The Approval Game: How to Write Guest Posts That Get Accepted

Along with the increasing significance of online marketing, and the daily evolution of marketing strategy, guest posting has become a cornerstone of digital promotion. New marketing writers often face difficulties when it comes to guest posting, whether it’s for an SEO link building campaign or blog contribution to build self-authority. They follow the same common rules of writing such as correct grammar, making their content both user and SEO friendly and more, yet their articles are often rejected. In some cases, it can be difficult to know the exact reason for the rejection. To reduce the number of rejections, and get a better hold on your guest post writing, I will highlight the key common weaknesses of guest posts and how to avoid them. Follow these tips to start creating undeniable guest posts and generate new backlinks for your company!

1. Review and match the website voice

It’s not strange for a skilled candidate to be rejected for a job role if he’s not a good fit for the team—even if he is highly educated with rockstar skills. Only the candidate who fits the flow of the company and can work seamlessly with the team will get the job. The same idea applies with guest posting: we write an informative post, but it needs to also match the website’s voice for it to be accepted. So, before you draft your post, take a quick look at what kind of posts your targeted website is currently posting and try to match their style of writing. Not all the admins prefer the same writing tone.

It is really important for you to target the same audience the website blog is aimed at. You must consider and follow the types of content they are sharing on their website on a regular basis, whether it is promotional, educational or resourceful. It’s also important for guest bloggers to adopt the same tone in their writing that the website or blog is using. For example, addressing the blog audience in the same manner that the core posts do.

Here in this agency-focused blog post, the author has efficiently adopted the tone of Vendasta blog posts and brought that flow into his own blog. In this guest post, Andy explained the way to win clients step-by-step, and he also added some rules to hold the tone. This piece of writing fits seamlessly with the regular blogs and doesn’t stand out as unusual in the blog feed. Moreover, this article shows a clear target audience (agencies), which ultimately accelerates the opportunities for Vendasta to attract their clients. Therefore, this article was accepted as a successful guest post.

2. Optimize your content visually

Almost all guest bloggers pitch their content as a bland text file. Do something different here. Add some meaningful images or videos along with your content to appeal more to the blog owner and readers. That way, readers will be more likely to engage with your guest post. And it’s pleasant for the moderators as well when they don’t have to do the extra work to find images for your content.
Design your guest posts with the appropriate features that have the moderator adoring your post. Just keep one thought in your mind while writing your guest post—it must not seem like just a piece of content, it must contain something meaningful and entertaining.

Here in this article, the writer included a good presentation that made it a unique piece of content with some useful data. Just like that, you can use supportive videos, data, slides, documents, infographics, or relevant images in a way that brings out the idea of the whole piece help the reader understand your concepts.

3. Add value to your guest post

Adding value to your guest post is a must for any submitted content, otherwise you won’t be able to climb that rejection wall. Peruse the blog posts on the site and find the gaps where you can add additional value. Your proposed content can be a link bait piece, optimized to gain social virality, or even just helpful for their blog’s SEO. When you submit your post, hint at what kind of value they can expect to gain from it—be it social shares, new backlinks, or something else.

Make your content helpful by adding value for the readers as well. You might need to do a quick scan of the comment section of their previous posts to research and understand what their readers are asking for. Arrange the information and ideas in your content according to those needs. If you can nail down the reader’s needs and concerns, the guest post moderator will not only welcome your post, but also thank you for the added value to their site.

This content marketing guest post is a perfect example of this point. In the article, the author has added extra value to the piece by using internal links, as well as authority site linking, which are both very beneficial for the post’s SEO. So go ahead and add this kind of value to your post. Hard work always pays off!

Related resources: List of 1500+ Quality Blogs That Accept Guest Posts

4. Go the extra mile

People are always searching for something extraordinary. So make it happen with your guest post. Add some extraordinary information that surprises the moderator of your submission site. Add some stats, research, data, or anything that would help the readers. Also, optimize your content in terms of SEO. Use a focus keyword, do some internal-linking in your post, and make sure you use proper headings and synonyms of the chosen keyword. This way, it will be beneficial for the publisher website itself. That way, you’ll also get traffic to your website through your backlink when the content gets ranked in search engine.

In addition, here are some ideas to go that extra mile:

• Do internal links and recommend other posts from the website
• Do some research on your guest post topic and add some unique data. Everybody loves data!
• Do an interview with an industry influencer and add it to that guest post
• Take a survey and add the results along with the data in your post

In this social media guest post, the writer did not simply write a generic blog post demanding to be published on Vendasta’s blog. Rather, she added a screenshot of the Vendasta products and also suggests it as an effective solution to the problem she’s discussing. This is another way to stay one step ahead with your guest post.

5. Use standard anchor text

You must be thinking—are we going to do all these things just to serve their users for free?! Remember that all these previous points are just to maximize the chances for your guest posts to get approved. If it is not published, then all of your efforts along with the benefits of guest posting will be in vain. Your main goal is to get a backlink with the post, so do it in the standard manner.

Using anchor text is the best way, but you also need to focus on what your anchor text is. Don’t use anything that doesn’t suit the post! Keep it very natural to not interrupt the flow of the writing, and try to make it within a phrase (containing the keywords) rather than just a word. This way, the readers learn about what it is they are directed to.

Also consider:

• Besides getting a link to your website, give some backlinks to authorized and non-competitive websites. It’ll make your backlink more natural among the other links.
• Your backlink placement and linking page are very important. Insert it in a way that the readers will likely visit your page to get more value. Remember, getting traffic from a site is a key indicator of a quality link in the eye of Google.

This is another guest post where the writer has used user-friendly anchor text for linking to the article. She smartly adds the link with user-friendly keyword anchor text by putting it in an example. Above all, this article has no keyword stuffing or anything clumsy in it, and that’s what Vendasta can consider as a helpful one.

In a nutshell, you have to cover all these tips and details while writing your guest post if you really want them to be published and not written in vain. These are the most important tips for making your guest post publish-worthy, but the tips and strategies don’t end here! Overall, you have to focus on the bringing out the best through your guest post.

Try out these tips yourself, and submit your own post to the Vendasta blog!