Accepting guest posts on your site can be a fantastic way to produce high-quality content written by people outside your company. Likewise, producing guest posts for other sites can be an important part of your backlink strategy, along with another way to expand brand awareness. This guest post guidelines template will give you an example of how to accept guest posts while maintaining quality content standards.

I recommend that you only accept guest posts from qualified, vetted people with interesting points of view and experience related to your space. You don’t want any random piece of content on your site. You want content that will engage and educate readers while building trust and authority in your space.

Instead of keeping our process hidden, I wanted to share RevenueZen’s guest post guidelines. These are the guidelines we use for ourselves (and it’s similar to the guidelines we create for our clients when we manage their guest post program).

Likewise, if you think you’d make a fantastic contributor to our blog, contact us about submitting a guest post. If you have expertise and experience in the B2B marketing and sales world, we’d love to chat about collaborating.

Feel free to use our guidelines as a template for creating your own guest posting guidelines. For context, these guidelines are typically sent out after we’ve agreed on collaborating with someone on a guest post.

Guest Post Guidelines Template

Thanks for contributing to RevenueZen! We’re teaming up with some of the best minds in the world of marketing and sales to educate founders and revenue leaders on their growth strategy. By partnering together, we want to showcase your thought leadership while promoting your brand as a trusted resource in your space.

Being a fairly boutique agency, we get inbound leads all the time who aren’t quite the right fit for our services. When that happens, we prefer to refer these leads to trusted partners.

With that in mind, here are some guidelines and recommendations for each piece of content that you submit.

List of Desired Blog Post Themes and Topics

In general, posts we accept for guest content fall under the following themes:

  • Content marketing
  • Inbound marketing
  • SaaS and startup growth strategies
  • LinkedIn and social selling
  • Marketing tips, guides, how to’s, and advice for founders
  • Outbound sales
  • Sales/marketing alignment

While brainstorming what to write about, ask yourself these questions:

  • Will this topic be relevant to the RevenueZen audience?
  • Will this post offer solutions (that don’t require the purchase of my product)?
  • Am I qualified to write about this topic?
  • What insight can I bring to this topic that nobody else can?

When in doubt, get in touch with me at marketing@revenuezen.com.

Note: We want content from people with hands-on experience in marketing, sales, or as a founder. If you’re a freelance writer trying to get experience, feel free to apply separately!

Guest Post Content Tips

The guiding light behind our blog is to share content that’s educational, engaging, and entertaining … not product-focused or promotional.

We’ve built a high level of trust with our customers because they know we will never push something on them that we don’t 110% believe is in their best interests, even when that means telling them not to use our services. Being overly self-promotional destroys that trust, even if your advice is good.

Instead, use our blog to showcase your expertise with potential new customers. If people find your content valuable, they’ll research you all on their own. Likewise, our team will happily use your content to make warm introductions to you when appropriate.

Posts should be 1,000 – 1,500+ words in length. We find this is a sweet spot with our readership, and you’ll fit in with the rest of our blog this way. Longer is good, too.

Break up your content, so it’s easy to read. This means including headings, subheadings, bullets, and any other visual elements to increase the readability of your piece.

Write in a natural, conversational tone. We want to share content that is authoritative, but not robotic. We’re producing blog content — not Wikipedia pages, so don’t shy away from showing off your sense of humor. That said, if your guest post was a movie, the highest rating we’d want to see on it is PG-13.

All content MUST BE ORIGINAL. We do not accept duplicate or syndicated content as guest posts. If your post has appeared anywhere else on the web, we can’t publish it on our blog. If you quote other content, link to it.

Always name your sources. We understand that you’re an expert, but our audience might not be so sure. If you’re going to drop some stats (ie: “open rates jumped 55 percent overnight”), link back to the original source.

Talk about your real-world experience. Talk about mistakes you’ve made, plans you’ve built, and strategies you’ve executed. Draw on your own personal experience to speak authoritatively about what you know.

Take a position. If you disagree with common wisdom on a topic, talk about why the mainstream point of view is wrong or misleading. Back up your perspective with facts. Take screenshots. Include interesting data. Support your arguments with external references.

Other Things to Include in Your Guest Post

  • Statistics. Research shows that 94 percent of people are 53 percent more likely to believe content that’s supported by 26 percent more data. (Okay, that’s made up. But try to include verifiable first or third party research, statistics, and data in your post.)
  • Outbound Links. Does somebody else have a great point of view on a topic? Want to make sure people know a certain definition of a word or concept? Link to it. Make sure these links are to authoritative sites. Only link to your site if it’s a highly relevant blog post.
  • Lists and Bullets. We’re fans. Readers are fans. Most people skim articles until they find the value. Bullet points make this easy.
  • Actionable Takeaways. Recap the takeaways of your article as bullet points at the end of your post.

NOTE: *RevenueZen reserves full editorial control and may edit or tweak submissions as we see fit. These tweaks include anything from removing too much self-promotion, to optimizing for SEO, edits both small and large, and more.

Guest Post Logistics

  • First, we’ll collaborate and agree on a topic and title. Don’t start writing until we’ve done this!
  • Once we’ve agreed on the topic, give me a deadline for when you expect to submit the article for us to review.
  • After you’ve written your draft, send it to me as a Google Doc. Use these sharing settings:
    • On – Anyone with the link;
    • Access – Can edit.
  • I’ll make edits in this Doc, so make a copy if you’d like to keep an original version of your writing.
  • Send a short, couple sentence bio. This can include a link to your LinkedIn profile and/or your website.
  • I’ll let you know when the post is scheduled to go live.

Guest Post Promotion

Please feel free to promote your post through your social media, newsletter, or link to it from your blog.

You can even include a snippet of the post on your blog, with a link back to the original content on our site (this is important so that we both avoid duplicate content penalties).

Takeaways

Guest posting is an important part of any serious blog strategy. It benefits your site by giving you more quality content to boost your content strategy. It benefits guest posters by getting their name in front of a new audience.

As you go out and find possible people to collaborate with, always make sure to work with trustworthy experts in your space. Your content needs to fit into a much larger overall marketing strategy and you want to find people who support that strategy.

And if you think you’d make a interesting, valuable contribution to the RevenueZen blo, reach out! We’re always on the lookout for people to collaborate with!