How to Create Guidelines for Guest Bloggers

Guidelines for Guest Bloggers Example Outline

I would like to share guidelines for guest bloggers that we created for one startup. These guidelines are not unique and many content marketing oriented companies such as Hubspot and Kissmetrics have their own rules that you can use as a template. In this example, I tried to select most important and simple rules to follow.

Length

recommended 600-900 words per blog post.

Topics

Provide guest bloggers with list of possible topic areas. Think of a vertical markets that you can cover as well as variety of problems that your target audiences care about. What is your target customer has to deal with on daily basis? How can he/she do their job better or more efficient?

Links

• You may include 1 to your personal social media account inside Author Bio
• We recommend you limit outbound links to 2 in your blog post (ex: other articles, your blog, references) but limit total number of links to 1 per every 100 words (SEO best practices)

Content Guidelines

• Well-written, high quality, and only original content.
• Professional style and tone (but we also encourage you to be personal in your writing).
• Avoid actively promoting yourself, your services or services of any company (including ours). However, feel free to mention companies/products that are relevant to the topic of your blog post.
• Include Author Bio, a short 1-2 sentences with 1 link to your social media profile.
• Include appropriate references, attribution of data/quotations/studies.
• You cannot republish guest blog post after it was published on our blog. However, if you write unique summary you can link it back to original post on our Blog.
• Review blog post for grammar and spelling errors.

Nice-to-haves

• Share blog post on your social media channels (we want you to get as much visibility as possible).
• Include images/graphs/tables if necessary but in good quality (most of us are visual learners).
• Cover topic of your blog in depth.
• Be helpful, specific, and detailed (include bullet points if it helps to bring your point across).
• Get to the point early and summarize topic at the end of the post.

We may change/edit/adapt your blog post if needed before it will be published.

I hope you find these guidelines helpful. Communicate to your bloggers that you are looking for unique stories that will stick with your target audience and make sure they receive all the benefits that come from guest blogging — share their posts across all social media accounts (including your personal).

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