Our Guest Blogging Guidelines

We really need you to read these guidelines

Claiming to read them but proving you didn’t, is not a good look!

There are some really important things in these guidelines that are missed by most people. Whereas we feel that people should read the entire document, failure to comply with the red text items will result in your publishing date being postponed, at best. When we receive articles, we try to browse them by the following weekend. However, this isn’t always possible. And by the time we’re able to do a full proofread, if you’ve missed some of the finer points of this document, it could result in your publishing date being delayed.

Before detailing the guidelines, I must ask that people not send in their requests for us to add links to existing articles. We really don’t have the time for such a typically low-reward exercise. If your article is really good, you can offer to write a guest post that links to it – as long as it is something our audience would be interested in reading. Otherwise, if you’re not suggesting an alternative article for a broken link, please don’t send these requests to us.

The Guidelines

Before we get into the guidelines, please note: We have little interest in publishing sponsored articles or paid links. Google has strict rules on these – they must be stated as sponsored and links CANNOT BE dofollow. We will not risk censure so will not break these guidelines. If you still need to see our sponsored post policy, click here. Know, however, that when we say our terms are non-negotiable, it is because our terms are non-negotiable – even to you!

We currently post once a week. This is relevant to you for a few reasons:

  • By the time we post articles by our regular contributors, there are some months when we will have as few as 2 open slots for guest and irregular contributors
  • We must request that your article relates to content marketing or social media marketing
  • We receive far more requests than we can publish. So only the highest quality articles can be published
  • There could be a several week wait for your post to be published after it is received, and if it is accepted.

We’d rather people send articles in when they are happy with them, as opposed to based upon deadlines. Unfortunately, we’re no longer able to reserve a place in our queue based upon your inquiry date (except for repeat contributors). But people will not be penalised when we must ask for changes. If you get back to us in a timely manner, your place will be held.

Clearly, many people who submit articles to us had them written by Fiverr or some other budget offshore content writing service. If you do this, it is very obvious. Grammar and sentence format will not be to English usage, and your article will need a lot of proofreading. The same goes for people whose written English is not very good. We do not have the time to do this editing for you, at least not for free! You need to do that for yourself or have someone else do it for you.

We will edit articles with poor English and/or grammar for you, but at a rate of $50 per hour, paid in advance of our work.

If you are not able to provide a well-edited article and will not pay for us to edit it for you, we will have to reject your article.

At this time, we do not charge for posting articles on Curatti. However, if you are earning money, writing for a client, we will not provide our service for free. If you are writing this for a paid client, let us know in advance. We will expect to be paid for our time if you are paid for yours. Payment can be for the link(s) to your client, which should be fully organic. If it is obvious that you have been paid by a client to write the article you are posting and you have not informed us of this, we will pull the article from our queue – even as late as a day before the scheduled posting.

Returning contributors: Please don’t presume that as you’ve already had one or more articles on our site, that you now get to choose our editorial direction and we’ll publish articles on any subject you wish. We won’t! When in doubt, ask us. It can save us both time!

