Guest post guidelines

We do not charge for submissions

It's free, but what you write has to be excellent. Instead of giving money to us, spend it making the content and accompanying graphics great. 

Article topics

If you want to contribute to the Reputation X site your content must have value to readers, be different from other content already out there, and be about one of these subjects:

  • Public relations
  • Social media
  • Online reputation management
  • Search engine optimization
  • Negotiation
  • Content marketing

Well-researched

  • Please put the time into researching the information contained in the post.
  • Cite your sources. Especially scholarly articles. 
  • Don't link to Wikipedia (too many people do that). 

Make your article a purple cow

purple-cow

Most guest posts are crap. Don't write about things that have been discussed to death. If the post isn't unique and truly helpful then please don't waste your time. To use Seth Godin's term, make it a "purple cow".

A Purple Cow is when someone stops and pays attention to because it's different from the other cows. Your content should be the same. 

Do not write articles like:

  • 5 Ways to Improve SEO
  • Her Website Ranks Number One with This Simple Trick
  • How to Build a Wordpress Website

The above examples are just lazy. If it looks like you just churned it out we probably won't accept it. 

Tone

  • Business casual, but not stiff. Written for professionals. Not goofy.
  • Flesch-Kincaid readability between 50 and 70.

Content

  • You know how writers ramble to fill space. Well, readers skip right over that. So, little to no fluff. Put another way: no long rambling conversational intro paragraphs. Get right to it.
  • Data heavy, preferably with graphs.
  • Descriptive H2 headlines.
  • Images as needed to illustrate ideas.
  • Include meta description
  • Include a tweet


Style

  • Please use the AP Stylebook style of writing.
  • H1 in Title case:  The Title of the article
  • H2 in Sentence case:  The headings in the article
  • H3 in Sentence case:  The sub-headings in the article


Outbound links

Your article can have up to two outbound links, but they need to make sense. For example, if you are writing about "6 New Schema Types to Help Your Business" and you link to a maternity website you'd better have a very good reason to do so. We edit out links that do not make sense or help the reader. 

 

Inbound link reminder

We check guest posts for inbound links 30-45 days after they are published. If a post hasn't earned any links we tend to take it down. So make sure your post is good enough to earn at least one decent link. 

 

No guarantee

Reminder, there is no guarantee we will use your content. We reject content for a number of reasons. The most likely one is that it was not written by native English writers or experts in the area the blog post is about. 

 

What a well-written post looks like 

Here are examples of well-written articles: