Guest blogging is an important part of online presence- both for the writers and the owner of the platform itself. For a writer, guest blogging enables them to reach a new audience and introduce themselves. This gives him extra exposure. But guest blogging is not just beneficial for the writer, as a website owner, you too can benefit from guest blogging.
As guest blogging enables new voices to be heard, by enabling people to write guest posts on your site, you are adding diversity to the content of your site. Your audience will love to hear new voices apart from the regular writers.
It's the reason guest blogging has taken off in the world of internet publishing. And it's here to stay for a long time to come.
Guest Blogging as An Income Source!
For some websites, however, guest blogging can be an opportunity to make some extra income. If your website has a large audience and you receive millions of visits on a regular basis, you can bet that there will be many who would want to write for your audience to give themselves or their product a boost of exposure. Right, there is your chance of earning some extra money.
Let's say you've managed to get people to pay for publishing posts on your site. How exactly do you go about charging your guest bloggers to publish content? How do you get them to pay? Is there an easy system that lets you maintain and manage the whole process automatically so that guest bloggers can pay and submit their posts without much complication?
Luckily for you, there is. Introducing WP User Frontend Pro plugin. What this plugin does is allow your guest bloggers to submit posts from the front-end of your site, and optionally charge them before they are allowed to do so.
Setup Guest Posting from Frontend
While the traditional approach to allowing guest bloggers to submit posts on your WordPress site is to create an account for them and let them submit posts for approval, wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to let your visitors in on the backend of your site? It won't just be safer to restrict their access to the backend of your site, it will also be professional to have a system set up that allows them to submit posts from the front-end of your website.
Best Guest Posting Plugin for WordPress
WP User Frontend Pro plugin is all you need to allow users to access the post editor on the frontend of your site. When this plugin is activated, users can register on the site from a form that appears on the front-end of the site, add and edit posts and view their posts dashboard all without ever accessing the wp-admin part of your website.
The plugin has built-in guest post support. This means, your users won't even have to have a registered account on your website before they can submit a post.
But let's just say you do want your guest bloggers to register on your site. You can do so, too. WP User Frontend Pro plugin allows creating of multiple forms to be displayed on different pages. So you can have a form specifically for the registration of guest bloggers.
Guest bloggers can provide the information you want from them while registering on your website for an account. With that out of the way, you can let your guest bloggers submit posts on your site.
You can even manage your affiliates with WP User Frontend.
You can also use this plugin to allow your own writers to submit posts from the front end of your site. As you can guess, there are versatile uses of the functionality of this plugin. If you're interested in learning more about what it has to offer, be sure to check out the WP User Frontend Pro plugin page for more information.
But I want to charge guest bloggers!
Relax, I haven't forgotten that part of the post! The previous section was to briefly introduce you to the functionality that the plugin has to offer. Now let's see how you can charge your guest bloggers for submitting posts on your site.
There are two types of methods for how you can charge your guest bloggers to submit posts on your site. They are:
- Pay per post.
- Subscription model.
Pay Per Post
This one is self-explanatory. If you want to keep things simple and charge your guest authors for every single post they want to publish, this is the way to go.
To set this option, navigate to User Frontend -> Settings and open up the Payments tab. Now set the following exactly as it is.
To clarify the settings, the Charge for posting must be set to Yes if you want to charge your guest bloggers. Force pack purchase must be set to Disable. Otherwise, the subscription model, details about which have been discussed in the next section, will be activated.
Down at the Cost section, you can set how much you want to charge your guest blogger for every individual post. Make sure to change currency if US Dollar isn't what you want to receive payment in. Also, Enable demo/sandbox mode must be deactivated to ensure the payment goes through.
When you save the settings, voila! You have just activated pay per post method on your site. The next time someone attempts to submit a post on your site, they will be asked to pay as soon as their post is submitted in pending status. When the payment goes through, you can review and publish the post as you wish.
Subscription Model
As the name suggests, if you'd rather have regular guest bloggers or writers who will be allowed to pay in advance and then submit a specific number of posts within a specific period of time, you can take advantage of the subscription option provided with WP User Frontend Pro.
To enable the subscription model, first, you need to head over to WP User Frontend -> Settings and under the Payment tab, you'll find the following settings.
While the Charge for posting is set to Yes, what you need to enable the subscription model is to set Force pack purchase to “Enable”. This will disable the pay-per-post model and activate the subscription model.
The next step, create a subscription pack.
Navigate to User Frontend -> Subscription. You will see a list of all subscriptions that are already created. If you haven't created any, this will show empty. Simply click Add New Subscription button from the top. You'll be presented with a screen identical to what you see below.
This new subscription page will allow you to give this pack a new name, a description, an amount to charge, an expiry date, set a recurring option, set how many posts this subscription pack will allow users to submit, and so on.
When you've entered all the details, simply click Publish and your new subscription pack will be active on your site.
Create Posting Form
So, you have registered your guest bloggers on your site and created a subscription pack from the backend. Now, it's time to create a posting form that you can redirect your guest bloggers to in order to submit posts. The question is, how do you make sure that your guest bloggers won't be able to submit using that form without subscribing to a membership pack first?
Simple. Just follow the instructions as laid out below (WP User Frontend Pro User Documentation):
- Create a posting form using WPUF
- Create a new page and copy-paste the shortcode that you generated after creating the form in the previous step
That's pretty much it. Save the page, and send the page link to your registered guest bloggers to submit their posts. They will be prompted to pay according to what they've set (subscription or pay per post). If pay per-post is set, they'll be asked to pay that amount via PayPal.
If the subscription model is set, they'll be asked to subscribe to a pack. And when they do, they will be allowed the number of posts set by your subscription pack.
Wrapping Up
As you can see, the process requires a bit of time and understanding of how WP User Frontend Pro works but once you get the hang of it — and you will get the hang of it soon, it's really easy and straightforward. You don't have to do this every day! Just set up once and let your guest bloggers pay to appear in front of your wide audience.
What's your take on charging guest bloggers to submit content on your site?