The Guidelines In Bullets

Your Outreach

  • We get several outreach emails daily and don’t respond to all of them. Honestly, many simply get lost in the crowd. Send in your outreach with a title that will make it stand out.
  • We are not one of the blogs that ignore people with non-English names. A browse of our many pages will prove this. So, please, don’t adopt an English name.
    • Whereas we can’t offer more free editing to non-English speakers, we will be far nicer and more understanding towards “Amit Shah” if his outreach has non-English usage, than we will be to “John Smith”.  If John Smith doesn’t know proper English usage, either he is a bad writer, or he’s lying about his identity. And neither of those work for us.
  • Don’t ask us if you can send ideas. That takes 2 emails when one would suffice.
  • Please (!) be genuine in your outreach. Preternatural compliments will have the reverse effect of the one you desire. Click on this internal link to see an example of an outreach email that will not be answered – or at least not answered with a positive response!
  • If I don’t know you, don’t ask me what you should write about. Nobody knows everything, and if you write as you learn, it will usually be obvious.
  • Please provide at least 3 relevant writing samples and at least 3 article ideas.
    • Do not send us an article on your first contact
    • Until we know you well, if you write an article without running the title by us first, there is an extremely high chance that we will have to reject it. Don’t presume that you know what we want you to post! Please!
  • Please email your requests to info@curatti.com.
  • Be aware that we get several requests daily and most become like wallpaper – we don’t notice them. So, make your email stand out with an interesting heading. (Note: Interesting doesn’t mean brash, boastful, or clickbaity. They are turnoffs.)
  • Most people talking of partnership or collaboration simply prove that they don’t know what either of these words means, so they are also good to avoid.
  • Be aware that an outreach email with spelling or grammar mistakes or that are very poorly written, make a lousy first impression. This article may help you with your outreach.

Subject Matter and Voice

Curatti’s readership is largely quite experienced and knowledgeable. This provides opportunities for recognition for would-be guest authors. It also means that pretty much everything you will want to write has been seen before, and most of it has been posted on Curatti.

  • We have to this point been primarily a B2B, small business blog. That may be changing though!
  • Don’t talk about corporate departments. Presume that there is little-to-no budget.
  • We have historically posted articles that relate to various aspects of Digital Marketing – specifically Content Marketing/Inbound Marketing/Lead Generation/Social Media Marketing/SEO/Email Marketing. However…
  • Anything that you can write about AI/ML/VR/AR, as it relates to our small business audience, will definitely pique our interest. This is our preferred subject matter and will comprise a significant percentage of what we publish going forward.
  • We are also happy to post articles on B2B eCommerce, and B2B Customer Service.
  • The areas that we now find most interesting are Blockchain, NFT, and all things Metaverse/Web 3.0
  • Re. the preceding line, we are not as gung-ho on Crypto as some, certainly not in terms of telling people why they must get into it. But we’re always interested in different angles!
  • We will not publish articles that are primarily retail or corporate, are aimed at a strictly technical audience, or based on special events such as Super Bowl or Holidays. 
  • First-time contributors are invited to send in a brief summary of their proposed first article. Unfortunately, we must reject more articles than we accept, and we are mindful of the time and effort needed to write an article. Far better that we can catch any mismatches before the article is complete.

Your Article

Here are our simple if extensive guidelines for prospective guest bloggers (You will find the requirements for what you must send us immediately following the guidelines):

  • Presume that everybody knows something and nobody knows everything. This includes:
    • Not explaining at any length, subjects or terms that most people know and that have been written about ad nauseam.
    • Hyperlinking to explanatory articles on subjects that few people know. Some will want to learn – this is for them. You shouldn’t presume it makes you look smart to pay lip service to newer concepts as if everyone knows them already.
      • You should also not just pay lip service to things that are an integral part of your article. If adding details might make your article too long, consider either narrowing the focus or splitting it into 2 or more parts.
  • DO NOT SEND A GOOGLE DOCUMENT UNLESS THERE IS NO FORMATTING (SUCH AS BULLETS) AND YOU SEND YOUR IMAGES AS SEPARATE ATTACHMENTS. THESE ARE A MAJOR HASSLE TO ADJUST TO WORDPRESS AND WE WILL NOT DO IT. IF WE RECEIVE AN ARTICLE IN GD, IT IS PROOF THAT YOU DID NOT READ THESE GUIDELINES AND WE WILL NOT READ YOUR ARTICLE! Please send articles in Word format.

