No Guest-Bloggers Allowed

Ahem... contrary to the heading, today's post is from my first-ever guest blogger, Damaria. This is her take on sites that don't allow guest bloggers...

I recently asked a blogger if she would host me as a guest-blogger on her site, as part of my online promotion of Kwanda, the community makeover show. She flatly told me “NO.”

No, she didn’t object to me personally. My content is really harmless, and we’d never “met” on the blogosphere, so I’ve never had the occasion to offend her.

The reason was that she had been let down by bloggers too make times. They’d come on her site, make promises, and then disappear from the face of the earth. So she decided she would no longer host guest-bloggers.

Practically speaking, I couldn’t argue with her position. It is her site, and she can do whatever she likes, and if she doesn’t want to have guest bloggers, that’s cool.

But I also felt sad for her, because she must have been disappointed many times to come to that decision. And if you have been on the Internet/blogosphere long enough, you know what I’m talking about: good content sites shut down seemingly overnight, because the hosting fees are climbing higher due to increased traffic, and the site consumes so much time to update and maintain, and the owner is not getting advertising revenue to keep the site going.

Or a blogger gets tired; wonders if he/she still has something to say. Decides he/she doesn’t, and shuts down a popular blog.

Or my very favourite, which happens a lot among writing blogs: the blogger is inundated with client work. Most of us writers just hang out at our blogs to make friends, have fun and have a platform to occasionally vent to people who truly understand what you’re going through. So when you have to slice up your 24/7 to your priorities, sometimes, paying work trumps blogging. Because blogging is just a fun activity [unless you do it for the money etc].

So I wondered if I would I ever be so tired of being disappointed by bloggers [for the above reasons] that I would decide not to have guest-bloggers anymore. Would blogging be just as rewarding for me?

And what about you? Are you comfortable having guest-bloggers on your blog? Why/not?