 Well, that was a chore, wasn't it? Now you can have some idea of what I'm talking about, so that's good. Welcome. Thank you all for coming. I'm Ian Smith, and this is my presentation about how to identify guest authors for your blog. I am the co-founder of Fedsmith.com. Sorry, I just realized I've got something missing here. And I've been running that company since 2002. It's an online news service for the federal workforce. And I do currently have, at any given time, about 20 authors that write for my site, including myself. And I've been using WordPress since 2012. And my site is very niche content, and that will be relevant later in the presentation. I'll come back to that point. But also to give you an idea of a rough overview of the traffic I have on my site, I've got three free email lists that people can sign up for to follow content that we post. My main list has about 128,000 subscribers on it currently, and I get roughly 400 unique visitors per month to the site. So as I said, I'm talking about guest posts. And so why would you even want to do guest posts? And let me ask you all, how many of you currently have a blog that you run? That's cool. Can you expound on that? Do the words have asked made anything to you? It counts, I guess. And I assume if you don't, you're maybe thinking about it or planning on launching one. Okay, cool. Just curious for where everybody stands. But here's some reasons why you might want to do it. It's a great way to expand your content, and also you can potentially get new regular authors for your site. You may not think you have anything to offer people who would aspire to write for your site, but you do. You're reaching an audience that they potentially are not reaching. Like in my case, I cater to the federal workforce. There are people out there who want to reach that audience. Maybe they have a business where they provide training to that group, or maybe they've written a book that pertains to it. So regardless of what you're writing about, you are reaching people that potential authors are on it. So you do have something to offer, and it's just important to keep that in mind. And so that's why, you know, why would anyone want to write for you for free? Well, it helps the potential authors build their businesses as well. Because again, maybe somebody as a consulting firm is looking for new clients, and a great way to publicize that business is to write articles. I'm not talking about just a blade and ad for the business, nobody wants to read that, but something that's relevant to your audience. And then at the end, you have a bio or a byline or something about the author. And by the way, here's a link to my book, my website, that kind of thing. It really does work in that sense. And it's a great way to grow your traffic. Obviously, the more content you're posting, the more potential readers you're going to have on your site. By the way, I'm a big college basketball fan, so you'll notice a theme in some of the pictures on my slides. So bear with me. But I stumbled onto guest posting early on. As I mentioned, I didn't even start using WordPress until 2012. I launched the site, it didn't exist. Guest posting was certainly not a formalized trend by any means. And I stumbled onto it because, again, I found there are people who wanted to reach the audience I was reaching. They had a message. I needed the content. They needed business to sell their books, promote their business, whatever they were doing. And it's become a real trend in the blog realm, I found. And I believe that because I get more emails in a week than I can count from people who are offering to write from my site. That's what I'm going to talk about next. But, again, it does work because it's a bartering system. Because, again, you do have something to offer even if you don't think you do. And there are people out there who want to tap into that. But there are problems. And as I said, I get more emails in a week than I can count from people wanting to write for me. And they all have a very familiar ring to them. They frequently will contain or start off with something a lot like this. And sometimes I think that there is some kind of template out there in an Amazon S3 bucket or something that people copy and paste into an email and send out for, here's how you get to write for other sites. And as a site owner, it's off-putting. I mean, if I find irony in getting an email from somebody who wants to write for me and inside of the email, he hasn't even bothered to proof it for typos, grammatical mistakes, things like that, and yet he wants to write for me. I don't get it. Does anyone remember? I think I noticed it back in the late 90s. I was getting emails from somebody who claimed to be a prince in Nigeria who had this windfall. And I felt so lucky because, wow, he had $25 million, he didn't know what to do with. And all I needed to do was give him my bank account number and I would get all this money. So now, to be fair, I'm not trying to equate these spammy type emails I get from would-be authors to stealing money. It's not on the same level, but it just, I put the slide in there because it just kind of had the same, it made me think of it, it's kind of a spam meme out there on the internet, if you will. Warning signs that you'll find when you get these emails, as I mentioned the typos, broken English, it comes across as, again, somebody who's wanting to write but can't form a complete sentence, off-putting as a content editor to get an email like that, to say the least. The familiarity of it, I showed you some snippets of the emails I'm getting and later in the presentation I'm going to show you some actual emails I've gotten. It usually starts off the same way, it'll say something like, I'm an avid reader of your blog and I think it's so great what you're doing and I read it all the time and I'd like to offer you a 100% completely unique article and I was wondering if you accept guest posts and I'm thinking, well, if you've read my site, yeah, I have an entire page