    • Include your name in your Document! We get many submissions, and sometimes, keeping track isn’t easy. You adding a couple of words can save us a fair amount of hassle!
  • If we see the words “Content is King” in your article, we will stop reading it and reject it. Enough with that already!
  • More articles suggest contests than there are contests. Again, enough already! Unless you can speak from great, demonstrable experience about how to do them right, please leave them out of your article proposals and content.
  • Guest posting is good for the poster and the blog. However, this does not mean you can shamelessly advertise your website or product. We allow one internal (do-follow) link to your site and one in the writer’s bio. Anything more might be construed by Google bots as a sponsored post and we could be censured.
  • Few people read guidelines before writing outreach emails. If you’re one of the 2%, please be sure to mention in your outreach that you read the guidelines. Thanks!
  • We publish blog posts, not school essays. Please don’t demonstrate your vocabulary and understanding of long word usage. Instead, write as close to how you speak as possible.
  • Don’t send articles with formatting characters. These have not been necessary for WordPress blogs for a long time, and they would make our task more difficult if we accepted them. But we won’t accept them!
  • Please don’t use Heading 1 within your article. Use H2 or lower.
  • Please center your images
  • Your opening must be powerful! The majority of even good articles begin with really trite sentences. Few people will ever read beyond this! Always presume that your audience knows that Social Media, Content Marketing, SEO, etc. are important. Don’t open with that. People will expect an article for beginners and stop reading.
    • Don’t open by telling people that there’s a lot of competition, or there are more websites than ever. Maybe you don’t get sick of endlessly seeing that, but I do, so I must presume I’m far from alone.
    • If you’ve seen an opening quite a few times, presume I’ve seen it hundreds of times. DON’T COPY OR PARAPHRASE LAZY ARTICLE OPENINGS! WE WILL NOT PUBLISH THEM!
  • Articles should be original (we do use the Grammarly plagiarism checker), at least 1,000 words, and well-illustrated.
    • We waive this minimum when a post is to accompany an Infographic. In that case, they should still be no less than 300 words, and preferably at least 500.
    • If you are writing on a single subject and there simply aren’t 1,000 words to be written without repeats or fillers, write what is needed to get your point across in an informative, and that is all. Yoast suggests a 300-word minimum.
  • Yes, COVID-19 is a massive subject that affects all of our lives. But, for now, at least, people seem to be burned out on the subject. Reference to it within an article is fine, but we will not accept articles for which it is the focal point or in the title.
  • Articles must not be obviously self-promoting (unless they are paid)
  • They must stick to the basic content marketing tenet of not selling, but demonstrating knowledge and value
  • They must have a positive intent. No name-calling. No swearing
  • They must be original in 2 ways:
    • Not previously published – this includes no passages lifted from other articles unless attributed and presented as a quote
    • Injecting something into them which stands them apart from the many thousands of other articles written about every subject within Digital Marketing. This is key.
    • Remember, most of our readers are already aware of, if not expert in, your subject matter. Give them a reason to read your article.
  • ALL sources must be attributed and hyperlinked – this includes images
  • If you mention a website, tool, or not widely known concept, hyperlink that, also. This is a solid SEO practice as well as being the right thing to do
  • It’s good practice to include at least one hyperlink to a relevant article previously published on whichever blog you are contributing to. This tip works whether you are submitting to us or any other site. I encourage you to include this as a part of all of your future guest post submissions.
    • Internal links are good for SEO. So including links to articles on the website you are contributing to (in this case, Curatti!), you are boosting your chances of your article being more widely read.
  • Never quote a statistic without stating and/or hyperlinking the source. Too many so-called facts aren’t facts at all – they are simply ‘common knowledge’ that is wrong! We won’t publish these!
    • And for goodness sake, please don’t use years-old statistics! In this little world of ours, things change so quickly, stats from 2 years ago are often barely relevant.
  • We will provide the featured image for your post
  • Long walls of text are a major turn-off for most readers. They must be submitted with relevant, illustrative images
  • DO NOT include any images that originated as stock photos
    • Using Stock images without paying for them can result in a hefty bill for the blog they are posted on.
  • Please avoid run-on sentences. Whereas Yoast suggests that no more than 25% of sentences should contain more than 20 words, we certainly frown on single sentences pushing or exceeding 2 lines. We live in an ADD world. Don’t make people work too hard to read your post!
    • Any article that begins with a long sentence is virtually guaranteed to have a high bounce rate, as readers will take that as a sign of things to come. We will not publish articles with long opening sentences.
  • Yoast also suggests that no more than 10% of sentences should be passive. The reason for this is simple. People like to be able to personalize what they are reading. This is a great rule for Curatti and all sites.
  • Punctuate well (Again, don’t make people work to guess at your sentence flow) and be consistent with your use or lack of use, of the Oxford comma.
  • Please avoid using overused terms like “Today, ……”, or “In 20nn, …..”. In almost all cases, such words are proven irrelevant by whatever follows them.
  • Avoid things such as “Gone are the days” and other trite, overused, unnecessary terms. We all know that the marketing topography has changed. No need to remind people of that or anything else that our readers already know.
  • We will only publish pieces containing a year in the title in December or January of any given year – in a retrospective article in the last few weeks, or a preview of the following year. And even then, it’s highly unlikely.
    • We actually dislike preview articles for two reasons:
      • Predictions made in them prove largely wrong before long
      • Many things attributed to the new year are not new – so what’s the point?
    • Including a year in the title also limits how long people will click on your posts. Removing the year can make it evergreen
  • Similarly, most things ever written in trends articles will be known by most of our readers and aren’t close to new. We accept extremely few trends articles for this reason.
  • Most ‘Tools’ articles rehash exactly the same small list. We are not interested in repeating what is on our site and/or many other places. If you propose a tools article, please assure us that you will write about some that are not so common, by including some in your article preview.
  • Please capitalize the first letter of all words in titles and subtitles. Thanks!
  • If your article is to do with visual marketing, include plenty of images. If it’s about video marketing, include videos. If it’s about SEO, make sure it has SEO-friendly text. No point in talking about the value of an aspect of marketing, yet not using those to demonstrate your argument.
  • Whereas we do naturally proofread articles, our time is limited. So we hope that by the time you send your articles to us, they do not require major editing. We will probably send back articles that require too much work on our end.
  • If people leave comments on your post, you should be happy to respond – and in a timely manner.

