Blogging has become a great passion for a lot of people today, and most bloggers start it alone. But as the site traffic increases and the blog grows, more people join in to make their contribution. It’s not easy for only one person to manage a good blog with lots of things, like content, editing, design, development, etc.
Simply said, when there are multiple authors writing and publishing their work on a blog, it is not easy for blog owners to manage things. If you are a blogger with multiple authors on the board, you might have faced this difficulty.
In this article, we have curated some of the best ways for you to make the management of multi-author blogs easier. This will help you to reduce the time invested in management so that you can focus on more important things.
1. Craft editorial guidelines
Many multi-author blogs become very difficult to manage because they don’t have any editorial guidelines in place. They lack consistency in posts, quality, as well as quantity. This can be addressed by creating editorial guidelines, including the following points:
- Type of content required on blog
- Formatting of articles
- Length of articles (word limit)
- Websites to find images
- Way to submit articles
- Number of articles to be published per week
These should be the main points in your guidelines.
2. Create a calendar
Most bloggers have an editorial calendar in place, especially when they have multiple writers. What you need to do here is create a schedule of topics for the writers, along with the deadline. The deadline should be around a week before the post is supposed to get published.
The schedule will help you to free some time for you and your editors to edit the posts, share feedback with the authors, and publish the content on a regular basis. You can also look forward to solving the problems that your editors or writers face.
3. Find quality writers
If you are having a “Write for Us” page on your site, you might be receiving guest post submissions. While the guest posts are good for having free content and monetary purposes, you should ensure that you are accepting only quality content from good writers. You should maintain some standards for your blog setup.
You should maintain a list of all the writers who contribute to your blog. If a good writer has submitted a post in the past, you can approach them for more contributions. This can make your blogging life easier.
4. Have only one editor
For your blog, you should try that only one person edits the work of authors. Whether you are doing it yourself or having another person as an editor, the editorial guidelines should be followed strictly.
The advantage of having only one editor for the entire site is that you can maintain a consistent style for the blog. This is good for authors, as well as your readers.
If you feel like one editor wouldn’t be enough for your blog because of numerous write-ups every day, then onboard more editors. In this process, you should try to fill this vacancy by promoting your great authors for this job. This will help you to continue to maintain consistency.
5. Communicate with writers regularly
You should interact with your authors on a regular basis about the content, suggestions, feedback on drafts, etc. When the interaction with authors is more, you will be able to get the most out of them.
Rather than bombarding your authors with emails when they are writing, it is better to have regular communication. You should spend time checking their work and sharing honest feedback. The payment rollout should be done on time if the assignments are completed.
Along with being professional, you should also be friendly with your authors, so they remain interested in working with you.
6. Create Canned Responses
If you are receiving numerous guest post requests every day or week, then you might be spending a lot of time replying to them with a similar response. You can use the Canned Response feature in Gmail to save your time.
A Canned Response is something that is sent automatically as a reply to specific emails. For guest post requests, you can draft a response that includes Thank You message, greetings, your content guidelines, etc. You don’t have to reply to everyone the same thing manually.
7. Use WordPress multi-author plugins
Using the right plugins can make your life easier by providing some useful features that aren’t available by default. The plugins to manage multiple authors can help you improve content quality, manage the workflow, and create outstanding author profiles.
For example, you can use the Edit Flow plugin to customize the statuses of the content, track the content regularly based on the calendar, and more. The plugin also enables the editors and authors to chat with each other, thus improving the communication flow.
Here are some useful plugins that you should be using:
8. Schedule the posts and promote them
When you have multiple posts in a queue to be published, it is better to schedule them for auto-publishing at a specified time, rather than visiting the posts one by one over time and doing it manually.
This can save you a substantial amount of time. Set the status of posts from draft to scheduled and set the right time for publishing. The posts will get published automatically.
Once the posts are live, your job is to promote them via emailers, newsletters, and social media. Ask the authors to share the posts on their personal social accounts as well. This can maximize the reach of your posts.
Handing over to you:
These are some of the best tips for you to manage your multi-author blog efficiently and quickly. You have to save your time for better things rather than just spending the entire day managing authors and their posts.
If you have anything more to add, let us know via the comments below.
