How to Effectively Attract and Manage Guest Bloggers in WordPress

Are you looking for ways to attract guest bloggers and manage them in WordPress?

Guest blogging is a powerful way to gain exposure and build brand awareness. You can publish different types of content through guest post submissions and boost your traffic.

In this article, we will show you how to effectively attract and manage guest bloggers in WordPress.

Benefits of Accepting Guest Posts for Publishers

Guest blogging has tons of benefits for the guest author or the company they represent, helping them to get publicity and backlinks to their website.

But what’s in it for you as a publisher?

Here are some of the advantages of accepting guest posts on your website.

• New Perspective – Every author brings their unique perspective with their writing. Your audience will like a little change of pace and ideas.
• New Audience – Often the guest author will share the published post with their audience. This will attract new users to your website and grow your audience.
• New Connection – By allowing the other person to guest post on your site, you can build a relationship with them. This increases your chances of helping each other in the future.
• New Post – You get an extra post on your site that you didn’t have to write. You can use that time to focus on growing other areas of your brand.

Now that you see the benefits of accepting guest posts on your site, let’s find out how to attract guest bloggers in WordPress.

Attracting Guest Bloggers in WordPress

There are various ways you can attract guest bloggers in WordPress. The simplest way of doing this is by creating a Write for Us page on your site.

You can highlight the details for guest post submissions and offer publishing guidelines for writers on the write for us page. If you have particular topics to cover, then you can also list them down on the page.

Besides that, it’s a good idea to make this page visible to your visitors. You can place the link in the main navigation area of your WordPress website, like in the top menu or sidebar.

Other than that, you can place the ‘write for us’ page after each post in the author bio or on each guest author post.

Bonus Tip: You can create stunning write for us pages using SeedProd. It’s the best landing page plugin for WordPress and offers a drag and drop builder along with numerous customization options. You follow our detailed guide on how to create a landing page in WordPress for more details.

Another way to attract guest bloggers to your website is by offering them a monetary reward. You can set different prices for different types of content.

For example, DAME Magazine offers guest authors a monetary reward of $150 for essays and between $300 to $500 for reported features.

You can also partner with other businesses by guest posting on other sites and allowing their authors to guest post on your website.

Often bloggers tend to reciprocate guest posts, which can work out great, especially if you are in the same niche.

Lastly, you can join different communities of guest bloggers and look for opportunities to attract new guest posts to your website.

Once you know how to attract guest bloggers, let’s find out how to accept guest posts on your WordPress blog.

Accepting Guest Posts in WordPress

There are several ways to accept guest posts in WordPress. The easiest way is by allowing users to submit guest posts from the front end of your WordPress website.

This way, you won’t have to give access to the WordPress admin area or require users to register. Guest bloggers can simply upload their content using a post-submission form.

For this tutorial, we’ll be using WPForms. It’s the best form plugin for WordPress and offers a drag and drop form builder. The plugin offers a post submissions addon that makes it easy for users to upload content to your site.

You’ll need the WPForms Pro version as it includes the post submissions addon.

First, you’ll need to install and activate the WPForms plugin. If you need help, then simply follow our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Once the plugin is active, you can head over to WPForms » Settings from your WordPress admin area and enter the license key. You can find the license key in your WPForms account area.

Next, you’ll need to go to WPForms » Addons page. Then scroll down to the Post Submissions Addon and click the ‘Install’ button. The addon will now automatically install and activate.

Upon installing the addon, you’re now ready to create your post submission form. To start, simply go to WPForms » Add New to launch the WPForm’s form builder.

After that, go ahead and enter a name for your form and then select the ‘Blog Post Submission Form’ template in the Select a Template area.

Now, you can use the drag and drop builder to customize your form. Simply add new form fields by dragging them from the options on your left and placing them where you want in the form.

WPForms also lets you customize each individual field. All you have to do is click on any field you want to edit, and you’ll see options to change their label, size, format, add a description, and more.