dedicated to guest posts so that it outlines the process. So again, a very familiar pitch and then no identifying credentials. One thing I find frustrating is I'll get these emails and a lot of times it won't even, not even suggest a topic. I'd like to write for your site, I'd like to send you 100% completely unique article. Okay, what's the article? Why didn't you attach it to the email? Why didn't you give me a link to go read something comparable on another site? It's something, some of them do that. But usually I find that the articles, if they're even offered, whether it's a potential topic or an actual article, have nothing to do with my site and when I told you I produce very niche content, I'm catering to a very specific audience and so if you've got an article about how to make more money babysitting or foosball or something like that, that's great but if you've read my site for more than about a minute, you're going to realize it's not going to fly with my users and that's the kind of stuff I run across with this. So the person's clearly not read my site. The article's likely to be very general in nature. Some of the articles that I have gotten, they're like one, it was actually relevant to a topic that would pertain to my audience but I did simply Google searching. It took me about 30 seconds to figure out how he'd written the article. He'd gone out to a government jobs website and pulled pieces off of it and put it in the article. There's nothing wrong with that but, again, my audience, usually it requires to write for me, it requires a very in-depth expertise on a subject and so if all the person's done has gone out and grabbed some paragraphs off of a federal agency's website or something, it's not going to, it kind of dilutes my content. It's not something I would want to post. These people are often relentless. What I mean there is, I've gotten to where I ignore most of these requests for a lot of the reasons I've mentioned because, again, there's a lot of typos in it or there's a pitch but there aren't even suggested topics or something so I just kind of look at it as you're wasting my time, essentially. But if I ever have gotten one that's intriguing, again, I usually get an article that's very general that's not going to help me a lot and then if I do respond and say, hey thanks, I appreciate taking the time for sending it but I'm not going to post it. It leads to this almost endless back and forth where the people just will not let go. I interacted with a lady a couple months or so ago and she wrote back and said, what do I need to change to have you post the article? And I'd already given her a very in-depth explanation in front of, first of all, the kind of content I'm looking for, the kind of expertise I like to see. She ignored all of that and sent me a very general article anyway. It was well written but just didn't pertain to my audience and I had heard from her two or three more times and I was thinking, I'm sorry but I don't have time to write this article for you. And also watch for copyright violations. I would not have even mentioned this until about a month ago. I was sitting at lunch one day, I got an email, I have a forum on my site where people can submit articles to me and I'm going to cover that in a moment. And I read the news all day long scouring for content and the article sounded very familiar to me and it came from somebody who at least claimed to run a healthcare blog site or something. He had copied and pasted an article from another news source, verbatim into an article, put his name on it and it was done so hastily, lazily. He'd even left in the middle of the article a little tagline about signing up for the other company's email list. And I wrote him back and I was very direct. I said, this appears to have been copied verbatim from another site. I provided the link to it and I said, it appears to be a violation of this other company's copyright therefore will not be considered for publication. And he wrote me back and he said, well that's odd because I wrote it myself. I'm going to have to look into that and I'm thinking, yeah, and I'm going to ask you if I could look into that. So anyway, if I hadn't recognized it from having not already read it, you could probably find something like that with just a quick Google search. It's just something to be aware of. So does all of this mean that you would never ever get anything good out of this? No, absolutely not. That's not what I'm saying. These are some things to look for for potentially valid authors. You'll get a lot less of a canned email. Again, if you've read five or six of these things, you've read most of them. They also are very similar. If the person actually provides credentials, whether it's a bio, a website that you can actually go look at, maybe it's just an email address but with the domain attached to the email address, you can go look at the person's site. And you see, oh yeah, this person is retired from the federal HR sector. This would be good for me. So I can see things like that. Maybe the person has articles on his or her website or actually sends you an article. These are good things. And these are some tips for how you can get better authors in that same vein. I mentioned very briefly, I have a page on my site for recruiting guest authors. I actually really like to have people write for the site. As I said, I have about 20 currently and do it any time. And some things you can put on there to help guide the submission of content. Include your terms and conditions. What do you have to have from somebody to post his articles? For me, that's going to be certain required fields. I need a name, I need a bio. Do you want me to include your email or not with the article so people can contact you? Some people want that, some don't. This lets you also ignore the illegitimate request. Like I said, if I get an email that starts off with, I read your site all the time and it's so great and I'd love to write for you. Or do you accept guest posts? Well, immediately