Blogging has become a marketing staple to some businesses. It allows them to show their expertise, drive traffic to their site and provide their audience with useful information. Some companies churn out all the blog content on their own while others also allow guest blog posts.
Using guest bloggers is a great way to add new content and new insight onto your blog, and it’s also a great way to generate traffic from a new audience (as long as the guest blogger also shares the link to their following).
But while guest blogging does have its perks, working with guest bloggers can oftentimes be a nightmare. If your company is toying with the idea of using guest bloggers, make sure you understand the following disadvantages that are associated with it.
But before we go any further, a video from Matt Cutts.
You’ll get little response
Your blog is representing your brand, so you carefully choose whom you want to use as a guest blogger. If you want to go the guest blogging route, it’s a good idea not to schedule what day you want the post to launch until you receive the actual finalized draft.
You will find that you will reach out to many prospective guest bloggers and only hear back from a handful. Then you will find that out of the handful that agreed to be a guest blogger, only one or two of them will actually follow through.
Chances are that you chose your guest blogger because they’re influential in your industry, so they too have a career and life that they need to tend to. They may have had every intention of helping you out, but their own business got in the way. If this happens to you, it’s best to just move on.
You’ll use up a lot of time
Utilizing guest bloggers takes up a great deal of time. Not only do you have to first locate whom you want to use, but you’ll also have to reach out to them, wait for a response, email back and forth a few times about the focus of the post, read and edit the post, continue editing the post, launch the post, and finally promote the post. This is all very time consuming, so if you’re on a time crunch, guest blogging is not the smartest move for your business.
It involves unappreciated constructive criticism
You have a certain idea of the focus of the blog post you want your guest blogger to write. They also have theirs, and most likely, you’re not going to be 100% satisfied with their post on your first read. If you send their blog back asking them to change a large amount of content, they’ll be frustrated and may not take the time to make your suggested edits. Even asking for the slightest change can cause drama for some people.
You need to be careful when it comes to this point in the process. Some guest bloggers will be insulted if you ask them to make changes, so make sure that you are polite and try and explain why you’re making your edits so that they don’t feel attacked.
It never stays on track
As previously mentioned, make sure that you don’t have the post scheduled until you have the final draft in your hand. Even if you reach out to the guest blogger months before you planned on launching their blog, you’ll still end up receiving it late.
Guest bloggers very rarely stay on your schedule because they’re putting their own needs and essentials in front of your post. You can send as many reminders as you want, but it will not incline them to move any faster to get you your final draft.
Once finalized, they become stalkers
Getting them to write and submit the final draft of their blog was harder than pulling teeth. You wasted a great deal of time sending repeated emails with edits and reminders about due dates, and they didn’t seem to care. But once that final draft is in your hands, they will stop at no means to hound you until you put that post live on your site. They will call and email you asking when the post will be up and if you can alert them when it’s live. It’s frustrating, but it’s commonplace.
When it runs smoothly, guest blogging is a great asset for your blog, but when it doesn’t run smoothly (which happens more often than not), guest blogging is a real nightmare. Knowing about these issues ahead of time can help prepare you for your next guest blogging endeavor.
This valuable online marketing article was prepared by Jessica Brown in tandem with SEOMap – a group specializing in SEO keyword research.
