When you start blogging, you can easily handle different tasks of your blog yourself and run it successfully.
But, when your blog starts to grow, you don't get enough time to create sufficient amount of content to meet the growing demands of your audience.
In order to continue the growth and expansion of the blog, you invite other bloggers and writers to contribute to your blog.
However, managing multiple authors on a blog is a challenging job. It is always difficult to keep the co-authors in control, get quality content from them on the right time, making payments for their contribution etc.
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If you are running a multi-author WordPress blog, you can use WordPress resources and plugins to manage your blog easily. Have a look at some of the main tips listed below:
#1 Follow an Editorial Calendar Strictly
When you tend to develop a strong online presence, you face lots of problems to find new ideas for posts and publish the right content at the right time.
Sometimes, you don't have the content you desperately need.
Therefore, you should strictly follow an editorial calendar. It is an easy way of organizing all the content on your blog in advance. It helps you to implement your specific content marketing strategy without any fail.
You can use these two plugins for this purpose:
Editorial Calendar
An editorial calendar is necessary if you want to ensure the availability of enough content for your site and manage all of them easily. With the help of a WordPress editorial calendar plugin, you can:
- Create a schedule of posts in advance for writing or publishing content in future.
- Change the date of content publication by using the drag and drop functionality.
- Know the exact status of each & every post and can publish them manually if required.
- Easily manage the scheduled posts of contributors.
Edit Flow
Edit flow could be a right plugin for WordPress bloggers who handle Multi-Author sites.
The plugin allows you to manage a big team of authors with the following features:
- Calendar- It allows you to schedule your content creation and publication activities in advance. Based on your needs, you can reschedule the actual plan with the help of drag-and-drop functionality. You can also track the exact status of content easily and take action accordingly.
- Editorial Comments- It enables you to communicate effectively with writers/editors in the admin area of your site and reduce the load on your inbox up to a certain extent.
- Editorial Metadata- It helps you to save all important data about the blog posts such as Word count, topic overview, etc.
- User Groups- You can classify your website into different user groups, depending on the role of authors/contributors. Additionally, you can send email to all easily with a single click whenever the status of scheduled post is changed.
#2 Create a Writer Database & Scrutinize Their Actions
When multiple authors contribute to your blog, it is possible that some of them may be great and others aren’t that much skilled. You should know all these and track what assignments they have completed and how much you need to pay them once they complete the assignments.
Therefore, you need to create a writer database and update it from time-to-time with every new writer and every assignment you have given to your current authors.
This can be done using MS Excel sheet or you can use any plugin available for this task.
Your writer database should have all required information about each WP-authors of your blog from day 1 to the day they stay active on your blog.
#3 Reveal Your Contributor Guidelines
When multiple authors work on your blog, you need to have certain guidelines (for the acceptance of articles) for contributors and display it prominently on your site. You can visit my "write for us" page for more details on contributor guidelines.
It must include all the information that let writers and content professionals know what they need to follow to get their content published on your blog.
This will make your blogging life easier and you will be contacted only by professionals under your niche.
#4 Endorse Your Website Contributors
Most of the bloggers don't give credit to their contributors. When you don't give the byline to your co-authors, visitors don't get any idea whose article they are reading. It affects the credibility and readership of blog greatly.
Therefore, showcase all of your writers and give appropriate credit to them. You can use WordPress Author bio box plugins to display full details about your authors. It helps you to increase the credibility of your blog.
Additionally, you get free social media marketing from guest authors and writers when they share their work on different social media channels. It gives an extra push to your blog articles, which means more traffic to your website.
You can use your WP theme default author box to give credibility to your guest authors or you can use other author bio-box plugins available in WordPress directory. I recommend Starbox- the Author Box for Humans and Fanciest Author Box.
Starbox- the Author Box for Humans
When you switch to this plugin, it provides you beautiful and professional author bio box themes. You can use them to make author boxes more appealing for users.
Look at some interesting features of this plugin:
- Allotment of special pages to your authors.
- It also works with sites having WooCommerce and other E-commerce plugins.
- Allows you to upload your images without any need of a Gravatar.
- You can link all articles created by authors.
- Facility to attach social media profiles of your authors.
- You obtain Google Authorship for all authors that you list.
Fanciest Author Box
Most of the WordPress themes have their own native author box feature, which allows WordPress bloggers to include author information into WordPress posts and pages. Nevertheless, these author boxes often lack the required features which are necessary to help visitors get in touch with visitors.
