Recently I realised I had, with the Blogmistress, become expert on collaborative blogging, also known as multi author blogs. We have half a dozen growing group blogs under our belts and they work well, both for us and for the bloggers involved.
A collaborative blog is a blog with many authors around a central theme and that central theme is the framework that holds the blog together.
The first thing needed when setting up a collaborative blog is your central topic, so have a good brainstorm on that – this will help you when you invite people to join. Google Trends can help you see any patterns of what is popular and becoming popular if you need some inspiration.
When you have your main topic, you need to invite contributing bloggers and you will need to do the best selling of your life here, you need to be able to sell the concept of working smarter, not harder and you need to be able to take the rejections. You also need to be able to deal with the questions that your prospective bloggers have they include:
- What’s in it for me?
- How many links per post?
- How often do I have to blog?
- Can I publish something I have previously written?
- What’s in it for me?
- How many words do I have to blog?
- What topics can I blog about?
- What happens when I want to leave?
When collaborative blogging it helps to have the answers to these questions and more ready.
When you have your bloggers, you need to decide on your posting frequency – daily, thrice daily, thrice weekly and at what time.
You will also need a way of managing your bloggers – decide whether to add a forum or a chat room to your blog.
Then the next step is to register your domain name, upload WordPress and start sourcing your theme.
On Birds, Grumpies, Africa, Blokes, Mums and Home we use the Studiopress Magazine theme. This makes the site very visual and attractive. This was the third or fourth theme we used before we settled on it, so be prepared to be looking for a new theme within a week or so of starting the collaborative blog.
Plugins – when you have a blog with a lot of bloggers you will need some plugins to 
help manage the site.
Editorial Calendar, Future Posts and Smart SEO Links are the vital components of each of our collaborative blogs. The editorial calendar to manage the scheduling. Future posts so you can see what days are empty and start planning and SEO Smart links as you will have a lot of common things that need linking to – previous posts, authors, pages – you name it and a link is probably desired, this plugin manages it all neatly for you.
Start scheduling after you have decided how you are going to manage the posts – will bloggers upload them directly? Or will they send them to you? Do you need a gravity form uploader?
Make sure right at the start that images are sourced ethically and legally - no bandwidth stealing, no image stealing and give guidance to your bloggers about images.
Another thing you need to consider is editing, I have a light hand on the editing – obvious typos and obvious grammar edited. Style of writing will be left untouched. Consider what you need evidence for – will bloggers be asked to cite sources and resources used? Will you encourage them to link out to these sources? And bear in mind that you, as the blog’s owner, are ultimately responsible for the content.
Mediation
You need an exit strategy and you need a plan for what happens if something goes wrong, you also need to be upfront with your bloggers about costs, and about advertising revenues and whether they are allowed their own affiliate links in posts. They are all areas where you will need your diplomacy skills.
A collaborative blog is a great way of working with other bloggers and raising all of your profiles. It is hard work and can be rewarding.
Enjoy 
Sarah
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Some great tips Sarah, from the Queen of multi author blogs
They both work really hard on these blogs and I am proud that they allow me to contribute to them, I suspect it’s because I am married to her though
I did put that originally actually that I was the queen of them
but thought ‘expert’ sounded better. I was musing yesterday around writing 5,000 words about them that I actually knew an awful lot and needed to start getting this info out to people.
Well I have a question for you, Sarah: why do YOU do it? As far as I can see, you don’t make any money out of it, so why put all the effort in?
Nope, no money yet but we have educated some girls who would have fell by the wayside otherwise.
I will write a post solely in the benefits just for you Morag
We get to educate about what being a woman in business is really like, we get to lift each other as a group, we get to talk about what really interests women in business and looking at the stats, it is not lipstick and shoes or how much we weigh…
I will leave you with this thought, if you lost someone in a store or in the street you have some options. You can look or shout out on your own and you many get lucky. Or you can persuade some people around you to help you look and shout out. The louder the voice, the luckier you get. We are just making ourselves very lucky
[...] blogs. Collaborative blogs can also be known as multi author blogs.In the comments of How to set up a collaborative blog Morag asked what I actually get from it as there is very little money in them.Ok, let’s [...]