I know you don't read my site all the time because if you did, you'd see, yes, I do accept guest posts. And here's how you can send them to me. So, and as part of the terms and conditions, you can put things in there too, like we put something in there. By submitting this form, you're agreeing to these terms and conditions. You agree that you won't get paid for the article? That we have the right to edit it? Things like that, you own the copyright, that sort of thing. And this is actually, these are screenshots of said form. I put on here, these are some benefits of writing. And in fact, one thing I've done that I have found has helped me a lot too, is I mentioned that there are some benefits if you start writing for me regularly. You get a lot of one-off authors who might just send one or two articles and then I don't hear from them again. But I do have people who have been writing for me for years. And one benefit I'll offer them, I will include the person's picture and set up a bio page on the site. And what I'm doing essentially, I'm actually going inside a WordPress and adding them as a user. Whereas if it's just a one or two thing, I don't set up a separate user to post their articles. And so that will have the person then show up on an author's page I have on my site and it lists all the current authors. And people like that. In fact, I took it a step further and I've written an algorithm so that people who write more frequently show up higher on the list. If they haven't written in a long time, they don't show up at all. And it actually created a little bit of competition. One guy really focused in on that and he would try to send in more articles that his name would get bumped up higher on the list. So anyway, just a little carriage you could dangle like that. And then this is the form itself. You can see those are the fields I'm looking for, short bio. Sometimes people will send a, here's my bio and it's like five pages long. Well, that's too long. So in a form like this you can force it to be no longer than a certain length and that helped me a lot too. And I also have a canned response for dealing with these things. It's helped me a lot. It's just a very short and sweet email I send. If somebody sends me an article to be considered for publication, a lot of times it's completely irrelevant to my audience. Not a bad article, just not relevant. And so this is a, again, by having this form they're kind of automating the process. And so I just send a very polite but direct response like this and say thank you very much for sharing it, but it's not got direct relevance to my users. And then again, you can ignore, when you have a form and a process like this you can just ignore the spammy requests. And one thing I didn't mention, part of why I consider them to be spam is sometimes I'll get emails that go to the public address of one of my email lists. And I have it set up so it doesn't go out to the whole list. Fortunately, all 130,000 people. But I see them. And that's kind of how I know like, okay, somebody's going out there and scraping the address or whatever. I'm not sure this will be a good article. So what about copyrights? Offending the attorney in the audience. But this is a guidance from my counsel so that's a good thing I guess since I'm not a lawyer, but that disclaimer on it. What we do is we require the author to own the copyrights. That's worked out very well and also that's one of the terms and conditions in my guest form. I get questions from the authors, particularly the ones who write for me regularly about can I post this article on another site? And my response is sure, you own the copyright so ultimately you can do whatever you'd like to do with it. I do usually ask in that case, would you maybe add a line at the end or something that says this was originally posted on Fedsmit.com with a link to it, something like that. Also, we get requests from our users periodically wanting to reproduce the article. Again, we defer those to the author. For me personally, I do that on a case by case basis. If I had one guy who he regularly goes around to news sites, most of them are my competitors and it includes mine, and he will copy and paste the articles into an email and then he then sends the email out to a bunch of people in his agency. And I told him no, I didn't want him to do that for a couple of reasons. One, it's an email and so I'm thinking, it's an email, you can put a link in there, people can click on it and go to the site. The other problem too is I found it kind of diluted the content a little bit because he wasn't including images in there. A lot of times it's just a stock image or something with the post so it's not a big deal but sometimes I might put a chart or something in the article and it's very relevant to the content and if that's missing it can confuse people. Other times though someone might say I'd like to reproduce this in my agency's newsletter and they tell me a little about it, how many people it goes out to, things like that. And I usually grant that and again with the stipulation it's being reproduced with written permission from the author and then a little teaser from my site to get people to come in, to come back, sign up for my email list, whatever. But that's how we handle the copyrights and they work very well. This is a quick tip I just wanted to give everyone a quick technical tip. I mentioned I have a lot of just one authors who write one or two articles and then don't hear from them again. You can obviously never predict that but if I'm assuming up front that may be the case I found this very helpful. WPBeginner has this article with this address and it's how to add a guest author custom field to your theme. You just use a custom field inside of the WordPress editor called guest author, whatever you choose to call it. You put the person's name in there and then it explains how inside of your theme you can then capture that and have it display so it seamlessly integrates with your overall website. Before I did