Let’s talk about some quick and easy steps that you can take to guarantee that your guest post will get published the first time, every time.
1. Adapt Your Style
When you’re submitting a guest post to another blog, you’re putting your content in front of an already established audience. They know what they like, they know why they’re here, and they want more of that. They’re not that interested in coming to read posts that don’t fit in with what they’re used to.
So whenever you are planning to submit a guest post to a pre-established blog, particularly if the blog is very popular, be sure you adapt your writing style to fit what their readers are used to. This doesn’t mean writing like that blog’s author, it means keeping your formatting and style similar to what the readers are used to.
If they are used to short sentences and short paragraphs, don’t write continuous pages of dense paragraphs.
2. Make It Actionable
One of the quickest ways to get your guest post published is to make it incredibly actionable. That means giving the audience something they can take and put into practice as soon as they finish reading.
Bloggers love actionable content because readers love actionable content. A practical, actionable guest post is more likely to get published than a post about brilliant theory. Make sure you give the readers a call to action and next steps that they can follow the moment they’ve finished reading.
3. Don’t Be Promotional
Remember that guest posting means that you are just that, a guest. You are being allowed to share your content on someone else’s property, and a great way to make sure that your content never get published is to use that property for your own gain.
Don’t write a post that’s all about your latest project or product. Don’t insert affiliate links into your content. Don’t encourage people to visit your blog or by your stuff. Bloggers are more than happy to allow you a bit of promotion in your “About the Author” box at the end of each guest post, save it for there.
4. Innovate Their Old Posts
When you’re writing for blogs that have been around for a while, it can sometimes be hard to get your guest post published because your topic has already been covered so well in the past. The best way around this is to go back to the archives of the blog you’d like to be published on and find old posts that you can innovate or find new angles for. Find new ways to approach the topic, new ways that the readers can make those old posts actionable.
Bloggers love this because it helps drive traffic deeper into their blog and improve their SEO with good unlinking.
5. Build On Their Old Posts
A similar approach is to find old posts that you can build on. Instead of finding new angles, you might find new ways of expanding upon what was already talked about before. You can combine strategies from old posts into something new and interesting. Guest post publishers tend to be big fans of this because it pulls their content together in a more helpful and long-lasting way.
6. Link To Their Old Posts
Once you’ve done numbers four and five on this list, help out your host blogger by finding the specific posts and linking to them yourself. This helps promote their old posts and it saves them a lot of time when publishing. It’s a nice thing to do and it will make it more likely that they’ll say yes to your written draft if you have already done most of the work for them.
7. Do The Formatting Yourself
In the same vein as number six, format your guest post before you submit it.
Be sure to read the rules for submission in the listings on Guest Blogger’s Market to be sure, but most bloggers who accept written drafts prefer to have them formatted when they are submitted. That means entering headings, or bold and italic text yourself instead of asking the blogger to do it for you. This saves them a lot of time and hassle, which is what makes it more likely that they’ll publish.
8. Follow Their Rules
Guest Blogger’s Market lists many of the rules that our blogger ask you to use when you submit guest post to them. We don’t however cover them all. Many bloggers have guest posting guidelines laid out in specific sections on their sites.
Guest Blogger’s Market usually links to these with a button labeled “Guest Posting Guidelines”. Be sure to read the guidelines when they’re included. The more closely you can follow any rules previously laid down, the more likely it is that your guest post will be published the first time around.
9. Keep Their Audience In Mind
The number one reason you want to guest post is to drive traffic to your blog to build your audience, right? And that’s great, but that’s not why bloggers want to publish your content. Similarly to not writing promotional content, make sure that your content is always geared toward their readers and not yours. Write what’s useful to them and what’s on their minds. Content that focuses more on the readers then on your needs is always more likely to be published.
10. Be Patient
Bloggers can be busy people and many of them receive too many guest posts per day to deal with effectively, so don’t be worried if you don’t hear back immediately. Be patient, follow-up when you feel you need to, but make sure you give bloggers enough room to digest your guest post before getting back to you. This also goes for waiting for your guest post to be published. It’s not unusual for guest posts to be accepted quickly but not published for weeks or months. This happens when bloggers have a jampacked content calendar already prepared. Don’t be offended or put off by this, yes you will have to wait, but your content will be published and in the meantime you can submit more guest posts to get the ball rolling and build up some traffic momentum.
While every blog in blogger is different, these 10 rules are a good place to start to ensure that your content is accepted quickly and easily.
Another good place is our free report, “The Secret Psychology to Getting Your Guest Posts Published.” It contains two free template submission emails and an in-depth look at the psychology behind why they are so effective at getting your content accepted at even the biggest blogs on the net.
To instantly download your free copy, just click on the “Share” button above and tell your friends and followers on Facebook or Twitter about the Guest Blogger’s Market. Help us spread the word and we’ll reward you handsomely.
