Have you considered hosting guest bloggers on your blog? Maybe you’re thinking about having a guest blogging contest but you don’t know a thing about inviting guest authors to your blog. It’s easier than you think so don’t be afraid to get started with allowing others a chance to share their content on your blog.
How to be A Good Blog Host
There are a few things you need to take care of first and here’s an important one that many of you might be overlooking. After all, you want your guest bloggers to put their best foot forward and offer you high quality articles, then in return you should do your best to be a good blog host. You should install a plugin to properly display the guest authors bio!
Here at Blog Engage, Brian recently talked about how to Set Up Your Bio When Guest Blogging and you should have a similar bio box for guest posters on your blog. On my blog, Basic Blog Tips, I use the plugin called Better Author Bio.
This plugin provides each guest with the following:
- Link to all of their posts on my blog
- Link to the guest’s blog or website
- Link to their Twitter profile
- Link to their Facebook Page or Profile
Did you notice all those links? 
There are many plugins available for creating an author bio box, so be a good to your guest bloggers and in turn, they’ll be good to you!
BONUS TIP: When you want to find all of the posts by a given author on your WordPress blog, take the url of your blog and add /author/username to the end. For example, in order to find all of my posts here on Blog Engage, this is the url:
http://www.blogengage.com/blogger/author/ileane/
Therefore, if you are a guest blogger here on Blog Engage, simply replace my user name with your own, and now you have a listing of all your guest posts here on the site!
What are some of the ways you use to treat your guest bloggers good?
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Twitter: ivinviljoen
Awesome! thanks Ileane. I needed this, now I can feed my Engagement posts into my blog.
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Twitter: Ileane
Ivin, you can also set up Twitter feed or feed them to Facebook with RSS Graffiti. I plan to do both later today. Thanks for your comment.
Ileane recently posted..$150 dollar for a post? Brand new contest!
Twitter: bbrian017
I’ve been pushing guest blogging on Blog Engage now for about two years. I’ve noticed the best way to get people involved is to simply ask them. Having plugins like comment luv, top commenter and about the author box only helps motivate blogger to guest blog for you. these are some of the things I have done in the past and it seems to be working fine.
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Twitter: CoachNotesBlog
Ileane is definetly Queen of Guest Posting, at least from the standpoint of knowing how to treat her guest bloggers.
I plan to immediate recommend this plugin to a few bloggers I know who have guest posters but do a crappy job of displaying their info (and a few who do a decent job but could do better).
Thanks Ileane for a heads-up!
Vernessa Taylor | CoachNotesBlog recently posted..Is Blogging Making You Sick? Doctor, Doctor!
Twitter: Ileane
Vernessa, I like that crown you gave me! I promise to wear it proudly.
As you know I have two different styles of author bio boxes, one of them is built into the Thesis Awesome blogskin that Hesham designed and the other is the WordPress plugin. I couldn’t make up my mind which one I liked better so I decided to keep both. When David did a guest post on my blog about where to put the author bio box, the commenters appear to be split. Some said on top, the others said on the bottom. Ironically no one seemed to notice that on Basic Blog Tips, it appears in both places. I’m going out on a limb and say that nobody else is doing that for their guest bloggers because they don’t want to give away so many links. But of course, that’s absolute non-sense when you’re talking about a blog with CommentLuv anyway.
Thank you Vernessa!
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Twitter: CoachNotesBlog
I didn’t realize you were using a plugin until this article. I thought both boxes were handled by your theme. Neat idea to use both to give that extra care to your guest posters.
Which reminds me, I oughta write something for you soon!
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Thanks for the info. I am using WordPress and am not sure if I can use this plug-in without requiring the guest authors to have a log in? I want to encourage guest blogging for my site but I don’t know how to NOT get my name to show up for each post. Any suggestions?