A great way to promote your book by reducing your workload is letting others guest blog on your site.

Hosting a guest blogger offers a couple of benefits to your site. Most obviously, it frees you from having to come up with another blog entry. More importantly, though, it exposes others to your blog and website, as the guest blogger promotes his appearance on your pages. This brings new visitors to your site, and many of them probably have never heard of you or your book.

To find guest bloggers, simply invite others to take on that role. Offers can be made via your social media posts or by emailing someone who you think would write something of interest to your readers.

You may receive guest blogging requests from people you don’t know. Before letting just anyone guest blog at your site, though, you’ll want to know their credentials. They should be qualified to write for your site and should be of interest to your readers. Perhaps their credentials are being a fellow author, a publisher, a literary agent, or a book editor. Or possibly they are an expert in the area you write about, say a car designer if you wrote a book about car maintenance.

In addition, before giving them the go ahead to write their guest blog, have them pitch some topics. You might then say “no” to some, as you’ve already written about them or as they wouldn’t be of interest to your readers. Other topics you might tweak so they better fit your readers. Knowing in advance what one guest blogger will write about also means you can say “no” to that topic if a second or third guest blogger proposes it.

One guest blog submission to always say “no” to is one that has appeared elsewhere. Guest bloggers should create unique material for your site or interest in the post will be reduced. Type various phrases from the submission into a search engine to see if it has already ran or has simply been rewritten for your site.

Always let your guest blogger know that you reserve the right to edit their submission. You should edit it as well, at least to catch typos. Such editing includes the option to reduce the piece’s length (If your blog runs about 800 words, you don’t want a 3000-word entry posted.) and writing the headlines/subheads as you see best.

Also limit the number of submissions by any one guest blogger, usually to once a month at most. Some writers are prolific and can churn out a lot of material that soon crowds out your own entries. If looking to reduce your workload, opting for a variety of guest bloggers typically is better than relying on one or two writers.

Be sure to promote your guest blogger and his topic on your various social media. This can attract attention and visits from those readers who would be particularly interested in the post. It’s also another way for those interested in the guest blogger to stumble across your site as they conduct Internet searches about him.