this the author name would show up as my company name is how I had it set up and I had to manually put the person's name in the body of the article and it just didn't integrate as well. And also the author's name didn't show up inside the WordPress editor when you're browsing your posts. It had my company name or something. And now it takes whatever you put in this field and actually puts it in there and it just makes it easier to manage. So I've explained about how people coming to you things to look for. What if you want to go out and approach other companies that you'd like to write for? Could you ever do that? Absolutely. I've done it. I'd recommend it. It's a good way to get your name out there as well. These are some things as a business owner and a content editor what I would want to hear if the shoe was on the other foot. So you'd obviously want to explain up front introduce yourself, your website, what you do. Basically explain why you think you'd be a good fit for writing for that site. And you'd want to talk certainly about your content what you would plan to write about but above all avoid saying we're making it sound like here's what you can do for me. I've had people approach me in business deals before and their entire approach was here's what you can do for me. I'm thinking that's great but why would I do that? I don't get anything out of this. There was a guy we were trying to work out an advertising agreement or something with him and his whole approach was here's how you got you know I've got this conference and you guys can promote it and it'll be so great you can put an ad here I'm thinking yeah I guess that would be great for you but I don't see what I would get out of this. So anyway, just a lot of business decisions can be settled by as simple as just switch shoes with the person. And if you're pitching yourself as an author like I said oh and I sorry I screwed up a little bit this I jumped ahead I'm sorry this is if you're approaching authors so if you find an author out there who's writing he's got a blog he's you know writing for other sites whatever this is how I would approach a person like that because he may not know you're out there and you can see he's already writing for other sites so sorry I jumped ahead this slide is going the other way around if you want to pitch yourself these are some suggestions I would have again for having been on the other side of it try to avoid all the canned emails and tailor your approach to the site or the company that you're pitching so don't say you have a great blog and I read it all the time and it's so awesome trying to be a little more concise talk specifically about again what can you do as a writer for that company show that you've read the site that's huge again I can't tell you how frustrating it is when I get these emails and the people clearly have not read the site and yet they want to write for me and so it's just not going to work but again I won't even consider it so I've gotten to that point for all the reasons I just mentioned but providing relevant sample articles that's very good that's something I like to see is come as close as you can certainly I mean if you've obviously been ever written for the site maybe you don't have something that's exactly a fit for their content but if you're wanting to write for them there's probably a reason so there's probably a good match in your mind as to why you'd be a good writer for them so my last thing before I come to the end here these are some actual emails I have received from people who would like to write for my site so yeah this one I don't know what the site was it's probably great foosball sure that's cool interesting but I write about the Thrift Savings Plan and CSRS in first and you know how to determine your annuity supplement I don't think foosball's going to fly so anyway totally free to you Ian totally free for you I like overflows with information if you're not anywhere else Dave most of them say this it's a very hackneyed message to be sure so this one probably kind of self-explanatory you might notice some typos in it I realize most of you all haven't looked at my website but suffice it to say that I don't teach people how to be a better weatherman I like how to perfectly edit you blog content so this one's got the same kind of generic approach I talked about I'm an avid reader of your blog I love what you're doing it's so awesome I've got this great idea for an article only he didn't tell me what it was a few dollars for every blog he mentioned you have six bucks at least he did acknowledge I do cater to a specific niche that's right to the point one thing I did not cover is I know that part of this trend is paying for posts whether you hire somebody to write for you or go in the other direction you pay to have your article posted I've personally never done that I can't really speak to it I've talked to people who have used it successfully though my hunch is that's a pitch for something like that if I didn't even respond to something like this I would just say we don't offer anything like that sorry anyone has any questions just a quick comment I wonder if you guys have a really massive inbound link profile because I imagine most e-mails are people looking for search engine boost back links that's the case so just that's what you might do that would be my hunch and I might not have said that until Friday when I was at the happy hour for word cam the pre thing I was talking to somebody and I can't remember who forgive me if it triggers a bit he was saying that as his traffic has gone up he's running into the same thing and so I can see that if you have any links from .gov domains there's kind of an SEO community usually gold if you get a legitimate one so if you're getting a lot of links from them just kind of spill it over and we do there are people who link to us we get passed out on social media a lot sometimes I'll have a post that's popular that'll on Facebook at least according to Facebook it'll be read 10, 20,000 times sharing