After you’re done customizing your post submission form, you can head over to the ‘Settings’ tab.

In the General settings, you’ll be able to edit your form name, form description, change the submit button text, edit the anti-spam protection option, enable AJAX form submissions, and more.

Next, you can go to the Notifications settings tab to change the email address and message you’ll receive when someone submits a guest post using the form.

Once that’s done, you can head over to the Confirmations settings tab and edit the message people will see once they submit a form. WPForms lets you show a message, direct users to a new URL, or display a page.

After that, go ahead and click on the Post Submissions settings tab to map each form field to the respective fields in WordPress.

Now, save your settings to store your post submission form and exit the form builder.

Next, you’ll need to add your guest post submission form to your website. You can do that by adding a new page or editing an existing one.

Once you’re in the WordPress block editor, simply click the plus (+) button and add a WPForms block.

After that, you’ll need to select your posts submission form from the dropdown menu in the WPForms block.

You can now go ahead and publish your page and visit your website to see the post submission form in action.

Aside from using WPForms, there are more ways to allow users to submit guest posts to your WordPress website. For instance, you can create individual WordPress accounts for each contributor.

However, this would mean allowing guest writers to access your WordPress admin area and view other blog posts and pages on your website.

If you’re looking for more options to accept guest posts, then please refer to our guide on how to allow users to submit posts to your WordPress site.

Set Up Website Traffic Tracking by Authors

Once you start publishing guest posts, it’s important to know how they’re performing. One way of tracking their performance is by finding out which authors drive the most traffic to your website.

This way, you’ll get to see the most popular guest author on your website. You’ll also get to know which content your audience likes, so you can accept more guest posts on similar topics.

With MonsterInsights, you can easily set up author tracking in Google Analytics. MonsterInsights is the best Analytics solution for WordPress and is used by over 3 million businesses.

It makes it very easy to add Google Analytics to WordPress without editing code or hiring a professional. Using the MonsterInsights Dimensions addon, you can identify the most popular contributors on your blog.

The Dimensions addon lets you set up custom dimensions in WordPress. Custom dimensions are additional information that you can track in Google Analytics. This includes authors, post type, user ID, category, logged-in users, and more.

The best part about using MonsterInsights is that you can see the data inside your WordPress admin area and don’t have to switch between tabs or windows.

To view the most popular author on your site, simply head over to Insights » Reports and go to the ‘Dimensions’ tab.

For more details, you can follow our step-by-step guide on how to enable author tracking in WordPress.

Bonus: Tips for Accepting Guest Posts

Ever since Google has started cracking down on paid text links, SEO companies and spammers rely on guest posts to pick up the slack. For this very reason, no matter how popular your blog is, you will see at least a few guest posts request.

When your blog is relatively new and you get a guest post request, you get really excited. In that excitement, you tend to make the mistake of approving sub-par or even low-quality content.

To help you out, here are some rules that we think you should follow when accepting guest posts.

Ask What Keyword or Backlinks Do You Want?

You don’t want to link to spammy sites like porn, inkjet printers, car insurance companies, etc. You also don’t want to link to a specific keyword, which isn’t relevant to your industry or niche.

If you don’t ask your guest bloggers which keyword they’re focusing on or are they linking to spammy websites, then they will write an article that won’t add value.

At this point, if you reject their post, it sort of looks bad. It’s best not to waste time and get this out of the way.

Ask for Topic Ideas and Summary Before the Final Post

Often these SEO companies and spammers tend to have pre-written articles. They will say that we want to write for your blog, but they don’t suggest ideas.

Chances are, you will get a pre-written post that has been published on numerous sites. This is bad for your site as duplicate content can hurt your WordPress SEO.

It’s always best to ask them for topic ideas along with a summary or an outline of the article. This shows you how qualified they are to write the post, and you can approve or reject the topic.

