My name is Britt Reints, and I’m a professional guest blogger. Seriously. There’s a line on my resume that says “guest blogger”. That’s how I ended up posting here, as a matter of fact.

If you have a solid content marketing plan, you probably have a blog. And hopefully, you understand the value of using guest bloggers to help you build a wide range of quality web content on your site. (If you don’t, go read about inviting guest bloggers and help keep people like me employed.)

Guest bloggers may be writing for free in order to get links to their own content, or you may be looking to hire a writer to help you keep your web content fresh. Whichever route you go, you’re putting someone else in charge of creating content for you, and that can be tricky.

As a professional freelancer, guest blogger, writer person extraordinaire, I’ve learned a few things about how to make life easier for guest bloggers. If you’re considering hiring a writer or inviting guest bloggers to write for you, here are a few tips that will help you get quality web content from your new contributors.

3 Tips To Get Quality Web Content When You Hire A Writer

1. Give guest bloggers a list of keywords. Hopefully, you’re hiring (or inviting) a writer who is familiar with SEO writing and understands how to properly disperse keywords into an interesting article. Giving guest bloggers a list of keywords will help them know what to focus on and which exact phrases they should make a point of using.

2. Offer sample headlines. Working off a list of keywords is hard. But pairing a keyword list with headline ideas makes the guest bloggers job much easier and ensures that the content they produce is more likely to be in line with what you’re envisioning for the project. You don’t have to do all the work, but brainstorming a few ideas they can run with will benefit you both in the long run.

3. Suggest a list of resources. In a perfect world, all of your guest bloggers are experts in their field and have extensive knowledge of your industry. After all, that’s why you’re letting them guest post for you, right? Sometimes. If you’re looking to hire a writer rather than recruit guest bloggers who work for free, you mind end up with a great writer who knows a little bit about what you do. Providing them with a list of resources for research will save you time on training and fact checking.

Of course, all of these things are merely suggestions.  The more you can give a guest blogger or writer to start with, the faster they’ll be able to produce quality web content for you.  But in the end, you are paying for content (either with a link or cash), so don’t feel like you have to flesh out the entire idea on your own.

Britt Reints is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments. WriterAccess is powered by ideaLaunch, a full service content marketing agency serving hundreds of clients and thousands of writers since 2000.

Image from vintage-diva.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.