that much I'm getting guest writing if someone writes you a legitimate e-mail and involves a phone call do you appreciate that to annoy you? well my feeling would probably be shocking off how'd you get my number truthfully I work for the CIA so that's not a problem but other than that and the only reason I say that is is because I don't have a business phone or anything posted out there if somebody did it probably because I handed out my card so that would be fine but yeah I think that's good, that's a good approach because it's more serious and actually I did have I approached an author he has his own blog he writes in the same space I do and he was writing for some competitors as well and I approached him and he wanted to have a phone call beforehand just I'm sure to get to know me and learn more about my company and what I plan to do with his articles and it's led to a steady of likes writing for so I think it's helped him get more traffic to his yes do you have a process for how often do you host a guest writer do you have like weekly, monthly or just as the opportunity arises really just as the opportunity arises the way I prioritize articles to content management flow is if something's more timely I'm gonna post it a lot sooner for example I've got a lady who's started writing for me she just sent me her third or fourth article and actually she writes about travel like great places to go on a cruise that sounds like it's something I would not want to post but she runs a site with her husband that it seeks out discounts for federal employees for cruises and so that's the tie in and she's just sent me one that's about upcoming summer discounts and it's got a kind of a limited time window and so I'm gonna post that sooner than I would something that's more general so that's how I take the approach on that yes sir how labor intensive is this do you have an idea of providing opportunities to students high school students to practice writing for like my site is to meet some college students but I want to get an idea of how much labor is given them the opportunity to build on that skill but how much work do you put in to work on this week it's not bad like as far as setting up the form goes I use contact form 7 I guess is the plugin I use but there's a myriad of them out there there's ninja forms there's another one I used to use I use ninja yeah there was a there's another one it's escaped gravity yeah that was it but so that part's not bad then truthfully it pretty much just comes down to how many of these are you gonna get right I don't get through my form I don't get a ton of them most of the articles I'm getting are from the established authors and once that relationship is established generally they're just emailing me directly it ebbs and flows though that's an advantage and a disadvantage an advantage is I'm not paying them as I said it's a bartering system and it works well for both of us the disadvantage is it does ebb and flow somebody might write for me for months or years and then I don't hear from them again so since I'm not paying there's not an expectation of hey I'm paying you so you need to send me one a month or whatever so do you put a limit on your power I don't put a hard limit on it people will ask and I usually say around a thousand is good but it's not a hard limit if somebody sends me a really long article it could be triple that if it's really good I don't mind posting it now I am gonna edit it and make sure it's got section headers to break it up if it sometimes though I mean one lady emailed me and said I'm working on an article but it's gonna be about 5,000 words I think and I said well let's break that up into maybe several articles and she told me what it was about too and it should have been because it was they fell under the same category but they were fairly broad it would work better but I think as long as it's good content I don't put a hard limit on it sure so they don't send you an image do you find an image to attach to it yes in fact I prefer that because again coming back to the copyright stuff I don't know where the image came from and so if I go get it myself from my stock or whatever then I know I'm safe but by requiring the author to own the copyright we felt that also takes some of the liability off of us as well if somebody does violate a copyright or plagiarize or something we can say well the author agreed when he sent it to us that he was adhering to copyrights and he owns it and so we can might not keep us completely out of hot water but we can push a lot of it back so yes do you have an example of a guest author really benefitting from having posted on your site yes and that's an outstanding question I had a lady tell me that she was just starting her business that caters to federal workers and she does like motivational type stuff I think of how to climb the leadership ladder and what not enjoy your job more she said that writing for me had her email list go from zero to a thousand in a month or something and she was just starting out I had another lady tell me that she worked for the postal service but she was also running some businesses on the side that she started like writing ebooks and doing motivational things speaking whatever career stuff she told me she got some public speaking invitations that she would not have gotten had she not been writing for us because we were reaching people part of the ebb and flow of getting the articles and not I was talking about some of that is my fault in the sense that some of our authors have their own consulting firms where they do training for federal workers on the side and when they write an article or series of articles they might put a little plug at the end of hey I've got this conference coming up we're thinking about doing a conference whatever it is and then they get very busy and can write for a while because they get an influx of work from the publicity yeah so yeah anything else well thank you all the keynotes are going to start at 1130 down in the auditorium