In the world of online marketing, there are many tools at your disposal. From social media platforms to SEO tricks and more, there are numerous ways for you to promote yourself or your company online. Another very popular, effective way to do this is by guest posting, which is the act of publishing an article you wrote on someone else’s blog. This helps broaden your reach to other audiences and, by including a link to your page(s), allows readers to easily learn more about you and your work.
However, guest posting is a bit of an art and, if done incorrectly, you risk having your submission rejected and unused—which means that you have just wasted valuable time and energy you could have invested in something else. To help ensure your guest posting success, I’ve outlined a few of the common pitfalls that keep guest blog articles from getting published. Avoid these and you increase the likelihood your article gets published.
Ignoring Webmaster Requests
As a guest poster, it’s important to be aware of and sensitive to a webmaster’s requests, after all you are a guest on THEIR blog. From word count to photo usage, webmasters can be very specific about what they will and will not tolerate on their blogs, so it’s important to abide by these rules and restrictions to ensure your post gets published.
Think back to when you were in school–as a student, your grade was based partially on how well and closely you followed assignment directions. Well, the same rules apply now, only instead of grades the proliferation of your message is on the line. By blatantly ignoring and disregarding the webmaster, you might come off as difficult and hard to work with and that definitely won’t help your cause. To spread your message you need as much exposure as possible, so be sure to develop your pieces around what the target blog is looking for.
Sloppy Coding and Style
As you begin to search for blogs to guest post on, you will begin to notice just how different one blog might be compared to the other. From layout to font and coloring, themes and “feels” vary from site to site. To make things easier on the webmaster, it’s nice to have your post in a straightforward format that utilizes simple html coding. This will help ensure it’s compatible with any site—regardless of the set up. Plus, it helps maintain the integrity of your content by keeping links intact, securing correct paragraph separation, and more.
If the webmaster you are working with has to do a lot of extra work and editing to make your post compatible and readable for its audience, odds are it won’t make the cut. Webmasters are busy maintaining their site, on top of other responsibilities they have, so the last thing they want to do is waste their time doing something that shouldn’t have been an issue in the first place. So, unless your goal is to be rejected, watch the coding and style formats on your submissions.
Providing Irrelevant Content
Another surefire way to ensure your submission never sees the light of day on the world wide web is to provide the blog with content that is completely irrelevant to its target audience. Providing a blog on cooking tips to a site that is geared toward literary enthusiasts might not be the best idea. Plus, it’s a bit of a waste of time for you. Why try to appeal to a niche of people who couldn’t care less about what you’re doing?
Sure there are times you might be denied publication just because your content is too general or overdone, but that’s not nearly as bad as being denied for sheer lack of effort to find a relevant connection between your skills and interests and the host blog.
Overall, it’s important to remember that the world of guest posting is booming and therefore webmasters are constantly inundated with submissions eager for recognition. Being such a competitive field, you should try your best to make your posts as appealing as possible—and part of that means NOT doing all of the things listed above. By avoiding this erroneous moves, you increase the likelihood your voice will be heard and spread on the web.
Katheryn Rivas frequently researches and writes about a variety of topics, yet her main interests include education and the validation of accredited online universities. For questions or comments, she can be reached at [email protected].
I agree to all these amazing tips and will surely keep them into my mind while writing my next post
hi Abdu
Thanks for sharing these tips with us . I keep these in mind while submitting my next guest post. these tips will surely help me improve my guest post quality and to get my guest post published
thanks for sharing this
Bryan