Last week, I wrote a post here on Performancing about weeding out guest blog post spam and suggested that you write very clear guest post submission guidelines and publish them on your blog. Doing so might not deflect all guest blog post spam, but it can help to make sure the legitimate guest posts that are submitted to you meet your publishing criteria.
With that in mind, following is a guest blog post submission and publishing guidelines sample that you can tweak to work on your blog. Feel free to copy and use it as needed.
Sample Guest Blog Post Submission and Publishing Guidelines
If you would like to submit a guest post to this blog, follow the instructions below for consideration. Only guest posts that meet these criteria will be considered for publishing.
- The post must be useful to the readers of this blog.
- The post must be grammatically correct and well-written.
- The post must not include marketing-related links and must not be entirely self-promotional.
- The post may include links to your website and blog in a brief author’s bio (approximately 3 sentences), which will be published at the end of the guest post.
- Guest posts must be original and may not have been published elsewhere online already. All submissions will be verified for originality using a tool such as Copyscape.com or Plagium.com.
Guest posts that are approved for publishing will be published without notice. Please check the blog periodically to see if your post has been published. Due to the high volume of guest posts this blog receives, messages following up on the status of a guest post submission will not be responded to.
If you have any requirements related to length of guest posts, specific topics, things you won’t publish no matter what, image size or format, and so on, add those to the above list, too. In other words, the more specific and clear your submission guidelines are, the less time it will take you to review and approve guest post submissions. You can automate the submission and publishing process using a tool like the Gravity Forms plugin if you use WordPress.org for your blogging application. Alternately, you can use a service that links blogs up with writers who are interested in providing guest posts such as MyBlogGuest.
The point of publishing guest post submission and publishing guidelines is to set expectations and alleviate some of your workload processing submissions. If your blog gets a lot of blog post submissions, it can take up a lot of your time to review, edit and publish all of them. Let your guest post submission guidelines take care of some of that work for you.