If done correctly, guest blogging can seriously help your website progress and attract new and greater audiences to it in the long term. I say ‘done correctly’ because for one of my websites, I had many emails after the Google Penguin update to remove the links the guest bloggers made to their own websites as it was, at the time, giving them bad SEO (interesting, right)?

Regardless of this, guest blogging is still done in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions and is a crucial part to blogging as well as making ‘blogging buddies’ (which we all need). For this reason, here are a few ways you can attract guest bloggers to blog on your website.

#1 Advertise Guest Blogging

If potential guest bloggers entering onto your website do not know that you even accept guest blogging as a thing, then you should not be surprised when no-one comes knocking on your email inbox to offer their services as a guest blogger.

Advertising the fact you let others write on your site can be done at key locations on your website including:

• Navigation menu – create a dedicated ‘Write for us’ page to go into the details of guest blogging on your site, preferably with a form for the guest blogging to fill in and contact you by.
• In the author bio – everyone loves reading a little about the person who wrote the article they just read. By adding ‘You can write for ____ by clicking here’, you can make clear you accept guest blogging in your author bio too.
• Sidebar widget – If you find that your sidebar does not include many elements to it, you could always think about adding a widget to explain that you are open to guest bloggers and people to write for you on your website.

#2 Set Out Guest Blogging Guidelines

The main problem with guest blogging is that it is a compromise. As the owner of the website, you want to have unique and high quality content. However, for the guest blogger, they want to get their name out there more and also gain at least one dofollow link back to their own website to improve their website’s SEO. With this in mind, I generally stick to the following guidelines:

1. One link can be added to the article at the end of it in the author bio section.
2. The article has to be at least 500 words long (but this will depend on the type of content that is already on your website).
3. The article is linked to a category on the website.
4. The article has one image (preferably unique) – if not, the source of the image should be added.
5. The article should not contain any typos or misspellings.

With this, I know that every time I get an application from a guest blogger, it should satisfy the guidelines I put on the ‘Write for us’ page – if it doesn’t I would normally email the guest blogger telling him why I won’t be using his article.