Aug 20 2012

Beware of Horrible Guest Bloggers

There are many great reasons to feature guest writers on your blog, such as offering your audience a new voice and alternative view on things, fostering your online networks and to simply give you time to concentrate on other parts of your business, to name but a few. The bad news is that you need to beware of horrible guest bloggers. That’s right, there are guest bloggers who will create nothing but headaches for you. Here’s how to spot and avoid horrible guest bloggers.

Generic Emails

If you receive an email from a complete stranger requesting to guest post on your site then take a closer look and consider whether the email is specific to your site or a copy/paste email with your web address inserted. Although a generic letter isn’t always an indicator of a horrible blogger it certainly isn’t an indicator of a tremendous one either. Some web masters have been known to receive generic emails with the wrong web address inserted into the letter, suffice to say those letters get trashed instantly.

On the other hand, if you receive an email that outlines some of the reasons why the guest writer thinks your specific site and audience are a good fit for their content and better still, they quote your site, then you could be on to a winner. Why not write back and offer for them to submit an article for review and go from there.

Poor Quality

It’s a good idea to set out guest blogging guidelines so anyone who approaches you about writing can be clear on what you expect. That doesn’t mean a horrible guest blogger will follow your directions of course. Indeed, horrible guest authors will offer you poor quality content, bad grammar, poor spelling and then wonder why you refuse to publish their article! Stick to your quality control policies and you’ll keep the great guest bloggers coming.

Copied Content

Perhaps you’ve received an article from a guest author that, to your delight, reads extremely well. Excellent content is great providing the content is original as opposed to simply being copied from somewhere else on the Internet. Take the time to run the article through a duplicate content checker such as www.copyscape.com to be certain you’re not dealing with a horrible guest blogger.

Irrelevant Content and Links

Guest bloggers who offer your audience information that is highly relevant to the blog topic are valuable indeed. Horrible guest bloggers on the other hand will deliver up irrelevant content and or place irrelevant links throughout the article. Remember, your reputation is on the line so ensure you carefully vet all links and edit and approve all content before it’s allowed to be published.

As tempting as it is to let a group of strangers fill your site up with content for you, don’t fall into the trap of forgetting about your audience and allowing poor quality content through. Building a network with other bloggers and guest posting on each others’ sites is a fantastic way to build your audience and your brand, just remember to avoid the horrible guest bloggers by creating guidelines and sticking to them.
Author Bio : Tauseef Hussain is a media blogger and was looking to write on Designer Furniture Units and luxurious products, but after reading this blog he couldn’t stop himself and started writing on this topic, “Beware of Horrible Guest Bloggers.” Hope you enjoyed reading it. You can follow him on twitter @usef4u

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4 Responses to “Beware of Horrible Guest Bloggers”

  1. Paul Madden says:
    August 25, 2012 at 9:30 am

    Lol irrelevant links, as this post links out to stupid commercial anchor text, was that a joke?

  2. John says:
    August 27, 2012 at 3:16 am

    I think you haven’t read the artilce Paul, its say irrelevant links in the post. The links the author have mentioned here is in the author bio section

  3. Ravi says:
    August 27, 2012 at 12:40 pm

    This is an highly informative posts and I loved the video. Duplicatecontenttool.com is the new site I came to knew in this post.

  4. Steve says:
    September 6, 2012 at 8:43 am

    It is surely the responsibility of the site owner to check that the content they are being sent is of a sufficient quality and not copied from elsewhere? The people you describe could be more accurately described as potential guest bloggers as they are not likely to actualy become a guest blogger on a decent website if their content is poor.