When guest blogging goes wrong

Imagine this:

You are responsible for a popular business blog with a thriving community. You begin regularly interacting with a new community member via your blog’s comment section and Twitter. Over time, the relationship reaches a comfortable point and the community member wants to submit a guest post. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, you agree. You run the post, your community likes it, the author responds to comments and everything seems normal.

A couple of months pass and the following comment pops up on the post, “I’m glad most of you liked the post. I’m the guy who really wrote it. My name is Gary and I was paid $50 for it.”

Wait, what? Sounds crazy right, almost unbelievable? It would never happen, right?

Oh, but it did. It’s absolutely 100 percent true. It’s become known as “The Great Ghost Post Scandal.”