April 12, 2022
by Kristena Mears
Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

This is my final addition to this series on How to Create and Maintain a Successful Blog as a Writer. (or anyone else) In this instalment, we will focus on how I find guest bloggers and how I schedule them. If you haven’t read part one, I would highly suggest you start there. Here is a link.

The first step to finding a guest blogger is the become active in other groups where those who are interested in the what your blog is about are active. Social media has made this much easier. There are groups for everything on any number of sites. You are probably already a member of the niche you have chosen. Many groups will let you post notice, so post. Put out a call for anyone who is interested in being a guest on your blog. Let them know the kinds of posts you are looking for. This is the easy part. Often, there are a number of people willing and able to be guests.

My next step has taken the struggle out of sorting through those responses I get. I set up a google form and directed all those interested there. Let me go through my steps.

1. go to https://docs.google.com/forms/

2. Create the form and set up a header that lets all know they are in the right place.

3. Ask each person for:
Name
Email and/or contact information.
Verification that they understand what your blog is about and they agree to follow guidelines.
Be clear on the deadline to get their post into you.

4. Create a list of question to help weed out those interested.
Some I have used:
When are you availible?
Do you have a book coming out this year? What month?
What would you like to do? (Give what you are looking for. I have a Devotional, Guest blog, Author Interview.) If you have picked topics for each month, list them for them to choose. I decided not to list topics. I didn’t want 5 people choosing one topic, and none on another.

There is a link on the form where you can view all the responses. This puts it in a nice layout that pulls everything together in one sheet.

Now you have the information you need. The rest is just a matter of weeding out who you want to appear on your blog and setting it up. I set mine in google calendar. I put the name, email and kind of post. This way, I have it right at my fingertips. I can check each post the month before and confirm with each person as needed.

I try to set my post up the month before. Sometimes I’m not successful, but if I have all the information ahead of time, it just takes a few minutes to pull everything together.

Here is a link to one of my forms. It’s closed now, but it will give you an idea of what I’ve done in the past.

I hope this helps.

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