It will also help you screen out generic posts or list posts that have already been covered by numerous other websites.

We hope this article helped you learn how to effectively attract and manage guest bloggers in WordPress. You may also want to check out our guides on how to choose the best blogging platform and our expert pick of the must have WordPress plugins for all websites.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Effectively Attract and Manage Guest Bloggers in WordPress appeared first on WPBeginner.

November 03, 2021 at 02:40PM

How to Setup WordPress Email Tracking (Opens, Clicks, and More)

Do you want to set up WordPress email tracking on your site?

WordPress email tracking will help you see whether your users receive, open, and click your emails.

In this article, we’ll show you how you can easily set up WordPress email tracking to gain new insights.

Note: This article is specifically for emails sent from your WordPress site such as order receipts, password reset emails, contact form follow-ups, and more. These are not marketing emails that you send with your email marketing service because those already have open and click tracking built-in.

Why Set Up Email Tracking in WordPress?

By tracking your WordPress site emails, you’ll be able to see who opens and clicks your emails. Plus, get detailed reports about email deliverability.

This helps to make sure that all of your website emails are reaching your users. You can even resend emails that didn’t get delivered to improve the overall user experience.

There are all kinds of reasons to track your WordPress emails:

• See which links in your emails are clicked
• Make sure important membership site and online course emails are sent
• Check if emails being sent by a certain plugin are delivered
• Ensure online store order and confirmation emails get to your users

Whether you’re running a WordPress blog or small business website, WordPress will send all kinds of automatic email notifications to your users.

This can be new user registration information, password reset emails, comments, WordPress updates, and much more.

You need to make sure all of the emails sent from your website go to your user’s email inbox and not to the spam folder.

The best way to do this is by using an SMTP service provider to improve email deliverability. For more details, see our guide on how to fix WordPress not sending email issue.

With that said, let’s take a look at how to set up WordPress email tracking, step by step.

Setting up Email Tracking in WordPress

For this tutorial, we’ll be using the WP Mail SMTP plugin. It’s the best WordPress SMTP plugin in the market used by over 2 million websites.

It lets you easily send all of your WordPress emails using an SMTP server and improve email deliverability for your WordPress website.

Step 1. Install and Setup WP Mail SMTP

First thing you need to do is install and activate the WP Mail SMTP plugin. For more details, see our beginner’s guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to go to WP Mail SMTP » Settings to configure your plugin settings.

Then, you need to enter your license key and click the ‘Verify Key’ button.

You can find this information under your account on the WP Mail SMTP website.

Once you’ve done that, you need to scroll down the page to the ‘Mailer’ section. Here you will choose how you want to send your WordPress emails.

The WP Mail SMTP plugin works with any SMTP service. There are easy setup options for the most popular providers, including Gmail, Outlook, SendInBlue, SendGrid, Amazon SES, and more.

Simply click on the mailer you want to use, and there will be detailed instructions on how you can set it up properly.

The default option is using the PHP mailer. However, we don’t recommend this method since it’s not reliable.

Most WordPress hosting servers aren’t configured to send emails. So, your WordPress emails may never even reach your users or end up in their spam folder.

For more details on setting up your SMTP server, see our guide on how to use a free SMTP server to send WordPress emails.

Step 2. Enable WordPress Email Tracking

Now that you’ve set up the plugin, it’s time to turn on the email logging and email tracking features.

Once activated, the plugin will automatically add a tracking pixel to every email that you send from WordPress.

To do this go to WP Mail SMTP » Settings and then click the ‘Email Log’ menu option.

After that, you’ll want to make sure that the ‘Enable Log’ box is checked for email records.

If it isn’t, then check the box now. This will keep a record of basic details about your emails and store them in your WordPress database.

You’ll also need this enabled if you want to resend emails in WordPress.

Next, you’ll see a few more checkboxes that let you turn on additional email tracking options. We recommend checking every box so you have more email tracking data available.

