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how to guest post on a blog or site

Be a Good Guest Poster: How to Share in Another’s Space

I get requests daily from people who want to guest post in this space. Like this post on difficulties and regrets in an open adoption, or this one on being a birth grandmother, or this one on a hidden peril faced by internationally adopted people.

I love being able to share with you voices of people I know and trust.

how to guest post on a blog or site

All of these fantastic articles were written by people I have a relationship with (I get scads of pitches from others who don’t read my blurb about that critical requirement.)

Some posts are easier to get ready for publication than others. Want to know how to be a great guest poster? Here are 6 tips, originally published on BlogHer (I tried to follow my own guidelines).

==>Read “6 Ways to Be a Great Guest Poster” ==>

If you’re interested in guest posting here, and if you feel we are in a relationship that includes trust, I would love to know about your post idea.

guide to living in open adoption

Lori Holden, mom of a young adult daughter and a young adult son, writes from Denver. She was honored as an Angel in Adoption® by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute.

Her first book, The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption: Helping Your Child Grow Up Whole, makes a thoughtful anytime gift for the adoptive families in your life. Her second book, Standing Room Only: How to Be THAT Yoga Teacher is now available in paperback, and her third book, Adoption Unfiltered, is now available through your favorite bookseller!

Find Lori’s books on her Amazon Author page and catch episodes of Adoption: The Long View wherever you get your podcasts.

15 Responses

  1. Very good suggestions. I’m amazed at the number of people who request guest posts who don’t follow any of these suggestions, particularly the one about actually knowing the content of the blog.

    1. Good question! I’ve asked a few others who agree with me on these two acceptable options.

      1. If you’re already a blogger write the post in your own dashboard and then copy/paste the entire post and send as an email. This can be done either in WYSIWYG or in HTML (“Visual” or “Text” view in the WordPress dashboard).

      2. Just compose in the body of an email. After you edit and proof, simply send to the host/editor.

      Try this experiment. Open a Word document you’ve written and copy a chunk of text in it, a paragraph or two.

      Now, start a new post on your blog. In the Compose window that you’d start writing in, paste what you’ve copied.

      To see all that extra code, now click on “HTML” or “Text” view. Your paragraph or two is now super long with lines and lines of extra code. While I get that the code is helpful in Word, I’ve found out the hard way that it’s very UNhelpful in WordPress and needs to be stripped out. Can be time-consuming.

  2. Such an interesting post! I had no idea about the Word thing. Thanks for the tips above, because I was totally thinking, “Where DO you do it then?” Makes total sense to write in your blog thing and then copy it over. I didn’t know much about guest posting until now, hmmm!

  3. Addendum: A reader asks if there’s a way to overcome the Word problem.

    There is a way. You can copy/paste from Word into Notepad (or Mac’s equivalent, TextEdit). This strips all the excess code and you’re left with only text. From there you can copy/paste into your blog’s Compose area.

    The problem is, though, that all the code you DO want — like hyperlinks, bold, italics, etc — also gets stripped. So then you’d need to go back and add all that in.

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