Blogging and content creation, in general, is no joke. It’s actually a very demanding and time-consuming endeavor, especially if you do it by yourself. A lot of things go into blogging, and contrary to popular belief it doesn’t just entail writing and posting blog posts, but also coming up with content ideas, maintaining the blog, and interacting with its visitors.
Out of everything we just mentioned, creating the content might be the hardest task among them all. Why? Well because not only does it require you to dedicate a generous amount of time into making it happen it also requires you to be innovative, creative, and a fairly decent writer. Unfortunately, even if you check all these boxes, your blog’s audience still might not be satisfied.
No matter how good your writing skills are and how well-crafted your blog content is, if you created it on your own, it will share similarities with your earlier work and with time it won’t be as exciting and appealing to people as it once was.
To get yourself out of this and other similar situations, you should start implementing a popular practice on your blog, a practice of having multiple authors as co-authors of your posts.
What does it mean to have multiple authors and how does your blog benefit from it?
Although most of you are already aware of this, we still have to point out that there is no rule which says that you have to be the sole author on your blog. Having other authors is not only normal, but it’s also expected from you if you want to strive in today’s blogging world.
The authors you have on your blog can be regulars that produce content for you in set intervals or can be casual contributors that you host 1-2 times or every once in a while. So basically, they can either be your employees or your guests.
It’s important to note that not only can your blog have multiple authors, but your individual blog posts can too. Posts that have been written by multiple authors are special. These posts offer multiple perspectives/approaches to a single topic allowing you to give your readers a truly in-depth analysis of the topic from every possible angle.
If the same topic was covered by just one author, his/her thoughts and opinions would only match the thoughts and opinions of one portion of your audience. On the other hand, a multi-author post can satisfy the preferences of the majority, sometimes even the entirety of your audience by having so much variety within it.
But the authors don’t always have to have differing opinions, they can actually share the same ones and then each elaborate them thorough their own dedicated section of an article.
Having articles like these will be a huge asset for your blog, but they are not the only benefit you will get once you start having multiple authors on your blog.
The other benefits include:
- Growing your blog more rapidly because of the increased quantity of quality content you are publishing.
- Having more time to dedicate to other aspects of your blog besides content creating.
- Making your blog more professional and giving it more authority in the industry by introducing to it guest authors that are experts and established names in specific fields.
- Expanding and diversifying the range of topics that are covered on your blog by having people from different areas of expertise produce content for you.
- Having consistent volumes of content at all times thanks to a larger number of authors writing the content and also filling in for each other in times of absence and other unpredictable situations.
- Enjoying more trust from your readers since 60% of them see multi-author blogs as more credible. As pointed out in various SEO reports, audiences want to see the face of the person they are writing or reading about–and are more likely to share or trust their content as a result of it.
- Last but not least, being able to create an organized content schedule in advance so you only have to worry about publishing content on the days you do your scheduling.
How to credit multiple authors at the same time?
Crediting all the authors that contribute to your blog and its posts is extremely important not only because it’s what the authors want and deserve but also because it’s the only sure way to keep the authors satisfied and willing to work with you again, besides, of course, paying them for their work on time.
Considering the fact that multi-author blogs and posts are so popular, it comes as a surprise that by default WordPress doesn’t allow you to credit multiple authors at once. This can only be done with the help of plugins which specialize in author bio boxes and multi-author crediting.
One of the best plugins of this sort available on the market is called Simple Author Box. Using this plugin, the process of crediting your co-authors will be extremely straightforward.
When crediting your authors your blog posts will be enriched with multiple responsive author boxes which will contain the name of the authors, their pictures, bios, and social media icons.
Depending on how you configure the settings of the Simple Author Box plugin, the author boxes will be added automatically, or you can do it manually yourself through inserting shortcodes and PHP code in instructed areas.
When choosing the authors that you want to credit you will have two options. The first option is to pick an existing WordPress user form a drop-down list. The second option is to create a co-author account but without having to create a WordPress account for that person first.
This is a great option and one that you will be using the majority of the time since you don’t want to give your co-authors/guest authors proper WordPress accounts that would also give them access to your site.
Creating the co-author account will not take more than a few minutes, and can be done directly through a pop-up window which will appear on the page of the specific post you want to credit the multiple authors on.
Compared to other plugins intended for the same purpose, Simple Author Box has made crediting multiple authors as simple as possible. That is why you should definitely take it into consideration when choosing a plugin that will help you complete this very important task.
Conclusion
We hope this article gave you a clear answer to the questions of why and how you can have multiple authors on your WordPress blog.
We know that some of you might be skeptical about it, and that is normal, a lot of people before you were as well. But one thing we can tell you for sure is, that once those people did go the multi-author route, they never went back.
Thanks for reading!