First, you can choose to save a copy of the email body. This lets you search the content of emails and also resend the entire email if it doesn’t send.

Simply check the ‘Log Email Content’ box to enable this.

Next, you can save a copy of the attachments that are sent from your site. This can be helpful if an email doesn’t send and you need to resend the attachment.

To enable this, you need to check the ‘Save Attachments’ box.

After that, you can track when an email is opened and which links get clicked by checking the ‘Open Email Tracking’ and ‘Click Link Tracking’ boxes.

Then, you can set the time period for how long you’ll save your email logs. If you’re concerned about disk space, then you can change the setting here.

Simply select the time period from the ‘Log Retention Period’ drop down.

Make sure to click the ‘Save Settings’ button before you leave the page.

Step 3. Check Email Tracking Analytics Data in WordPress

Once you’ve set up the plugin and sent out WordPress emails, you can view your email tracking and analytics data.

To do this head over to WP Mail SMTP » Email Log in your WordPress admin panel.

This screen will show you basic email data like opens and clicks, so you get a quick overview of your audience engagement.

Next, you can open up individual email logs to see in depth email information.

Simply hover over an email and click the ‘View Log’ link, and the email details will open in a new screen.

This shows you when the email was sent, the subject, if it was opened, and more.

Resend New User Emails in WordPress

Another great feature of WP Mail SMTP is the ability to resend emails.

To do this, go to back to WP Mail SMTP » Email Log to bring up your email logs.

This page shows you every email you’ve sent and whether or not it was delivered. The red dot means not sent and the green dot means delivered.

To resend an email, simply click the ‘View Log’ link on the email that didn’t send.

This brings you to the email log screen for that individual email.

Then, click the ‘Resend’ button in the ‘Actions’ tab.

This brings up a popup that will confirm the email address.

Simply click the ‘Yes’ button to resend the email.

If there are multiple failed emails, then you can use the bulk resend feature from the email log screen.

Simply check the box next to the emails that didn’t send, then select ‘Resend’ from the drop down list, and click the ‘Apply’ button.

This brings up a similar popup as above.

Simply click the ‘Yes’ button to resend the email to multiple users.

View WordPress Email Engagement Statistics

You can also view your full email tracking and reporting data by going to WP Mail SMTP » Email Reports.

This brings you to a screen with detailed statistics about your open rates and email deliverability.

Under the main graph you’ll find a breakdown of how your individual emails are performing.

You’ll see open rates, click through rates, deliverability breakdown, and more.

We hope this article helped you learn how to set up WordPress email tracking. You may also want to see our guide on how to create an email newsletter and our picks of the best business phone services for small business.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Setup WordPress Email Tracking (Opens, Clicks, and More) appeared first on WPBeginner.

November 02, 2021 at 04:00PM

How to Do Live Blogging in WordPress (Step by Step)

Do you want to learn how to do live blogging in WordPress?

Live blogging is a form of blogging that lets you cover live events and provide updates to your readers in real time.

In this article, we’ll show you how you can add live blogging to your WordPress site, step by step.

Why Do Live Blogging in WordPress?

Live blogging is when you create a single blog post and add real time updates during an event. This lets you add new content as the event unfolds, while keeping all the updates in a central place.

Bloggers and news sites commonly use it to broadcast real time updates from technology conferences, sports events, and across other blogging niches.

For example, if you run a crossfit gym you could provide real time live blogging coverage of the crossfit games.

Or, if you run a gaming website, you could provide real time blogging for eSports matches and other events.

Live blogging is a fun way to engage your readers and keep them coming back to your website for updates.

That being said, let’s show you how you can do live blogging on your WordPress site, step by step.

Install and Setup the Live Blogging Plugin

You could do live blogging in WordPress by manually editing a blog post every time you want to add an update.

However, if you live blog often, we recommend using the 24liveblog plugin. This free plugin lets you add real-time live blogging to your site easily.

