By regularly publishing valuable content across our range of partner blogs, you can build your online profile, demonstrate thought leadership, drive traffic to your website, acquire relevant backlinks to help with your SEO campaigns - and even open the door to future purchases. To increase the likelihood of your posts receiving quality offers, we've put together these guidelines and suggestions. Please read them fully before adding a post.

The main requirements for guest posts are that they must:

• Be written with good quality English that is free of spelling and grammar errors
  
• Be written in a informative and balanced style; rather than being promotional sales copy
  
• Not contain any adult language or objectionable words / backlinks
  
• All content must be original and unique (Copyscape is used)
  
• Include a headline, body text and an author byline
  
• Include no more than two self-serving backlinks (you can add extra links for references etc)
  
• Any images must be royalty free, used under licence or properly attributed 
  

Zero spam tolerance

We do not accept badly written guest posts that are merely breeding grounds for spammy SEO techniques and reserve the right to decline any post in order to maintain our standards.

We only accept engaging content that is compelling, interesting, entertaining or useful - this is what bloggers like to publish to help them grow their own businesses - and this is how you'll get the best offers.

Headlines 

Choose your headline carefully as these make all the difference to the number and quality of offers that you receive. Your headline is your first chance to make a good impression with potential publishers. 

With the exception of valid acronyms, words should never be fully capitalized in your headline or main body. You Should However Capitalize Your Headlines Like This.

Writing style

The best writers tend to produce content that tells a story or if your post offers actionable advice go into detail about the topic. Instead of regurgitating content about the merits of video marketing, you could write about places to upload videos besides YouTube with detail and screen grabs on how to use each site. Try to create posts that offer real value and are engaging, writing in a conversational style as if you were talking to a friend. 

Topics

Most blog readers love practical tips and how-to articles. You could express your opinion or offer some insight into something about your industry. Resource lists can work well (10 ways to...). 

Formatting

• Keep it clean so the blogger can easily adapt it to suit their theme
  
• Use plenty of subheadings to add structure to your post
• Avoid <h1> tags and underlines
• Bolded text should be used sparingly
• Image sizes should be below 400 pixels wide and at 72 dpi
  

Length

Your post should be at least 500 words and as long as you need be in order to convey your message. A word count is shown to bloggers.

Byline and links

You can add a maximum of two self serving links to your post. There is no limit on the total number of links you can include.

Bylines should be a sentence or two explaining who you are and what you do, and must include a link to an active social account on Twitter or Google+ (your own personal one or a company one). This helps to show readers, publishers and search engines that you are a real author and not just writing for the sake of links - as well as future proofing your efforts. 

Your other self serving link should can be placed either in the main body of the article, ensuring that your anchor text fits naturally with the surrounding text or the byline if its branded or neutral (keyword based anchors are not permitted in byline’s). 

Bad Example  - This post is written by John Smith who has a passion for travelling and over the years has organised several Bachelor Parties in Amsterdam. 

Good Example - John Smith has a passion for travelling and over the years has organised several Bachelor Parties in Amsterdam for Company Name / URL. You can connect with him on Google+. 

For more information about protecting yourself against Google updates see this blog post.

After publication

Once your guest posts are live, we encourage you to respond to any comments received. Any changes that are needed can be discussed with the blog owner through our messaging system.

Moderation and declined / suspended posts

We reserve the right to decline any post or content that falls short of our content policy or TOS. We sometimes suspend posts whilst they are open for offers based on reports from other users or admin review.

Last updated May 14, 2013