Better Website Content Series: Guest Columnists

Mar 2
06:54

2006

Peter Engelbrecht

Peter Engelbrecht

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By now, we all are aware that having rich content on our websites is one of the keys to achieving a good search engine ranking. There are numerous types of content categories that can be utilized that can provide a variety of messages for site visitors.

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One particular content category that I think has a tremendous amount of value is to incorporate a guest columnist into your site.  It is true that to get site visitors to come back to your site repeatedly there has to be a reason to come back.  When you think about a news site,Better Website Content Series: Guest Columnists Articles visitors return to read about updated news events, for online home business sites the challenge to get returning visitors is more daunting, but definitely possible.

Guest columnists provide a fresh and differing perspective on topics.  Many avid readers have a tendency to latch onto certain writers due to their style of writing or their viewpoint.  For a business site, readers will want to read something that provides value and has some worth.  The potential for having unpaid repeat visitors is tremendous should one of your columnists be perceived as providing valuable articles that visitors would be able to use.

To setup a guest columnist program, I suggest having more than one guest writer, preferably five.  Have a catchy name for your columnists, such as “Read Articles from our 5-Star Panel”.  Lineup five different writers who each can provide an article once a month on a topic of their expertise.  The commitment from each would not be much as they are only committing to writing one article every five months.  Think of the type of topics your visitors would be interested in reading; here are a few examples:

  • Debt Management
  • Investment Planning
  • Taxes
  • Marketing
  • General Business

Be sure to setup each columnist with their own email address so that visitors can write back to them and ask questions.  Those emailing back could be a good source of business for the columnists, if they are in business for themselves.

Besides having guest columnists writing for you, as previously mentioned there are a variety of other types of content that you can use to make your website rich with valuable information that will have visitors coming back repeatedly.  However you decide to build your website, try to keep the information fresh and most definitely up-to-date.