Responding to Guest Blogger Requests

It’s been a curi­ous 24 hours. First, snow falling on daf­fodils and cherry blos­soms (our first of the sea­son, here in Seat­tle). Then, 2 peo­ple emailed me, hav­ing found my blogs, to inquire about con­tribut­ing posts for this blog and my per­sonal blog.

The requests, while flat­ter­ing, caught me off guard. They made me real­ize I hadn’t thought about a pol­icy or guide­lines that would make it easy to know when to say yes or no to such requests. And because I blog for love, not money, the answers aren’t nec­es­sar­ily as straight­for­ward as they are for peo­ple who mon­e­tize their blogs.

Given that blog­ging (to me) is all about the authen­tic voice, or shar­ing thoughts, per­sonal reac­tions and feel­ings, how best to respond when some­one else — par­tic­u­larly some­one you don’t know per­son­ally — asks to step in and guide a con­ver­sa­tion? For the moment I’m think­ing about this like a din­ner party. Why not allow other peo­ple, if the con­ver­sa­tional topic seems appro­pri­ate, to share their voices from time to time?

I’m lean­ing toward an exper­i­ment or two. We’ll see what hap­pens as this unfolds.

Mean­while I’ve replied to the requesters that I’m not inter­ested in show­cas­ing overt com­mer­cial pitches of someone’s prod­uct or ser­vices. It’s pos­si­ble that this response may have dis­cour­aged one or both of the peo­ple who con­tacted me yes­ter­day. We’ll see…

If I decide to exper­i­ment, I’m relieved to note that my Word­Press instal­la­tion enables me to accom­mo­date peo­ple with roles as author or con­trib­u­tor… What’s unknown is how much effort will be required on my behalf to ensure the con­tributed post is appro­pri­ate for this blog.

Tagged as: blogging policies, social media policies, WordPress contributors