Was asked to take a look at PostRunner for WordPress guest posting and ran it through a few trials over the past few weeks on my smaller sites. PostRunner is a guest blogging service that directly ties into your WordPress blog, guest posters submit guest posts to other bloggers as drafts directly in their WordPress dashboard and they have the option of publishing them, scheduling them or rejecting them.
If you are a blog that looks for guest posts to help fill your post schedule or say you have a vacation and need some filler articles, guest posting can do a good job of filling some slots when you are too busy to create your own content. I don’t suggest completely supplying your site with too much guest content as all guest bloggers want SEO links out to their own sites and this can create many outbound links but occasionally a guest post may be worth hosting.
As a publisher PostRunner is free, you just sign up and install the WordPress plugin for PostRunner.
After some time if your blog has a PR and is of interest to guest bloggers, you will see draft posts show up on your WordPress blog and be notified in PostRunner. Here you have the ability to perform any edits, add images, and score the guest post. You can choose to schedule it, reject it, send feedback to author and even ban the author from submitting future guest posts if you really don’t like their content.
As a content creator you have to pay a fee to PostRunner monthly in order to be able to submit articles to other sites, this cost is based on the number of websites you are wanting to promote. This is not unlike submitting guest posts into the marketplace in MyBlogGuest which is another service for guest posting.
Overall in my few weeks of using Post Runner to fill some posts on a Culinary blog I found that it is hit and miss, some of the content I would say meets requirements on what one would expect in a guest post, but a lot of it is as you would expect from guest content submitted randomly. This is poor quality writing with some broken English and is just mostly fluff material. It really depends on which authors are submitting the articles, and there aren’t a lot of publishes at least not ones sending content to my test sites in the system that I can tell you I found some amazing guest posts in my queue.
The system should also enforce an author bio in each article it submits, or register using a guest author account that you set for the plugin, so all your guest posts can log under the same guest account. You will also need a plugin like Better Recent Drafts to keep track and see those submitted guest posts on your WordPress dashboard as well or you won’t notice them.
The system has potential but again, I wouldn’t rely on it for stellar content, more for a way to get some extra content from guest posts that may help fill some days where you need content. Overall I still prefer the My Blog Guest system which has bloggers look through a marketplace to help better match content to their site and after you express interest, you can always reject it after you see the full article. I have found some pretty decent quality guest posts on My Blog Guest, but there are also some that aren’t up to standards too so guest content is really hit and miss wherever you go.
If you want to increase the quality of guest post submissions in PostRunner you can try increasing your minimum accepted score to 80% or above and increase word count to 500+ or reduce to 1 link. This in theory should restrict the quality of advertiser who can publish to your blog, and may help increase the quality of guest post submissions but again there would have to be a lot of advertisers and activity in the system to see guest posts come in.
This is an original article from WP Cypher Copyright 2012
