Dear WordCount: how do I run guest posts on my blog?

Dear WordCount is an occasional advice column that answers your questions about freelance writing, blogging and working as a self-employed writer. During May, I’m answering questions posed by people in the 2012 WordCount Blogathon.

Dear WordCount:

I don’t know how guest posts work. I need a basic how-to guide that includes how a guest blogger posts to your blog and vice versa.

— P

Dear P:

This is a timely question since the guest post exchange that’s part of the 2012 Blogathon happens on May 14.

If you’re swapping posts as part of a guest post exchange, here’s how it works: You write a post and send it to your partner in Word or a similar text or blogging file format. Most bloggers would like you to submit a head shot or other digital image of yourself to run with your post, along with a one- or two-line bio. If you know how to use hypertext (links to information that’s found elsewhere online), include a couple – but don’t overdo it. Your partner should follow the same steps for sending a post to you. Then you upload the post to your blog like you would any other post that you write, and schedule a run date or publish it right away.

I run posts from guest posters all the time, so I have guest post guidelines, which you can see on in this post about how to write a guest post for WordCount.

If you don’t already have guest posting guidelines, think of anything that you would want a guest poster to know: do you want them to suggest a headline and a meta description for their post? Do you want them to suggest a few keywords? Do posts on your blog usually run a certain length  (300 to 500 words is good)?

If you’d like to see an example of what a guest post looks like, here’s one that website content writer Sara Lancaster did for my blog recently: Guest post: 4 naughty tips for a better blog

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Dear WordCount:

Hey Michelle, how much will I pay if I get a self-hosted WordPress blog? What are the advantages and disadvantages of a self-hosted blog?

— A

Dear A:

How much you’d pay depends on the host service company you use; I use BlueHost. I pay about $10 a month; I also pay for six domain names – the one that I use and five others that are similar enough that I wouldn’t want someone else to use them. That’s something on the order of $160 to $180 a year for those services.

I also paid a website developer/designer to move my blog from WordPress.com to a self-hosted site, and to design my site. You could do that on your own, but because of how much I work, I had someone do it for me. Those costs can range from several hundred to several thousand dollars, depending on how elaborate you want your website/blog to be.

Here’s some more information on self-hosted WordPress blogs, from a #wclw live chat I did a while back with web designer Ron Doyle: Working with WordPress: themes, hosts, plugins and more.

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Dear WordCount:

I’ve been blogging for years using just my own photos. Where else can I find images?  Today I’m working on a post on different ways to use Mason jars and I’d like to include images from the source articles.  Do I need to contact each blog to ask permission?  Do I include a link in my post to the image on their blog, or pull the image down and re-host it?  Each of those seems questionable as far as copyright goes. How do others do this?

— AR

Adding photos to blog posts is smart, because they make your posts look more professional, because readers like them, and because Google notices them, which helps your posts appear higher in search engine results. But as you suspected, you can’t just grab an image to use in a post without regard for who owns it; if you do and it’s protected by a copyright, you’re infringing on the owner’s intellectual property.

Here are some popular sources for finding images for blog posts:

Creative Commons. My standard fall-back source for photos is Creative Commons. It’s a clearinghouse of content, including images, that the license holders make available for other people to use online with limited or no restrictions. On the Creative Commons site, use a search window to type in keywords that describe the image you’re looking for. The site’s internal search engine will look through images from Google and Flickr and videos on blip.tv. If you see something in the search results that you’d like to use, click through to read what licensing rights the copyright holder is making available. Sometimes all they ask is that you identify them as the photographer when you run the photo (which is exactly what I did for the photo that’s running with this post). Read about more sources for free photos in this comment that a WordCount reader left on a previous post about using images in posts.

istockphoto and stock photo services. Stock images are another way to go. Stock photos or illustrations are existing photos that the owners sell online, often at very low prices. Many bloggers use istockphoto.com, an online stock photo company that sells images for as little as 95 cents. istockphoto lets you buy credits that you can use to purchase images. Other sources of stock photos that bloggers I know use include rgbstock and Stock.xchng.

DIY. As you already know, there’s another option: taking your own photos. You don’t need a fancy digital camera to take pictures. If you’ve got a smartphone, just point and shoot. You can post the photo to Flickr, Facebook or Twitpic, then copy and paste it into a blog post, or use WordPress’ QuickPress feature to put it directly into your blog.