Therefore, you can use Fanciest Author Box plugin and can easily customize it to meet your specific requirements.
Key features of Fanciest Author Box plugin:
- Compatibility with Co-Authors Plus plugin.
- RSS feed author box.
- Google Authorship.
- Retina ready.
- lazy loading of images for increased page speed.
- Translation ready.
- Author box for RSS Feed.
- It allows users to connect with authors on all social media sites.
You can use this plugin to:
- Increase your blog's functionality remarkably,
- Improve user engagement
- Increase the visibility of your articles in the SERPs of search engines and
- Increase traffic to your site and lead generation.
#5 Your Responsibilities As a Blog Owner
Well, you have defined your editorial guidelines, authors are sending quality articles as per your standards and you are publishing the received articles. If you think, you can sit and enjoy, then you are absolutely wrong.
As a blog owner, you should work smarter and take all possible steps that could bring more traffic to your blog. It will help your co-authors to get the desired exposure they are looking for.
In the same way, your targeted audience easily gets the value they need. It doesn't happen within a day. It requires consistent effort from your side. Here are a few things you can do:
#1- Optimize Your Blog Posts: When you get articles from your co-authors, you need to optimize your content with the latest practices of search engine optimization so that your blog and its pages are easily searchable on different search engines.
You must implement both On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO to boost the visibility of your content. In order to sharpen the outcome of SEO exercise, you need to follow complete WordPress SEO guide.
#2- Make Your Content Sharable: You must share your blog content on social media channels and encourage the targeted audience to share your content further.
When your content is shared in maximum numbers, it helps you to gain more and more clicks on your blog. You can also use RSS feed and Email marketing technology to promote your content and boost the readership of your blog.
#6 Restrict Author's Contribution To a Few Categories
It is possible that your authors may have expertise in different niches and they may be contributing to your blog for different categories.
But, it may create needless hassles for you when you get similar content for the same topic.
To avoid this, you should restrict author's contribution to certain categories only. You can use WordPress plugins for this purpose.
Just install the plugin on your blog and go to the Users > Author Category button > All Users button > choose the targeted editor from Author Category section and assign him/her to a particular category.
For this purpose I recommend using one great and easy to use plugin “Restrict Author Posting”.
Restrict Author Posting
With this plugin, you can restrict authors and contributors in particular categories and can avoid the accidental posting of contents in wrong categories.
The plugin adds a drop-down menu to the bottom of the user's profile. It allows you to determine their categories.
Users are informed instantly to which categories they are allowed to post the content. Only you (the site admin) can change their categories.
#7 Ensure Communication Among Your Contributors
When you run a multi-author blog, it is very important for you to ensure the communication among your contributors.
It will help you to indicate your authors what they need to do with a new content, which topic is allowed to be worked on, which article needs further improvement, etc.
You can use the Edit Flow WordPress plugin to collaborate easily with your editorial team on your blog or use different third party chatbots as well. (we already discussed it in #1 point above)
#8 Managing User Roles & Capabilities:
While running a multi-author WordPress site, You should have at least the basic knowledge of WordPress user roles and capability management so that you can easily know that exact capability of every user and prepare your WordPress blogging strategies accordingly.
In WordPress, you can assign user roles as-
- Super Admin - Has full control over the site.
- Administrator - Has all administrative rights.
- Editor - Allowed to publish and edit anyone's content.
- Author - Has right to post and edit his/her own content.
- Contributor - Allowed to submit content, but can't publish them.
- Subscriber - One who can manage his profile on your Site
You can use Capability Manager Enhanced plugin easily to define user's role, to add custom Roles, custom Capabilities, and check capabilities.
Key features of the plugin:
- Allows you to create & manage different role capabilities.
- It supports negation.
- You can backup and restore roles and capabilities to revert the changes you made at last times.
- You can copy and role at network sites.
#9 Revisionary
When you run a multi-Author blog, sometimes, you have to make some changes in the published posts to make them more compelling and useful.
So, do you want to allow your co-authors to perform this action? If yes, then you should use Revisionary plugin.
It allows the authorized users to submit changes and revisions to their published content. As soon as these changes and revisions are approved by the editor, they can be implemented immediately to the posts or scheduled for future publication.
Wrapping Up
Many bloggers run multi-author blogs and they face various problems on a daily basis.
Strategies are always required to manage a multi-user blogs or multi-niche blog. Without a proper management content and authors no blog can survive in a long run.
By implementing the above-mentioned recommendations, they can easily do away with most of the challenges and operate their multi-author blog smoothly.
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