If you want to increase the probability of getting your guest post published, you should analyze how other posts are accepted. For that, we present this “Guest Blogging Checklist”. Before you submit your post on our blog(s), kindly check the following things are done or not. We are not forcing you, but these are essential for a good relationship.
1. Gravatar : We request all the guest authors to have Gravatar. It lets weblogs and similar sites display user-provided pictures from a central database. We want you to sign up and upload your photo there, so that we can display your photo on our blog. [SIGN UP]
You also have the option of updating your User Profile to upload an Avatar. To read more about updating your user profile, please go here.
2. Fill out your Profile : Remember, this is a MUST. We don’t want to publish posts submitted by anonymous people. So please fill your profile which includes your name, your bio and other stuff. These details are essential for us to have information about our Authors.
* 3. Grammatical Errors: We hate it. Who loves it in fact? We can tolerate basic errors, which we all do sometimes. But continuous spelling mistakes and punctuation mistakes will be added to the reasons why we didn’t approve your post.
Quick tip: In the WordPress editor, there is a spell check and grammatical tool that you should use before submitting or publishing your post. This tool will underline possible spelling and/or grammatical errors for you to correct. But err on the side of caution as it won’t catch everything such as the misuse of the words “their” versus “they’re” since both words are spelled correctly. You should still re-read your article to make sure that there aren’t any errors and you can’t rely on this tool alone.
4. Check our Archives: What’s the point in publishing a post that is already present on our blog? So please check our Archives. But if you have written your post creatively different such as an opinionated column or review, you can get another chance.
* 5. Don’t be Promotional: Your post should not review any specific product/website/gadget unless instructed to do so, which will be rare. We hardly accept such posts because we have restricted such topics for blogging.
6. Check other Posts: Optional, but still useful. If you want to have an idea about what kind of posts we accept on our blogs.
* 7. Images [IMPORTANT]: Your post should have relevant images. Also make sure you give proper image credit if they have any such issues. You can read more about adding images to your posts here.
* 8. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The SEO videos in our dashboard pretty much sums up your SEO duties to the site. You must be logged in to the view this video.
9. Formatting: Use relevant formatting on your guest post.
<strong> – Highlight important points.
<italic> and <underline> – Stress something important.
<h3> – For subheadings.
10. Videos: You can also add relevant videos on your guest post. Like an introduction to the post you are writing, you can use the embed code of YouTube and others. It’s true you can drive traffic to your post with viral videos.
Please see this post in our Writer’s Guide that explains how to add videos.
* 11. Proofread: Before submitting read make sure you “proofread” it. That is, read it twice and check whether you made it correctly without any accidental errors.
12. Avoid Unnecessary HTML tags: Don’t mess the post with unnecessary HTML tags.
