9 Ways to Make Your Guest Post Editor Love You

(Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes)

Here’s some simple tips for getting your guest post published. For that matter, these tips will help get published on dead trees too.

I’ve never seen any of these tips published for guest posting on web sites. There are probably out there, I just haven’t found them.

What I have found is 100s of articles on “How to Pitch and Write a Guest Post.” Most of them are pretty good. You should do your own search and save a half dozen of the best to StumbleUpon or Delicious (friend me on StumbleUpon if you like, username dmdoolin, serious users only).

Instead, here’s what to do after your pitch is accepted:

It’s pretty easy. Just make a zip archive of everything that the editor needs for guest posting. Or might need. Or will make his or her life easier in all ways, or cure the shingles, or promote whirled peas, etc. Here’s a list of what makes me feel happy:

1. Brief bio, somewhere between 160-220 words. Basically one short to medium length paragraph is perfect.
2. Bio pic or head shot: Provide at least a thumbnail. If you want to provide other sizes, that’s fine, but the thumbnail is mandatory.
3. Use blog post template if necessary. If the editor “suggests” a template, he or she is just being nice. What “suggests” usually means is “mandatory.”
4. Copyright release detailing rights. Typically, the guest post author grants the host non-exclusive rights for publication under certain conditions. This is a large, complex and very murky area of law, and I am not a lawyer. Typically, copyright doesn’t matter until a dollar changes hands, then all of sudden everything gets really excited, and the sharks, smelling blood in the water, start to circle. I’ll have A LOT more information on how Website In A Weekend will handle copyright. I will say as a guest author, it should be a pretty good deal overall: backlinks, promotion, etc.
5. Post tags (WIAW will assign category). Feel free to add 7-10 tag suggestions for the editor’s convenience.
6. SEO title, description and keywords. Frankly, these meta items are a pain in the butt to write. Help the editor out by writing them yourself.
7. The article in HTML format. I was wondering what I was missing from the list… but yeah, you need to provide the article as well. Seems obvious, right?
8. “Original images” for locally hosting. Provide the original images used in the article, so that they can be hosted on the same site as the article. This saves an unbelievable amount of time.
9. Any other notes necessary. If there is something the editor needs not on this list, stick that into the zip file as well.

These tips are very similar to how you used to have to prepare a paper for academic publication. Nowadays, no need for 5 copies double-spaced with original figures on a certain size of paper. But, the strategic principle is the same: make it easy for the editor, the editor will make it easier for you!

If you have a guest post in queue, no worries, I’ll be emailing you for missing pieces as necessary.

Next post on this general topic will be copyright release. I’ve got a good notion of what’s fair and what ain’t, and I’ll be explaining why my opinion matters as well. Given the FTC’s new found interest in All Things Blog, I have no problem holding the difficult discussions in public. Look for it next week or the week after.

Did I miss anything? Let me know…