked post.
Purely your own decision on this and if you wanted to allow writers to use affiliate links, I imagine its fine.
Hmmmm….. Mark,
Self hosted redirect
You used these words…
Could you elaborate please!
Mark,
I don’t think a contributor in wordpress can change her/his postings whenever s/he feel like doing!
@ GB –
By self hosted, I mean… only allow the affiliate links to be created in something you maintain and control. Kinda like tinurl, or even my own that I use.
In my case – I have a php file that I add the links to, then all my post links lead to my file, based on a title.
My link: thenichestorebuilder .com/toolkit/goto.php?title=this
Inside the goto.php file, I have a list of “titles” defined with my outbound links and when the hit comes to the file, I extract the “title” variable from the link and redirect it accordingly.
I have also blocked the /toolkit/ and goto.php file from being indexed in search.
In regard to a contributor being able to change the link… you are right, the post would go right back to pending approval status. BUT… if I was an author on the site, I would not lead my aff links directly to the affiliate offer, I would lead it to my own tracking system to measure the effects of the authoring program.
You can easily see that if I linked to my own /toolkit/goto.php file for the links, I could change it without your knowledge, at any time, making no changes to the post itself.
Mark
Yes,
You are RIGHT, Mark!
So, I will have to think of something smarter to tackle with this problem…
OK, I go to my creative channel again… LOL!
Speaking of content, read this. ~
It was really funny that we were talking about content the other day. No sooner than I wrote my last post and I got an interesting email from the fine folks at Google. Read on:
********************
Hello,
While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as discountgolfonline.com.
Publishers may not place Google ads on pages that violate Google’s webmaster quality guidelines (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769#quality). While we’ve included the following excerpts from these guidelines, we recommend that you take the time to review them in their entirety.
* Make pages for users, not for search engines.
* Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
* Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.
* Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
* Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank.
* Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
* Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
* If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
As a result, we have disabled ad serving to the site.
Your AdSense account remains active. However, we strongly suggest that you take the time to review our program policies (https://www.google.com/adsense/policies ) to ensure that all of your remaining pages are in compliance.
Please note that we may disable your account if further violations are found in the future.
Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team
********************
When did the internet gods crown Google the “King of the Internet Universe”? Just wondering!
Jim
What Contact Page plugin do you use to be able to create a drop-down list of subjects? Very cool!
@ Alice -
Its called the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form.
M
@ James -
That is actually the identical email I got in May, when a group of 6-7 sites in one webmaster tools account, were all axed from the g index.
It looks like the site mentioned is using a redirect… which G doesn’t like.
Google has definitely got full control of 72% of the web…. almost too much control!!
M
Yes, I did redirect the domain shortly after I got the letter. I was a little upset that Google would send an email like that. I think I only had one AdSense ad on the site.
This domain has been in the Sandbox for about three years now. I am just getting a little tired of the game. The domain gets great traffic from MSN and Yahoo, so I am using the redirect to capitalize on that traffic.
I hear ya man… been there myself!!
I am actually starting to use a different search engine for my own searching… http://www.searchme.com – its quite an intuitive interface!!
It just in the second beta – but I expect it will have an impact when it goes mainstream.
I HATE dictators… and G fits the profile!
Mark
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