24liveblog offers a forever-free plan that includes features like social media integration, real-time statistics, audio and video recording, and much more.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the 24liveblog plugin. For more details, see our beginner’s guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

After that, navigate to Settings » 24liveblog and then click the ’24liveblog’ link at the bottom of the sign up box.

This brings you to the sign in page on 24liveblog’s website.

You need to click the ‘Get started’ link at the bottom of the screen to create an account.

Next, you need to enter a user name, email address, and password.

Then, click the ‘Sign Up’ button.

Once you’ve done that, you need to activate your account.

Simply enter the code from your email and then click the ‘Confirm’ button.

After that, you can go back to Settings » 24liveblog in your WordPress dashboard and enter your email and password.

Then, click the ‘Log in’ button.

Now you’ve successfully connected your WordPress blog and the 24liveblog platform.

Add a New WordPress Blog Post for Live Blogging

Next, you need to create a blog post where you’ll embed your live blog.

To do this, go to Posts » Add New and then enter the name of your blog post.

Click the ‘Save Draft’ link at the top right.

Then, under the Permalink tab in the right-hand menu, make note of the blog post URL. You’ll need to enter this later in your live blog event details.

Create Your First Live Blog Event

Now head over to your account page on the 24liveblog website and click the ‘Create Event’ button.

This brings you to a screen where you can choose the type of event.

Simply click on the ‘Live Blog’ box.

Here you can enter your event details.

You need to give your event a title, select the time, and choose a category.

You can also add a description for your event and enter the URL for the blog post you created earlier.

Then, add a cover image for the event and click the ‘Next’ button.

On the next screen, you’ll find all kinds of options for visitor interaction.

For example, you can enable a countdown timer, real time sports score updates, and more.

You can choose to customize these as you like to suit your event, and then click the ‘Next’ button to continue.

On the next screen, you can choose to turn on live streaming and popups to grow your email list, but we’ll leave the default settings.

Then, click the ‘Next’ button at the bottom.

After that, you can choose a theme. This changes the style of your live blogging stream on your website.

We’ll use the ‘Default’ time. However, you can choose the theme that works best with your event.

To choose a new theme, all you have to do is click on it.

Then, click the ‘Next’ button at the bottom of the page. On the next screen, simply click ‘Next’ one more time.

After that, you’ll be taken to the final screen, where you need to click the ‘Create Event’ button.

Add the Live Blogging Feature to Your WordPress Blog Post

Now, you need to add the 24liveblog block to the blog post you created earlier.

Simply open up the blog post, then click the ‘Plus’ add block button.

Next, type ’24liveblog’ into the search bar.

Then, click the ’24liveblog’ block.

This will automatically add live blogging functionality into your blog post.

After that, click the ‘Select Liveblog’ button.

This brings up a popup that will list all of the events you have created.

Simply find your event and then click the ‘Add’ button.

You can continue to add more text and other elements to your post.

Once you’re finished, click the ‘Update’ or ‘Publish’ button to make your post live.

You can view your post even when the live blogging event hasn’t started.

If you enabled a countdown timer when setting up your event, then you’ll see the timer now.

When it’s time for your event to begin, simply open up your blog post in your post editor.

Then, click the ‘View’ button.

This will take you to your account on the 24liveblog website.

Here you can blog in real time, and your content will automatically be added to the live blogging post on your website.

Simply enter your post content and then click the ‘Add Post’ button.

You can also record live audio and add video and images to your post.

Your visitors can comment on each event update you publish and also chat with each other in the live chat window.

If you want to add an events calendar to your site that shows all of the live blogging events you’re hosting, then see our guide on how to create a simple event calendar with Sugar Calendar.

We hope this article helped you learn how to do live blogging in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to get a free email domain and our comparison of the best AI chatbots software for your website.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Do Live Blogging in WordPress (Step by Step) appeared first on WPBeginner.

November 01, 2021 at 03:30PM