When I said guest posting could kill your blog, I didn’t mean the aspect of just accepting guest posts on your blog but also the part of making guest posts on other people’s blogs. As you can see, I accept guest posts on this blog but I recently considered resting that part of this blog because it has been a sad experience. I started accepting guest posts when my blog had a PR4 but I have seen it dropped to PR2 since I started accepting guest posts. I don’t have concrete evidence that guest post is responsible but I’m confident they have contributed a lot to it.
» Posting on Blogs with fewer Traffic: the essence of writing guest posts for another blog is obviously to get backlinks and get some traffic from that direction too. With this point noted, it would be absolutely foolosh of any blogger to post on any blog with fewer authority and traffic than his. You have to find a blog which has more traffic and authority to submit your posts to. That’s the only way you can help your blog otherwise, you would be killing your blog by devoting time you should spend on creating good content on your blog on other blogs that have nothing to offer you blog in return.
If you accept blog posts on your blog, be sure that guest posters are there to get backlinks from your blog, so be careful of the kind of posts to accept. Some won’t try to help your site too by providing quality content. Don’t be afraid to thrash this kind of posts and tell the author you simply can’t publish it.
» Type of articles you accept: poorly written guest posts would do nothing but kill your blog. Many guest bloggers have a way of spinning articles stolen from other websites on the internet and submitting it to your blog. You will never find out it was stolen from somewhere else but I think search engines know how to detect such. One online tool I know on the internet that can rewrite article for you so that it doesn’t look like the original one can be found at http://article-rewriter.appspot.com. I gave that so you can know I’m sure of what I’m writing about. Some just copy some contents found offline in newspapers and magazines.
» Links In Guest Posts: If you accept guest posts on your site, you have to be careful as regards the number of links guest blogger put in their posts. It’s not even just about the number of links, be wary of the link itself, try to see where the link leads to. I have seen links leading to mortgage and insurance websites in guest posts. My blog is technology-based for crying out loud! This will make you lose your readers as soon as you start referring them to sites that are useless through links in guest posts. Search engines might even punish your blog if it links to some blacklisted sites.
I will advise you to be ruthless in this respect. You can even add internal links to the article. What I mean is that you can find phrases and sentences that are keywords to some of your old posts and link to them. That’s what we call blog posts internal linking. This will reduce the chances of readers clicking the external links added by the guest author.
» Timing of Guest Posts can Kill: if you are someone that submit guest posts and they get accepted, then you are a good writer but you have to be careful. You have to create a very good article on your blog just before your guest post gets published. Many bloggers spend hours or even days to create guest posts because they want to impress that big blog and they just post crap on their own site because they have little time to focus on their own blog. This is not healthy for your blog because you are working against yourself.
When your guest post eventually gets published by that big blog, you start getting some leads from there. Yeeeeah! That’s what you want but when these people get to your site, what do they see? The crap you have been posting while you were trying to create that quality post for that giant blog. They leave your site because they think it’s crap. What have you gained now? Nothing!
Some bloggers would even reject your article no matter how good it is if they notice they would be linking to a site full of crap. They don’t want to lose their visitors too by linking them to a blog with poor content.
» Trouble from some Guest Bloggers: I’ve really had some bad experiences with this. Months after publishing some guest posts, some guest authors would make contact that they needed to change some links or add some links to their post and that gets me angry. I simply don’t oblige and do tell the really troublesome ones I could take the article down. It’s that easy. I haven’t got much to lose.
This post of course is not telling you to stop accepting guest posts or making guest posts on blogs but just advising you to do it wisely. They can be very useful on days when you can’t blog. It’s one of things you can do when you don’t know what to blog about. As a blogger accepting guest posts, remember that it’s your blog and you should set the rules. Don’t accept any posts if you think it’s going to harm your blog in any way. If they bring you down, they would leave you and find another blog to kill.
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