How to Properly Prepare a Guest Post in 5 Simple Steps

Alex — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:00:17 +0000

Guest posts are great things. They make getting new content up on your blog very easy, and it makes you feel like you’re doing something right when you get someone who wants to write a post on your blog. Having guest posts really means a lot of things for you, but come with their own share of annoyances.

The one thing that’s always on my mind when going through guest posts on my blogs is “does it meet the standard?” The standard I am talking about is not the idea of the guest post, but things like formatting, spelling, and how it’s written. I will not publish a guest post on my blog unless everything is perfectly formatted and well structured.

Again, not judging the post so much on the idea (because anything and everything should be posted as long as it’s relevant) but on the structure.

100% of the time, guest posts you get will need some kind of editing. Take us for example, we use headlines and images in every article here and many of the guest posts we get here do not have these things – so they need to be revised a little bit.

The one problem with editing guest posts is that you may take away from the authors original point. That’s another thing I worry about while editing guest posts, so I break down the process and I take it in steps. I’m going to explain to you now the five things I regularly do while revising guest posts.

1. Quality of Writing

You can’t depend on other people to be good writers. I always assume that there will be a lot of mistakes in guest posts so it will encourage me to look a lot deeper into the writing. Now of course, I don’t find a lot of mistakes at all. But pretending that there is a lot wrong really gets you thinking.

Always check for spelling, grammatical errors, good post structure and content that makes sense. These are the things I make sure to check the most when editing guest posts. I didn’t write the post, so I don’t have a great understanding of what may be wrong until I go through and actually start revising.

Here’s a tip for spell checking: Don’t rely on the standard WordPress function. Use a program like Microsoft Word to do it. It’s much easier in my opinion, and with many people using external editors to write blog posts – more logical.

Photo by Sharyn Morrow

2. Breaking down paragraphs

The key to great readability is short paragraphs. They say a good paragraph is usually 5-6 sentences long, I say a good paragraph is 1-6 lines.

You need to keep paragraphs short because most people nowadays want their content quick. If I see paragraphs go on for 10 or so lines, it looks unappealing and hard to read. Of course I will read it since it has information I want, but it may do a number on my eyes.

A good tip I can give you for cutting down paragraphs is to break them down into one idea each. So if you are talking about how to cut a ribeye steak then jump to cutting a sirloin steak in one paragraph, break it down if there is enough information in each section to support two separate paragraphs.

Photo by Manuel Sanfuentes

3. Add Headings and other formatting

As I mentioned in the beginning of the post, the guest posts I get here usually aren’t formatted with any kind of HTML like headings or any other paragraph styles. Not that it’s a bad thing, I actually mention it’s okay in the guest post guidelines.

But, now that you have control of the post, you can go ahead and start dividing content up with headlines and making paragraphs look nice by applying italics and bolding text. They key is to make the formatting of this guest post consistent with posts you write yourself.

For more ideas to style your content area, read here

4. Link, Link, Link!

Just like any other post you write on your blog, you should always try and link back to relevant articles. Sometimes when you write certain keywords, you think of a past post you wrote about the topic and you should feel obligated to link somewhere.

Linking back to old posts is a great way to expand on a current topic, bring life back to an old post and help your readers learn even more. Not only that, but it has it’s SEO benefits. You never know when you might find somewhere to link to in a guest post.

Tip: If you use a related posts plugin, check out what posts come up and try to incorporate them into the post. It will save you a lot of time instead of having to search through your archives for posts to link to.

Photo by Esteban

5. Expand as much as possible

It’s always good to expand on a topic if you can. You can make the post longer and more informative, and probably best for your readers. You will have a lot to work off of since you should have proof read the post, so expanding should be easy.

Expanding on the post should make linking back to older posts a lot easier, which will make the post an even bigger hit for sure.

If you’re worries about taking away from the original authors original focus, then don’t do this. It’s up to you really, but I personally think as long as you don’t take away or contradict the original focus, you don’t need to worry about that.

Photo by Ardonik

What are your thoughts on guest editing?

It’s a bit of a controversial subject about editing guest posts, because it always leads up to “the authors original idea.” If you edit it too much, you may take away. But, if you don’t edit it enough – it won’t match the quality of your own posts sometimes.

This post was inspired from a past post here about the alternatives to rejecting guest posts. You may be interested in reading that post as you can see where this debate originated here.