Our Guest Post Guidelines

We’re a marketing agency, so we’re hot on content and SEO. That’s why we’ve written these guidelines to help you have a higher chance of getting your post accepted on our site.

When you’ve finished reading these, please pitch us your idea via the form below. We’ll reply within five working days to accept or reject your pitch. 

We do not pay our writers for their guest posts at this time. In the interest of fairness, we promise to backdate payment to all published guest contributors if we pay for guest posts in the future.  

What we accept

We accept medium and long-form content that offers practical advice to small-business owners and in-house marketing teams to help them get to grips with their digital marketing and improve it. 

We also accept case studies/insights posts providing you can turn those insights into action.

• You can’t have written the post anywhere else.
• We haven’t written about the post before if it’s evergreen content. We will update rather than write a new post. Example:
  • We write X Trends for 2020. Your guest post can be X Trends for 2021.
  • We write List of Social Media Image Sizes. We’ll update this for 2021 if they change.
• We do not accept content that’s sponsored or overly promotional (all content should be written for informational intent). 

Copyright

Do not plagiarise any content that’s already out there. Even if you’ve written it yourself. We do check.

You can refer to previous content you’ve worked on, but make sure this blog is new information, not a rewording of your existing content. 

All statistics and quotes must be attributed back to the original source.

You’re welcome to syndicate the post 7 days after publishing here. Please use a canonical link.

Content

All submissions should be more than 1000 words.

Anything less than that won’t have the in-depth perspective we look for in guest posts.

There’s no maximum word count, but don’t waffle on needlessly. Keep things clear.

Don’t make the post promotional for your own products or services. Also, don’t discredit someone else’s.

Statistics must be three years younger and from reputable sources. Link to the original stat, not a fact-roundup post or similar. 

100% of your blog should be in English. 

Our blog is aimed at small business owners and marketers with varying degrees of experience. Your content should assume basic intelligence but break down complex descriptions where needed.

Links

When including external links, link to the most relevant information page to your point, not just the website homepage.

You are allowed a maximum of one link per 500 words in the body of your content to your own resources, providing they are specifically related to your subject matter. We reserve the right to no-follow these links and any others we deem appropriate. 

You will be allowed two do-follow links in your author bio. 

We will remove any links to our competitors unless they provide editorial value or back up a statistic or quote. 

Link Warning

We have a strict external links policy and will only add a link because it’s editorially relevant to provide additional information, to back up what we’re saying, or to point our readers in the right direction to help them take action. You must also follow this policy. 

You may place one affiliate link in your post (the same limit for staff writers). This has to be for a program we’re already part of as we cannot vouch for products that are not tried and tested by us, which we promise in our affiliate policy.

We do not place links because we’ve been compensated for them. It’s against Google’s rules. You must not be compensated for any links placed in your article. 

We will delete any post that abuses our link policy. You won’t be able to contribute to the site again.

Author Bios

You are allowed two do-follow links in your bio.

The first should be towards your company homepage or profile page if you have team pages. Example.

The second is your choice, but we may reject this link and ask you to pick an alternative if, for example, it is to an adult site. 

You’ll also get to link to your official social media accounts (1 per platform). 

Please provide a LinkedIn quality headshot 400*400 px that can be cropped circular.

If you contribute more than 2 articles you will have a dedicated author page set up which will contain this information and a longer bio along with links to all your articles on our site. Example. 

Images

Please supply a header image for your post (dimensions 800*418px).

You can use Canva (free) or Photoshop (paid) to help with this.

Please ensure you own all the rights to the photo. We prefer free stock photos to avoid copyright issues from sites like Unsplash or Pixelbay.

Please state the source of any images. This is just for our reference and won’t be shown.

Images cannot be watermarked or contain company branding.

You may include images to break up your text (every 500 words at most) but this is not required.

Please only use JPG or PNG image formats. We compress all images with Imagify.

Embeds

To protect copyright please only include screenshots and embedded content from properties you own, or the have the rights to use on our site. We may remove any part of our post if we have detected or are informed of copyright violations. 

For tweets, leave the raw URL and we’ll do the rest. 

Meta

Please supply a headline for your article that entices users to click without coming across as spammy. It should be what the article contains. Improve it with these tips.

Please provide a meta description for your post following best practices.

Submissions

Once your pitch has been accepted you may submit your post via Word or Google Docs.

All images should have the original image file submitted separately in the allowed formats.

Please use in-built headings for H2, H3 and H4 tags. 

We will format and upload the guest post ourselves.

Important points to note

• You are welcome to check your post and answer comments. We also may answer comments.
• You’ll always remain the author of the guest post and will be clearly identified as such. We will never claim authorship of the work or use it for any other purpose.
• We may make small copy-edits to keep the post updated and relevant. Examples of where we might do this are below:
  • Remove deleted tweets.
  • Updated screenshots where platforms or websites have been redesigned to keep them current.
  • Tweaking minor details such as step by step instructions if the way to do it changes.
• We reserve the right to nofollow or remove links or your entire post at any time.
• We may delete parts or all of your posts if we have a copyright notice sent to us. 

If you follow all of the above you’ve got a high chance of being accepted onto the Waterdown Media Blog.

The Process 

Once we receive your pitch we’ll let you know in 5 working days if it’s been accepted or needs some more work. We may ask you to broaden/narrow your topic or throw similar ideas back that might work better.

Once sent back we’ll review it and make any edits we need within 2 weeks and send it back to you for review. Once you’ve confirmed you’re happy with our changes we’ll fit it into our editorial calendar and let you know when it can go live.

We’ll also promote it across the Waterdown Media social accounts.

If you’re happy with all the above we can’t wait to hear from you. Fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch.