Working with influencers can lead to some big things for your brand. Not only are you tapping into an existing, engaged audience, but you’re also showing that audience that you’re relevant, approved and worth paying attention to. There are a lot of different ways to work with influencers, and getting them involved in guest posts is a great way to do it.
Sounds ideal, doesn’t it? Get an influencer to write your post, promote it, and watch your brand grow. Except it isn’t quite as simple as that. While working with influencers can lead to some really successful partnerships, there are also some risks involved with working with influencers. Brands can find that the content looks good, but may not fully serve their brand goals. It’s a common pitfall, and one that can lead to wasted money and opportunities.
Luckily for you, we’ve got the tips you need to help you get the most from your guest blogger partnerships. Check out the Blogger Tuesday guide to ensure your guest blogs match your brand goals for successful influencer partnerships.
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What is a guest blog?
A guest blog is a piece of content that sits on your brand’s website, but is contributed by someone else. In the context of this article, the content would be written by an influencer to bring an established voice to your brand’s content to help appeal to a new audience, promote a product or drive sales. The posts can include written content, as well as images, videos and graphics to create a rich and engaging blog.
The beauty of working with an influencer on a guest post is that the content will be done in their tone of voice, bringing familiarity to audiences, as well as the influencer’s unique style. An influencer who has a strong community is usually a trusted source of information and recommendations, and the positive association with your brand can build credibility much faster than brand-led content on its own. This can make audiences more likely to engage with your content, follow your social profiles and consider your products and services in the future.
It also gives your brand the chance to show up in a different way. An influencer can bring a fresh perspective, and does this in a way that feels more personal, instead of being promotional.
A successful blog post collaboration can do more than just fill a content gap – it can give your overall content strategy a boost and lead the way for more collaborations in the future.
Understanding Risks with Guest Bloggers
Before you even consider working with influencers, you need to ensure you fully understand what you want from the partnership. Are you looking to boost overall brand awareness? Promote a new product? Reach a new audience? Setting clear aims for your collaboration can help set you up for the best chance of success, brief correctly, and help you avoid some of the following risks:
Misaligned messaging
Choosing the right influencer usually involves working with someone who aligns with your brand values. Providing some clear guidance on your brand and its tone of voice can help your influencer get it right, ensuring you’re both on the same page when it comes to what you want from the piece.
Off-brand content
The influencer you work with must be relevant to your brand. A collaboration that feels unnatural or forced won’t do either of you any favours, and lacks the authenticity that most people respond to when engaging with an influencer or a brand.
Poor SEO
This one can be managed brand-side. From establishing keywords and anchor text/links from the beginning, you can ensure the piece delivers in the back-end, as well as the content itself.
Reputational risks
Be diligent when choosing influencers to work with. Ensure their past posting and opinions don’t reflect negatively on your brand, causing a crisis you’d rather avoid later on.
Inconsistent quality
Quality is important when working with guest bloggers. The work should maintain the high standard you’ve established for your brand, fitting in naturally instead of sticking out like a sore thumb.
Setting Clear Collaboration Guidelines
One of the best things about working with influencers is the creativity they bring to their role. A common mistake brands make is to try to control the creative too much, which can not only lead to frustration from the creator but also result in a post that feels too contrived. Setting some clear collaboration rules from the outset can help you manage expectations on both sides, while still letting the influencer do their thing.
Some points to consider here include:
- Define what you want from the collaboration – traffic, backlinks, a positioning piece?
- Share your tone of voice guidelines.
- Set audience expectations – what will they want from reading this piece?
- Provide some examples of good content if relevant.
A brief that sets out what you want to achieve will give your influencer the info they need to then go out and create something in their voice and style, creating familiarity with their audience that can then lead them to your brand.
Vetting Guest Bloggers Effectively
There are a lot of influencers out there, so how do you choose the right one for your project? Not everyone will respond to your enquiry, but that doesn’t mean you should just choose who’s available. Some tips for vetting your guest bloggers effectively include:
- Review their past content to get an insight into what they post about and how they write.
- Check that their audience aligns with yours.
- Look beyond their follower count – take a look at engagement to see how audiences respond to their content.
- Assess if they’re the right kind of creator to talk about your brand.
- Keep an eye out for any read flags, such as controversial content or too many collaborations.
Working with the wrong collaborator can undo months or even years of brand building. Learning how to choose the right influencer can help ensure you make the most appropriate choice for your brand.
Creating Detailed Contributor Agreements
Once you’ve chosen an influencer to work with, you can put an agreement in place. If you don’t have a standard collaborator contract, it’s worth creating one to speed up this process in the future.
A contributor agreement should generally contain:
Content scope and expectations
Clearly outline what the content should cover, such as key topics, tone of voice, and specific brand messages that need to feature in the content. This will give contributors the key information that lets them then create content that’s natural to them.
Deadlines and revision process
Set realistic deadlines for drafts and agree on how many rounds of revisions are expected. Setting out this process early on can ensure projects are completed on time and avoid unnecessary back-and-forth.
Content ownership
Define who owns the final piece once it’s published. This ensures there’s no confusion around control, especially if the content performs well or is reused later.
Usage rights
Be clear about how the content can be used beyond the initial blog post, such as on social media, in email campaigns or across other marketing channels. This will help you to maximise the value of your collaboration.
Promotion requirements
Beyond publishing the blog itself, you may have expectations around how and when the blog will be promoted. This should be made clear if you’re expecting social media posts, collaborative posts, etc.
