Keeping your blog personal and exclusive might be enough for some bloggers – but not for you.
You dream big: You’re ready to grow beyond writing blog posts to managing a multi-author blog.
By having other regular writers besides yourself on your blog, you can:
- Focus more on high-level tasks like strategy, promotion, and monetization to grow your blog.
- Revitalize your blog with fresh viewpoints.
- Benefit from the expertise of other bloggers, instead of always going it alone.
- Turn your personal blog into a business.
Running a multi-author blog isn’t for everyone. If you’re happy continuing your own personal blog, need absolute control over the content, or if your blog is focused largely around your own personal brand and style, then you probably don’t want to invite others to join you.
But if you’re just as interested in strategy, promotion, and growing a business as you are in writing the actual blog posts, then working with other authors could be a great way for you to grow your blog. Here’s how.
Preparing for the switch to a multi-author blog
Before you start inviting others to contribute to your blog, you should prepare by creating a simple document that outlines your policies. This will help to ensure your content is consistent with your blog’s style, and keep all your writers on the same page.
Your editorial guidelines can include things like:
- Acceptable topics to write about
- A description of the required writing tone and style
- Required word count
- Formatting guidelines
- Image requirements
- External and internal link policies
- Rules for author bios
- Procedures for pitching topic ideas, editing, and publishing
You can always edit the document over time as you begin to work with writers and learn what information needs to be imparted.
If you’re going to accept guest posts from non-members, it’s also a good idea to create a page on your blog that goes over your guest posting policies and requirements, and outlines how to submit posts. Here are a few good examples:
- HubSpot’s Guest Blogging Guidelines are short and to the point.
- Want to Contribute to Lifehacker? goes over all the ways you can contribute, including guest posting.
- Listverse includes not only their guidelines, but a handy submission form.
WordPress plugins for multi-author blogs
WordPress features for multi-author blogs are a bit limited out of the box, but with a few plugins you can make managing your multi-author blog a lot easier.
EditFlow
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EditFlow includes a lot of features that make it easy for teams to collaborate within WordPress.
One great feature is the new post statuses it introduces (in addition to WordPress’s default “Draft,” “Pending,” “Published,” etc.) to keep your editorial flow organized. Your writers can pitch topic ideas right in the dashboard as posts with “Pitch” status, and then you (or an editor) can change pitches to “Assigned” status after you review them. You can also define your own custom statuses to fit your workflow.
Each post also includes threaded editorial comments and metadata within the dashboard, and the plugin includes an editorial calendar that makes planning your content easy. Best of all, EditFlow is an open-source project, and the plugin is available for free download.
Author Avatars List
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Author Avatars List helps you to promote your authors by displaying them all at once as a styled list. You can display the list as a widget, or with a shortcode within a post or page.
The list can be customized to only show certain users, or exclude certain users. You can also optionally display their names and bios, or include just their pictures.
Ad Sharing
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WPMUdev’s premium Ad Sharing plugin lets you automatically share ad proceeds among the writers of a multi-author blog based on the number of impressions their posts get. It keeps track of everything for you and automatically calculates how to split the revenue. Just insert the code for Adsense or any other third-party ad network, and Ad Sharing will take care of the rest.
Fancier Author Box
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Of course, one of the draws of guest posting is that shiny author bio at the bottom. But with many themes, the author bio can be quite plain and uninteresting. With Fancier Author Box, you can dress it up a bit, and add many more social networks to encourage your readers to follow and engage with your authors.
User Role Editor
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With User Role Editor, you can customize each user role’s permissions. For example, if you want authors to be able to submit posts but not publish them, you can change that. Or if you want your editor to be able to edit posts and publish them, but not create new posts, you can set that up, too. The plugin is very easy to use: every user role is listed on one page, and you just check off which permissions you want them to have and hit “Save.”
How to find other bloggers
Finding bloggers to contribute to your blog is probably the most challenging part of starting a multi-author blog.
If your blog is well known and established in your niche and gets a decent amount of traffic, some bloggers may be willing to periodically write unpaid guest posts. In return, they’ll be able to reach new readers and get valuable exposure.
However, if you’re looking for contributors to commit to blogging for you on a regular basis, or if your blog isn’t very well-known or doesn’t get much traffic, you’ll have a hard time getting anyone to donate their time to you. Instead, you should consider paying your contributing writers on a per-post basis.
How much should you pay your writers? There isn’t really a standard “going rate” for blogging: you’ll find writers offering posts for anywhere from $5 to $500 or more. It’s best to set your budget first, and then try to find the most qualified writers whose rates are a good fit for your budget. (Just don’t expect skilled and experienced writers to work for cheap – you often get what you pay for.)
To find bloggers to join your blog, you can:
- Search for blogs in or related to your niche, and contact the blogger
- Search for freelance bloggers using Google, or social media networks like Twitter or LinkedIn
- Post a job ad on a site like ProBloggers
- Post a call for applicants on your own blog, and promote the post via social media
Over to you
Do you have other methods for finding bloggers to contribute to your blog?
What other challenges have you faced in transitioning to a multi-author blog?
Share your tips in the comments!
The post How To Turn Your Blog Into A Multi-Author Blog appeared first on WP Superstars.