Writing guidelines for guest posts

First off, thanks for your interest in EmailOctopus! We welcome guest posts on our blog.

If you have great writing skills and would like to share your email marketing expertise with our audience, we’d love to hear from you.

We’ve put together this page with information on our guest post writing guidelines. And a few ground rules to help with any questions you might have.

Guidelines for guest bloggers

Your article should be wholly original and unique.
We prefer detailed articles that provide readers with lots of value. So your article should be at least 800-1,000 words long, though the final word count will depend on the topic. We suggest you use a tool like Keyword Surfer to check the word count of the SERPs results for your chosen target keyword.
Please be concise and consider overall readability.
Your article should reflect the writing style of our blog, which is casual yet helpful, simple, accessible and clear – see ‘Tips on tone of voice’ further on.
Keep in mind that our readers are a mix of marketers, small business owners, entrepreneurs and digital agencies. Many of our blog readers are already EmailOctopus users or considering becoming one.
Our audience is primarily native English-speaking and so we’re looking for articles that read as though they were written by a native English-speaker.
The article should cover a topic related to email marketing, such as improving deliverability, using segmentation, growing a mailing list etc.
Your article should target valuable keywords and include plenty of semantic keywords for better SEO.
Include screenshots or images that illustrate points made in your article. These images should be succinctly labelled. You should have the rights to all images submitted and include links to sources where appropriate.
If you refer to statistics or studies in your article, we encourage you to include a link to your sources. Ideally these stats and studies should be recent.
Please include a two to three line bio. This can include a link to your website or Twitter handle. If you have one, send us your Gravatar email account too. Otherwise, please provide us with a suitable headshot.
Send the article as a Word or Google Doc. And make sure it’s free of typos and grammatical errors.

Tips on tone of voice

We’re in the business of delivering messages, so we know how important it is to communicate well. The way we talk at EmailOctopus reflects who we are: friendly, honest and straightforward.

Just as in our product design, simplicity is the holy grail in our writing. Because we work in email, we know that saying it concisely is saying it well. This means:

Write it like you’d say it
Use simple, short sentences
Avoid difficult vocabulary
No formal corporate-speak

Everything we write should be easy to understand for everyone in our audience — whether they’re an MBA-qualified marketing guru, or a self-published author getting to grips with email for the first time.

Sometimes we have to use email marketing terminology and other technical language. It’s unavoidable. But be careful not to use jargon where it can be avoided and — if it can’t — use the same technical words consistently (and explain them if you have to).

Rhetorical questions can be a great way to grab attention, but be careful not to use them too often. This goes back to writing it like you’d say it: people tend not to use rhetorical questions in conversation, so they can sound inauthentic or cheesy in writing.

A word on links

There’s no limit on the number of links you can include in your guest post. Ideally there would be a minimum of four, including one link to one of our own articles published on the blog. However, every link must be of benefit to the reader and be contextually relevant.

We will remove any links that we think are irrelevant to the topic.

If the purpose of your blog is to gain a link to a particular site, it’s a good idea you let us know from the start. That way we can decide whether we think the link is a natural fit with the topic. And whether it will be given the green light.

We’d prefer that you didn’t include links to any of our competitors.

The not-so-fine print

By submitting a guest post to the EmailOctopus blog, we’d want to own the content. Which, I’m afraid, means no republishing your guest post to your own blog, LinkedIn, Medium or any other publishing platform. Though we do encourage you to share your article like crazy once it’s published on our blog.

We’re looking for high quality articles so we do reserve the right to reject contributions at our discretion.

We may want to edit and adapt your guest blog content to bring it more in-line with our existing content. Or update it in the future for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

We also reserve the right to include calls-to-action, linking to EmailOctopus content, including but not limited to blog articles and downloadable content.

Examples of successful guest posts

Here are some of our most successful articles submitted by guest bloggers:

Want to write for us?

If you’d like to submit a guest post, please email help@emailoctopus.com with a few examples of your work. Include an outline of your article’s topic with a brief explanation of how this your article will benefit our readers. And include details on the primary keyword you will be targeting with potential search volume and keyword difficulty.

Guest Post