Fee arrangements
Establish the fee arrangements in advance. Most influencers will tell you their rate, and what it covers. Some influencers will work on a one-off fee basis, while others may agree on a percentage of sales. You should also agree upon when the payment will be made, to ensure creators are paid promptly for their work.
Disclosure requirements
Make sure both sides agree on disclosure requirements according to advertising guidelines. This means that any partnerships, sponsorships, or affiliate links are clearly disclosed. This transparency is not only important for legal reasons, but also to help build trust with the audience.
A formal contributor agreement helps protect your brand and the creator, ensuring each party knows where they stand and trying to avoid any misunderstandings further down the line.
Managing Content Quality and Authenticity
Working with an influencer is an excellent way to promote your brand and engage with audiences in a different way. While the content should be written in the creator’s voice, it’s understandable that you’ll want the work to match the quality of your existing content.
The finished article will be something of a balancing act. We’ve put together some pointers for managing content quality while keeping things authentic:
Edit sensibly
It’s normal to expect to make some edits to a blog piece. This could be to check spelling and grammar (we’re all guilty of typos!), and to ensure the blog makes sense. When editing the blog, however, it’s important to make sure you only edit for clarity and alignment, instead of stripping personality away from the piece.
If any significant edits are needed, due to the brief not being met, then these will need to be communicated to the influencer so that they can make the necessary edits.
Maintain the influencer’s voice
When publishing a guest blog, remember to maintain the influencer’s voice. It’s why you chose to work with them. Commissioning an influencer to write a blog post works differently from hiring a copywriter to do it, where you set the tone and specific content requirements.
Ensure the piece delivers value
While working with an influencer will bring something new to your content, it can’t just be their name alone. The content they deliver should produce some value, avoiding fluff. If you find the piece doesn’t really align with the initial brief, you can go back to them to ask for another draft. Misunderstandings can happen, and you can provide further guidance to ensure the next draft hits the right note.
Check all technical elements
Your final check should focus on the technical requirements of the article. This means making sure all of the links are correct, as well as the keyword and SEO requirements. You should also draft a meta title and description to help further enhance your SEO.
With all of the checks in place, you’ll be able to publish the content confidently, ensuring your content works for both your brand and the influencer.
Handling Legal and Copyright Issues
While legal issues are rare for guest blogs, it’s not something you want to encounter unexpectedly. Your contributor agreement should help protect you from these issues as much as possible, but there are some other extra considerations you should make:
- Establish who owns the content once it’s published. Some creators may stipulate that content comes with a right to use it for a defined period, and may ask for an additional fee for continued use after this date.
- One thing that many people forget when arranging guest posts is the rights over the use of images. Ensure usage is agreed in writing, especially if you want to use images on social media and other promotional materials.
- If the piece uses sources, ensure they are referenced appropriately.
- While it’s unlikely that an established influencer will lift their work from someone else, you should always carry out plagiarism checks before publishing. This can help prevent any copyright claims being made down the line.
- Check any follow-up content and social media to ensure the partnership is disclosed properly – this goes for any ad notices, sponsorship tags and affiliate links.
With the right agreements in place beforehand and careful checks afterwards, legal and copyright issues shouldn’t be a problem for your partnership.
Monitoring and Maintaining Your Brand Reputation
Publishing your guest post isn’t the end. Once the content is live, you’ll want to keep an eye on how it performs and how it’s being received by your audience. This can involve tracking elements such as:
- Traffic
- Engagement
- Conversions
You can then use these metrics to help you establish the value of your partnership and the impact it’s had on your brand.
As well as performance, you should pay attention to how your content is received by your audience. If something doesn’t land as expected, you may need to step in and either update the content or clarify the messaging. If, for some reason, something starts to reflect poorly on your brand, you may need to remove it altogether – although that’s an unlikely scenario.
It’s also worth evaluating what has gone well. A successful collaboration can continue, establishing longer-term partnerships that work for your brand. Many influencer partnerships begin this way before leading to longer-term collaborations. It can also help you work out the types of creators you want to work with in the future, creating stronger content each time.
A quick recap
Working with influencers to create guest blogs may seem simple on the surface, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. To recap what we’ve said above:
1. Start with clear goals. This will help you establish what you want from the collaboration and what the main aims of your campaign are.
2. Understand the risks. Working with influencers isn’t always plain sailing, so make sure you’re aware of what can happen when messaging is misaligned or reputational issues develop during your partnership.
3. Set clear guidelines. This guidance can give influencers direction without limiting their creativity.
4. Choose the right collaborators. Work with influencers who are aligned with your brand and have an engaged, rather than just a large, audience.
5. Put agreements in place. Contracts help define some key points about your partnership, like expectations, ownership, usage rights and more. Work shouldn’t go ahead without one of these in place.
6. Balance quality with authenticity. Edit the piece for clarity, without changing the creator’s voice.
7. Make sure legal basics are covered. This ensures content, images and all disclosures are handled properly.
8. Monitor performance. Track the results of your efforts to see what you can learn from and improve for next time.
Working with influencers to create guest blog posts is a promising strategy for your brand. It can be a fast and effective way to reach a new audience, and could increase sales and enquiries too. But a guest blog collaboration only works well when there’s a strategy behind it, which is why it’s important to focus on working with the right influencers on a brief that aligns with your goals.
With the right process in place, you can work together to create content that not only looks good but also delivers real results. Remember to keep content authentic and natural to help product content that connects with the intended audience.
Done right, guest blogging could be an ongoing tactic for your brand to help build trust and recognition and hopefully lead to some solid growth over time.
