In my post, Leveraging Your Business Partners for a Better Blog, I explained some of the benefits of making your blog a venue for business partners. If your business model relies on partnering with other businesses, and those businesses don’t have blogs of their own, you have an excellent opportunity to expand your online presence and lower the cost of producing content, while also deepening relationships with your partners.
You’ll need to plan ahead in order to effectively implement this strategy though. Here are some suggestions:
Lower the bar
Plan how you’ll take posts from your partners and how often you will ask for posts. Try to keep the bar low. For example, you might let people send you Word files with your posts or just type them in email. You handle putting the content into your blog and formatting the content. Also, try not to make posting a burden for partners. Ideally, they shouldn’t need to write more than once every month or two.
Prepare a solicitation package
Take the time to create an email that invites your business partners to participate and explain some of the benefits of posting on your blog. Cover how often you will be asking for posts, how they will get the posts to you, and the kind of articles you’d want. Be sure to summarize the kind of value it can provide to their business.
Develop some simple guidelines for types partner posts
Keep in mind both your and your partner’s business goals—but especially what will interest your readers. Then suggest the kinds of posts partners should provide. Tell your business partners that the material can’t be too self-promotional, as that risks alienating readers. Suggest people include pictures, where possible, as it livens up the page. You might want to make specific suggestions each month to your partners, or take the time to brainstorm with them each month.
Create a consistent format for the partner bio’s and links
Decide whether the partner bio will go at the top or bottom of posts. Pick a formatting technique for the bio, such as italics or a different color of text, to help it stand out from the article. Make sure the bios are brief, but include the author’s name, a description of the partner business, and links to any social sites for the business and, of course, to their website. Collect all the bios via your solicitation package, so you can use them for every post from the partner.
Provide specific editorial guidelines
Provide suggestions for post length and style (first person, informal versus formal, and so on). Tell people that you will edit their posts. But always have the writer approve your changes. They own the post and you need to make sure they are comfortabl with the final copy.
Get commitments and create a calendar
Ask for commitments for posts and ensure they are delivered a week in advance of their scheduled post date. Create an editorial calendar, a month out, of upcoming posts. You may even want to distribute it in email both to keep people apprised of their dates, and to let partners see that other businesses are taking this opportunity.
Help partners benefit from the post
Notify people when their articles have been posted. You want these businesses to promote the blog post, too. So, supply them with suggested text and a link to the post that they can include on their website, in their newsletter, or on their social sites. Obviously, you should be promoting each article, too. Track both the number of page views of each partner post and the click-throughs on links in the bios. Then report that information to the business partner, so they can see the benefits they’re reaping by posting on your blog.
For good measure, send a monthly update to all of your business partners summarizing the partner posts on your blog and the total click-throughs and page views for each business partner. That way, the ones who aren’t taking advantage of your blog will start to think twice, and begin calling you about writing for your blog.
Once you put the processes in place, your weekly effort should be low–far less than producing your own original content. Moreover, you’ll get a wide variety of interesting articles and build a lot of goodwill in the process.
Incorporating those who you currently work with or would like to one day workwith on your blog is a great way to engage and network. When I solicit guest blogs, I like to make it as easy on them as possible. I lay out exactly what I need from them and when and don’t ask them to do anything that I could do instead, such as the physical posting of the blog. I’m happy you mention that it’s important to alert guest bloggers when posts go live. This seems obvious, but its amazing how often people will neglect to follow up and in doing so loose valuable cross-promotions.
Thanks, Michelle. Good point about doing as much of the work yourself as you can. I agree that the lower you make the bar (effort-wise, not quality-wise), the more participation you’ll get. Sounds like you’ve got it down.
This is a great post Neicole with some easy to implement pointers on starting off right with guest posters. It’s timely too as I’m beginning to get offers (and requests) for guest posts. Thanks so much for providing a quick check list to make it easier for all.
Glad it was helpful, Nanette! Nice that you’re getting offers and requests! Good sign.