Posting on guest sites is a great way to increase your profile, develop your personal brand – and subtly plug a product or service. Here’s how to increase your chances of getting your posts accepted…

Writing guest posts is a great way to promote your work and build your personal writer’s brand. I’ve done a lot of this recently, to promote my book, Kitten on a Fatberg. I’ve spent quite a lot of time sending off ideas, reading submissions guidelines, and liaising with editors. Here are some of the things I’ve learned along the way…

Have something to say 

Start by sitting down and thinking of a few topics that you could write about. These need to hit the content sweet spot – that happy overlap between the things you want to talk about, the things people might want to hear about, and the things the blog or website might actually want to publish.

Look for topics that are editorial in nature but aligned with your product. My book is a comic novel written with two co-authors, for example, so I’ve pitched various ideas to do with writing humour, crowdfunding a novel, collaborating on a book and so on.

Research your markets 

It’s important to make sure there’s a good fit between what you want to say and where you might be able to post it. A sci-fi forum may publish lots of guest posters, for example, but if you’re a chick-lit author you’re probably unlikely to become one of them. You may have a great piece about a popular topic such as productivity or writer’s block to offer, but if the site has already covered this area extensively, you’ll probably be unlucky there too.

Turn topics into ideas 

When presenting ideas, try to entice your editor with a real attention-grabbing headline and a standfirst – that catchy intro para that magazines and newspapers use to lure people into reading the full article. Then, even if you are addressing a popular topic, you can show you have a unique angle on the topic, and you may be in luck.

So rather than offering the dull and generic-sounding ‘Top productivity tips’, try “7 ways to slay your inner procrastinator’, followed by a catchy standfirst, e.g. ‘Top tips for putting off the putting off and getting down to writing that book at last – from someone who took 30 years to complete their first novel…” For titles, numbers and questions work well. For more inspiration, look at the way they do titles on a site like Buzzfeed.

Keep it personal

Don’t blast out the same email to a big list of blogs and websites. Send out a few at a time, personalizing each one, with a brief intro about who you are (which you might also want to tweak each time). Focus on why your ideas might be of interest to readers, get recipient’s names right, and always…

Follow the guidelines

The biggest bugbear of writing blogs is, quite understandably, submissions from people who haven’t followed their guidelines. These are always supplied clearly and in lots of detail, so it will seem quite discourteous to an editor if you ignore their requests about formatting, imagery, subject matter, word count, use of links, etc. Some popular blogs will simply reject your ideas or submission out of hand if the guidelines haven’t been followed.

Do as you’re told!

Editors will almost always want to make a few tweaks to your words. They may want some additional copy from you or ask for words to be cut. They will very often tweak the intro and opening section to make it sit better with their style and approach. Remember editors know their markets and their titles inside out, and if they want some tweaks, it means they want to publish you very soon. So, this is no time to be precious about your writing – go with their editorial decisions and turn any requested amends round asap.

Final thought: Keep the promo stuff to a minimum 

There’s a quid pro quo in guest posting – you give the editor some content of value, and they’ll let you plug your book. But don’t overdo the promotional element – if your piece is crammed full of references to your book, it will just come across as one big advert, and it won’t be accepted. Writing something that’s useful or entertaining for people is the best advertisement for your work, after all.

BIO: Dan Brotzel (@brotzel_fiction) is co-author of a new comic novel, Kitten on a Fatberg(Unbound). As a reader of this newsletter, you can pre-order Kitten on a Fatberg for a 10% discount – simply quote promo code KITTEN10