How to Write a Guest Post That Publishers Approve

Most rejected guest posts aren't badly written. They're written for the wrong person.

The guest posts that get knocked back usually aren't the clumsy ones. More often they're perfectly readable pieces aimed at the wrong audience, namely whoever ordered them, not the people who actually read the site.

Plenty of guest posts pass through our link building marketplace each week, and the ones that get through editorial first time have a lot in common. None of it is complicated. Most of it comes down to a bit of homework before you start typing.

Why publishers turn guest posts down

Editors don't often explain themselves, but the reasons tend to be the same handful.

• It's obviously an advert. The whole piece only exists to get a link to a product page, and you can tell by the second paragraph.
• It doesn't suit the site. A crypto explainer on a gardening blog, or a beginner's guide on a site where every reader's an expert.
• There's nothing in it. Generic advice anyone could have written, padded out to hit a word count.
• The link has been forced in, usually a keyword anchor jammed into a sentence that makes no sense without it. Google's spam policies name optimised anchors in guest posts as a form of link spam, so careful publishers are wary of them.
• Nobody checked the AI draft. Editors see a lot of this now and they've got very quick at spotting it.
• It ignores the rules. Wrong length, wrong format, too many links, no images when they asked for some.

Sort those out and you're most of the way there.

Do your homework on the site first

Ten minutes looking round the site before you write will save you days of back and forth later.

Is it even worth the effort? We'd always start by having a nosy at the metrics that actually matter for a placement. Is anyone actually visiting? Is it on-topic for you? Does it link out to half the internet? Spending an afternoon on a lovely article for a site Google quietly stopped ranking two years ago is a bit soul-destroying.

Then find the guidelines. On most blogs they're tucked away on a "write for us" page somewhere in the footer. Buying through a marketplace? They'll normally be on the listing. Read them properly. When an editor writes 1,000 words and one link, they don't mean roughly.

Then have a skim of whatever they've put out lately. Three or four posts is plenty. How long are they? Loads of subheadings or hardly any? Chatty or a bit buttoned-up? "Colour" or "color"? And who's meant to be reading, a total beginner or someone who does this for a living? Then match all of it.

Pick a topic the readers actually want

This is where most posts go wrong, and it's nearly always because the topic was chosen backwards. Somebody needed a link to a page about mortgage brokers, so they wrote a post about mortgage brokers.

Start with the readers instead. What do they already read on the site? What questions come up in the comments, or in the searches the site ranks for? Find where that overlaps with what you know, and the link usually ends up with an obvious home.

One quick test. Would the editor happily publish this piece if it had no link in it at all? If the honest answer's no, keep working on the idea.

Sometimes no topic fits naturally, and that's useful to know too. If the context you need is already sitting in one of the site's existing articles, a niche edit could do the job better than a fresh post, and we've laid out when a guest post beats a niche edit (and when it doesn't) separately.

Writing it

Once the angle's sorted, the writing is the easy part. Mostly.

The opening matters more than people think. Most readers give a blog post a couple of lines before they wander off, so if your first paragraph is three sentences of throat-clearing about how important SEO is these days, you've lost them (and quite possibly the editor too).

What gets posts accepted, more than anything, is detail. A figure from your own work. Something you tried that flopped. The steps you really follow, rather than the textbook version. Editors have seen the generic take on most topics a hundred times over, and their site has very likely run it already.

Think about who's reading as well. A site full of beginners needs things spelled out, whereas experienced readers get bored fast if you spend 300 words on stuff they learnt years ago.

On a phone, a solid wall of text is hard going, and that's where most people will be reading. Subheadings and short paragraphs help a lot. So does the occasional list, as long as the whole piece doesn't turn into one.

It's worth linking to a couple of other decent sources too. An article whose one and only link goes to the writer's sales page is about as subtle as a sandwich board. Point to a decent industry report, or a free tool you'd tell a mate about, and suddenly it feels like someone's actually trying to help.

Then there's AI. Loads of people use it, and that's fine. The trouble is that raw ChatGPT copy has a sort of polished blandness editors can spot from the first line. Get a rough draft out of it by all means. Then pull it apart, put your own stories in, and check every number, because it does make them up sometimes.

Where to put your link

Get this wrong and even a brilliant article can come back with a polite no.

We'd aim for roughly halfway down. Picture someone who's never heard of your company reading it. If the link still seems useful to them, and the sentence wouldn't fall apart without it, you're fine. Put it in the opening lines and the whole article starts to look like scaffolding built around one link.

Don't just go with the first anchor that pops into your head, either. Your brand name, or a short phrase describing the page, nearly always beats a straight keyword, and if you've got a few posts going out at once, mixing them up matters even more. The rough percentages we work to are in our anchor text strategy article, for anyone who likes numbers.

Then there's the destination. A guide or category page that follows on naturally from the paragraph is usually a better fit than your homepage.

One link back to you is the norm, unless the publisher tells you two is fine. How many placements you need in total is a different question entirely, and the quickest way to answer it is to look at what the pages above you have, which is how we approach how many backlinks you need to rank.

A quick check before you submit

Run through this before the article goes anywhere near an editor. When you order guest posts through Press Parrot, the publisher still has the final say on every article, so it's worth doing whether you wrote the piece yourself or not.

• It follows every point in the publisher's guidelines
• The headline would look at home on the site's homepage
• It opens with something useful, not a warm-up
• There's at least one example, number or opinion the site doesn't already have
• Your link sits in the body, in a sentence that still works without it
• The anchor sounds normal when you read it out loud
• There are a couple of helpful outbound links besides yours
• Spelling matches the site, British or American
• Someone other than the writer has read it through

Tick all of those and it's very likely to get through first time.

If you'd rather not write it yourself

Plenty of people don't, and that's fair enough. A good guest post takes a few hours once you count the research, and across a whole campaign that adds up quickly.

You've really got two routes. The first is briefing a writer, in-house or freelance. Here the brief does most of the heavy lifting, since the site, the angle, the target page, the anchor and the publisher's guidelines all need to be in it, and what we include when briefing content that ranks and still reads well is a decent template to borrow.

The second is handing it over completely. Our content writing team can take the article off your plate, and the steps for ordering are all on the how it works page if you want to see where writing fits in.