Want to write a guest post?
we love featuring guest writers on our blog!
Would you like to write a guest post for our blog? We love featuring guest writers on our blog and all published posts on our social network.
We follow these simple guidelines when choosing what guest posts we’ll publish. Please check them out! If you send us a guest post, you’re confirming that you’re in agreement with these terms.
Please go ahead and add our email address posts@hellosmitten.com to your email contacts so you are more likely to get our replies to your requests! And if all else fails and it seems like we should have replied but you haven’t heard back, go ahead and check your junk/spam folders.
Guest Post guidelines
for being posted on our blog
- Original Work: Once we accept your post for publication, you grant us permission to be the sole publisher of your content. And you agree that it hasn’t been previously published and you won’t post it elsewhere (including your own blog/website.)
- Third Party Links Your guest post can link out to 2-3 third-party high-authority websites with Alexa rankings of 50,000 or less so long as those links make sense in the context of the post. (i.e. help the reader explore a topic further, give authority to what you’re saying, etc.) All links will be reviewed (and edited as needed) prior to publication.
- Company Links: A link to your company can be included in your bio!
- Brownie Point Links: Want to earn some brownie points us? Show us that you love our other posts by including some internal links that point back to already-published posts on our site. Looking for a fast method to do this? Search Google with this: “site: hellosmitten.com intitle:[YOUR KEYWORD]”.
- Promotional Content: All guest posts should not promote your business in any way. However, you’re welcome to reference experiences you’ve had in business as examples if that helps make your article more interesting/helpful to readers.
- Topic: Guest post topics should be suited and helpful to small professional and service-based business owners.
- Article Tone: We’re all about being human, so please write with a human touch. Use easy-to-understand language, lots of examples, and plentiful stories. We want our blog to be interesting so people come back!
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Bio: Authors must provide the following information:
- A current, regularly-checked email address (associated with a Gravatar account. It will not be made public)
- A short interesting bio, 50 words or less (please feel free to include a link to your company’s website)
- A headshot (we would prefer if you upload your headshot to Gravatar, using the email address you’re providing us)
- Any social profile links to be included in the author profile (if you provide a Twitter handle, we will mention you when promoting the post)
- Please note: We’re all about being human around here, so we won’t attribute your post to a company. Your author bio must be for a specific person representing the company.
- Images: Relax. You don’t need to provide graphics or images with your submitted post unless, of course, they’re directly related to the content (i.e., screenshots, infographics, charts, etc. related to the content of the post).
- Do You Need Our Prior-Approval? Nope, it’s not necessary (nor is it preferred) to send us your final topic choice for approval prior to submitting your guest post. We’d rather read your entire post and make a decision from there.
- Submission: Please send us your post as a text document, Pages document, Word document, a Google document or pasted in the body of the email message to posts[at]hellosmitten[dot]com. Please don’t send it as a PDF or with HTML formatting.
- Acceptance/Notification: We have a rolling publication schedule of about 2-6 weeks out. We’ll notify you via email if/when your post is accepted. If we do not send you a publication date via email within two weeks of submission, we will not be publishing your article on our blog and you’re free to publish it elsewhere. Unfortunately, because we’re pretty busy with other guest post emails, client projects, and being human, we won’t be able to respond to every email we get asking whether or not a post has been accepted, or why it wasn’t. Since we like to publish guest posts as much as we can, you can rest assured that if your guest post wasn’t accepted, it’s most likely possible that something about your post didn’t conform to our guidelines or wasn’t a fit for our audience. And we may have even shed a tear about that.
- Edits: While we’d rather spend our time doing other things, it’s possible we may edit your post a bit to make it an ideal fit for our readership and parameters. This means we might lightly edit the post for readability, edit or remove mentions of specific products or brands, and even possibly add relevant internal and external links.
- Cost: Believe it or not, we won’t charge you a penny to publish your guest post on our site. We love a good solid freebie. So there you go!