What We Need From You

For those wishing to become regular contributors, we provide Contributor IDs. For one-time contributors, we use our guest ID. Either way, if we post your article(s), you will need:

  • A bio and Social network handle(s) – at least Twitter, as this has been proven to help with sharing
  • A Gravatar account (Essential for receiving a Contributor ID – can be worked around for guest bloggers, who MUST send in a headshot)
  • A Disqus account, to respond should there be comments

Failure to provide the above can cause even the best article to be delayed or not published. This is on you!

Final Notes:

We will proofread all articles and run them through a plagiarism checker. Similarly, whereas we love publishing good Infographics, these are not purely about looks. We have been known to turn down great looking graphics where statements were questionable and/or not attributed.

We share your posts to all of our channels and you should do the same, in order to get the biggest possible audience.

Due to the volume of inquiries we receive, we are very picky about what goes on our site. A clear majority of inquiries we receive are turned down. And from there, most articles we receive do not make it onto Curatti. It is really important that your article is written with experienced marketers in mind. It must contain elements of originality. Again, we’re very busy, so your article should be proofread before we receive it. We simply can’t spend 2 hours editing articles.

 

You may find this article on guest blogging helpful

 

Don’t Send An Outreach Email That Looks Like This

I know you are swamped, so I won’t take much of your time.
I was reading some of the blog posts on your website and I must say the quality of the content is just amazing and it’s like that magnetic force that sticks and the reader just keeps on reading. Indeed, very informative!
I have some amazing blog ideas related to Online Marketing to share with you, which are homed in my thought clouds.
I value your time, so keeping it short. I would love to contribute a blog and want to share my thoughts with your audience. Would you allow me to contribute to your site? I have some share-worthy ideas in my mind. Let me know if you are interested in taking it forward.

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