5 Reasons For and Against Making Your Blog Multi-Author

This is a guest post by Kyle Judkins. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

I have been blogging for over a year now, and during this time, I came to a point where I wanted to expand my blog. The problem was that I just didn’t have enough time, as I have a full time job as a market researcher outside of my blog. This lack of time led me to the decision to hire writers for my blog. This wasn’t any easy decision, and it raised lots of questions. How would I pay them? Would it just add more work? Am I fit to manage other writers?

All of these questions were hard to answer, so I did what most people do. I just started blindly hiring writers with no roadmap in place. I was going with a straight trial by fire. It took some time and patience, but I now have a great system in place and am really glad I expanded to a multi-author blog. In this article, I’m going to tell you about the benefits and drawbacks of having a multi-author blog.

The Benefits

I figured it best to give you the good news first about have multiple authors on your blog, so you don’t just read the bad news and be scared off from attempting this drastic change.

1. More Articles and Content for Your Blog

I have never been a blazing fast writer, and I have a full time job. These things together make it near impossible for me to get more than 2 or 3 quality articles done a week. With only a limited number of articles per week, quick expansion of audience and article portfolio was out of the question.

Multiple authors have allowed me to ramp up the number of posts per week, and it allowed me to keep up posting consistency. If I went on vacation or took a break before, the blog sat stagnant. With extra authors, I always have a nice stock of articles just waiting to be published.

2. Expand the Topics Covered

Much to the dismay of many bloggers out there, I am a Windows guy. I have been my whole life and will continue to do so. I run a tech blog, so I would love to write about Mac software and hardware. However, I have no experience in that arena, so any articles I may have tried to write would have come off as uninformed and low quality.

In my search for authors, I made sure to find a few that used Macs in order to expand my blog’s coverage into that area. This helps round out my articles and gives me a little more variability and flexibility.

3. Increased Network

One thing that I didn’t think about at all when hiring writers, was how it was going to change my network. I never realized that you are not just hiring writers, you are hiring new marketers as well. I’ve had writers submit articles to social media sites and link me on their blog. This does nothing but attract more readers and get Google to like my blog that much more.

5. Become an Editor

My undergrad degree is in industrial engineering. That’s about as far away from journalism as you can get. Needless to say, I’ve never been the most swift writer, but I have polished my skills and been really impressed with my progress over the last year. However, I still don’t have amazing writing speed, so crafting a great article takes me some time.

Editing articles takes FAR less time for me. I am very open to all types of writing styles and articles, so skimming through someone else’s article and correcting grammar and formatting errors goes much faster. Becoming the editor has been great for me, as I still get to put my spin on things without having to spend so much time on research and writing.

5. Management Experience

Before have a multi-author blog, I had never been anyone’s boss. Being the boss has provided me with some great experience that will translate into the real world. I know that it isn’t exactly the same as face to face managing, but I still have to assign tasks, resolve conflict and communicate goals and objectives clearly. I firmly believe that these experiences will help me in my future career wherever it may take me.

The Drawbacks

Now that I’ve gotten you excited about expanding your blog, I’m going to give you the other side of the expansion story. The next five reasons are going to focus on the downsides of running a multi-author blog, because not everyone is going to find a solution to their blogging issues by changing to a multi-author blog. Let’s get right into the reasons of why you may not want a multi-author blog.

1. Loss of Control

In a multi-author blog you are still the final approver of content, and you can reject whatever you want. You could also demand all of your authors to write only about this topic or that topic, but I have a feeling that most people won’t like to be told exactly what to do or what to write about. If you don’t give your authors flexibility, someone else will.

Writers will write in a different tone or style than your own, and they will write about topics that may not have been your first pick. I was a little bit of a perfectionist before I hired authors, but I had to drop that mindset quickly and let go of my control over everything. If you want everything to be done a certain way, having multiple authors may prove to be a challenge.

2. Loss of Voice

This goes back to the fact that other authors have a different writing style than your own. This may help or hurt your blog, as you may have built up a strong audience with the way you write. You can still edit posts to make them sound more like you, but there is a fine line between just editing an article and rewriting it. It can be hard to keep the blog as just your own, because future readers will see many authors. This takes the focus off of you and could be a deal breaker for certain bloggers that want their blog to just be their own.

3. Become an Editor

This was one of the reasons to have a multi-author blog, but that was due to the fact that I am not a writer at heart. If you are a natural writer and really love crafting articles, becoming an editor could be something that provides you with little reward or excitement. Moving your time from the creative side to a more administrative role could be very hard and boring for many individuals and cause them to lose the passion they once had for their blog.

4. Become a Manger

This, again, was a positive in the previous list. The truth is that managing people can be challenging and down right frustrating at times. People have different personalities and ways of expressing their feelings. Dealing with people can be great, or it can be like babysitting.

Also, turnover tends to be fairly high, because you probably won’t have all the money in the world to pay your authors to keep them around. Training and constantly dealing with new people can get really old after a while.

5. Share the Wealth

If you hire authors, you have to pay them (well, most of the time). This starts to cut into that revenue you were building and were so proud of. Going from $100 a month back to almost nothing, because all of it is going to authors is a very hard thing to swallow. You may not see how the increased articles will yield increased revenue in the future. It is an investment, and some investments never pay out.
Conclusion

I am a big fan of running a multi-author blog and have gotten lots out of the change, but there are also many reasons to not take on this expansion, especially if your blog is very focused on your thoughts and opinions. Let us know what you think about multi-author blogs in the comments.

This is a guest post by Kyle Judkins, owner of LostInTechnology and the recently launched UpYourSocial.