How to Submit an Article

1. Read the guest blog guidelines below carefully. Any submissions which clearly haven’t even looked at the guidelines will be rejected outright as spam.
2. Submit your article to [email protected] as a word document.
3. If an article is approved for the blog I’ll get in touch with any revisions or tweaks needed.

Guest Blogger Guidelines

Target market

• Practicable, no nonsense tips for Small to medium business owners,
• Startups,
• Entrepreneurs,
• Freelancers
• Of every industry and sector

Relevant Topics (in order of importance)

• Web Design
• SEO
• Digital Marketing
• Branding
• Running a small business
• Business tips
• Social Marketing
• Graphic Design

Post Subjects

Any valuable marketing tips, advice, tutorials or case studies which:

• Grow the business
• Save time
• Make money

Rules

• The post topic must be relevant and useful to the readers of this blog.
• The post must be grammatically correct and well-written.
• The post must be over 1,500 words.
• The post must not be entirely self-promotional.
• ALL sources must be attributed and hyperlinked – this includes images
• I may tweak or tailor your headline and content before publication to meet the blog requirements.
• Guest posts must be original and may not have been published elsewhere online already.  All submissions will be verified for originality using plagurism tools. Any deliberate offenders will be permanently blacklisted to protect the quality of the blog.
• Once I publish the content that content belongs to Design Hero. This is because if the same article is published on another blog this will harm my duplicate content rating. This extends to if a guest post on my blog is spun and published elsewhere I will remove the original article to protect the quality of the blog.

Links

• The post must contain max 3 outgoing links
• The post must contain min 3 internal links to relevant pages on design-hero.com (such as other blog articles, or service pages)
• Any outgoing links must provide relevant or useful information to the user, any purely marketing links will be stripped on publication.
• The post must not include harmful or spam links.
• The post may include links to your website and blog in a brief author’s bio (approximately 3 sentences), which will be published at the end of the guest post.

Tone & Quality

Due to the number of requests I receive I am very picky about what goes on my blog. I maintain a higher standard of writing quality than most and accessibility is very important to my audience. This blog is not purely for SEO, these articles are written for and read by real business owners and ongoing clients with little or no marketing background so…

• No jargon, or tech speak
• Try to stay on brand with plenty of superhero/superpower themed hyperbole!
• Language should be very conversational, optimistic and upbeat.
• Any marketing tips should be demonstrated with a real world example
• Any claims of figures supported by references where possible.

Most Common Rejection Reasons

• Article is written with surface level knowledge, or less knowledge than those likely to read the post
• Weak intro or opening (needs to draw user in with Problem, Agitation, Solve.
• Weak conclusion.
• Article is trying too hard to sell, rather than offer knowledge & value
• Article contains too awkward links shoehorned in.
• Article is too generic- it’s ok to tread old ground, so long as you put a unique spin on it, or contextualize it in a different way. ie work it into a superhero theme consistent with the Design hero brand. This is key.

Terms & Conditions

I may edit, embellish or tweak your blog post content to suit the Design Hero blog guidelines after your submission. This includes adding or editing text, adding images and changing headings to suit our SEO strategy.

Format and Submission

Posts must be submitted in Word document format.

That’s it!

Best of luck and look forward to reading your submissions!