9 Ways to Make Your Guest Post Editor Love You

October 15, 2009 By 5 Comments

(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:


Make the editor love you; create a submission package.

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…

Filed Under: Creating Content Tagged With: , , , ,

Choose 3 to 7 Posting Categories to More Effectively Focus Your Writing

March 11, 2009 By 12 Comments

(Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes)

Don’t do what I did: I made a serious mistake on my first blog with respect to WordPress categories. I created too many. Then I compounded that mistake by listing most posts under multiple categories

This happened because I started writing before tagging was integrated into WordPress. Tagging used to be a plugin. So I didn’t use it.

Now, I recommend limiting categories to 3-7 topics to keep your writing tightly focused. Tags can be used to show key ideas covered in each post or page. A further benefit is that you can set up categories to display as part of the URL, which has SEO advantages. (Which is where I have a problem with too many categories: changing now is going to hammer my search results.)

Woops. I just published this post accidently… but I haven’t finished writing it…

…excuse me for a moment. I need fortification. Time to make some tea and fire up some music. I have a conference call coming up in an hour, and I better finish article this before the conference call starts…

The Upshot…

Stay Focused: Pick 3-7 Categories

Picking a small number of topical categories benefits you in several ways:

  1. Keeping within the subject of the category will keep your writing on topic, helping your grow an audience
  2. Using the category name in your URL helps search engines more accurately classify your content.
  3. Having fewer rather than more categories helps narrow your overall niche, allowing you to better focus on your customers need.

Take action now: Either create your categories, or prune your existing categories to keep your writing focused.

Ok, the tea is on… bad europop (Atomium 3003) is banging away on iTunes… let’s get back to WordPress categories.

How to create categories

Creating categories isn’t too difficult, provided you have a good idea of what you want to write about. If you’re not really sure about what you want to write about… you might want to consider your overall motivation… but it’s just fine to feel compelled to write at any cost! (I started like this myself; write, just write anything, write all the time, figure it out later.)

If you’re like most people (most of us are… like most people), you have a pretty good general notion of what you want to write about, but you’re a little fuzzy on the details.

This is good.

Here’s how to create a set of categories, while at the same time brainstorming for a bunch of articles you want to write anyway:

Write out 100 titles as fast as you can!

This should take, realistically, at least a couple of hours.

Write them out by hand on index cards.* Then put all the cards away and go dig in your garden, hang out with your spouse, watch a movie, whatever. Come back to them the next day. Sort the cards into 5 to 7 stacks, 10 at the most. If you have a few cards in stacks of one, save those too. Those can be articles you write as a guest posted on someone else’s blog. Or on a new blog covering a different subject.

Now, name each stack with a word, or at most two words. I’m using two words on this blog, with category names that describe the activities you take after reading posts.

And as I write… I can see I need to change some category names… since I want YOU to read each post and take action, the category names should be action-oriented. “Getting Started” and “Building Traffic” are good, “Social Media,” not so much. This bears some thought. Check back later.

Your category names should indicate your desire for your reader. If you provide information benefitting your reader, create informative category name. If taking action benefits your reader, create category names inspiring action.

This might be more difficult than you think at first. It does bear some time in thought. Your readers will do what you ask… as long as they understand exactly how what you’re asking them to do benefits them!

Adding tags to articles

This isn’t a post on tagging, but tags are so easy, they don’t need a whole post to themselves. Tags are most often used in two ways:

  1. As reader-visible keywords extracted directly from the article. For example, this article has the tags “Categories” and “Tags” associated with it. So nicely self-referential, no?
  2. As words not in the article which provide intellectual or emotional context to the article. Consider an article, say, “Women Has Octuplets.” I would tag this with “Octuplets” to be sure, but I might also tag it with “WTF?” (you can look it up).

After tagging a few articles, take a look at the share of each tag. Tags shared by large numbers of articles will be displayed in large type. For example, my largest tag [03/12/2009] is “Plugins,” because I just started tagging articles, and I wrote and edited several articles on plugins recently. But plugins aren’t the major subject of this blog… Do your tags show you’re writing about what you think you’re writing about?

*Really. Index cards. I’m dead serious. I’m doing this exercise with 500 cards on a related project (drop me a note if you’re curious), and it works gold. It’s something you can do right now, by yourself, it doesn’t cost any money, and you WILL benefit from it more than you know!

Filed Under: Getting Started Tagged With: , , , , , ,