Guest article programme

What a guest article programme is

A guest article programme is a standing arrangement to get articles published under your name on other people’s websites: association sites, industry publications, respected independent blogs, and the sites of firms who sell to the same buyers without competing with you. It runs by the quarter rather than one piece at a time, because the relationships with editors are the part that takes time.

It is not a link-building service, and this is the point on which I will not move. Paid placements, sponsored posts sold by the unit, and outreach mail sent to hundreds of addresses at once are all available elsewhere and none of them are on offer here. They put your name on sites nobody reads, they annoy the few editors who matter, and the association is worse for a business than having published nothing at all. That refusal is most of what you are buying.

When you need one

You need one when your buyers read somewhere other than your site and you are not there. Most trades have three or four places where the conversation genuinely happens, and being a familiar name in those is worth more than another year of posts on a site with no readership yet. If you are not certain where they read, that question comes first, and it is audience research.

You need one when your own blog is good and unread, which is the common case. The pieces are careful, the argument is sound, and the readership is twelve people, four of whom work for you. Placing the same quality of writing where readers already gather fixes a distribution problem rather than a writing problem.

You do not need one if the writing is not yet strong enough to be worth placing. Editors decline weak pieces, and a programme that pitches weak pieces burns the contacts it depends on. Write two or three strong pieces for your own site first — an argued article is the usual starting point — and pitch from a body of work rather than from nothing.

What the programme includes

• A shortlist of sites, with reasons. Eight to twelve places your buyers plausibly read, each with a note on who edits it, whether they take contributions, what they have run lately, and how realistic you are for them this year.
• Individual pitches to named people. One site at a time, written for that site, referring to something they have actually published. No template, no uploaded list, no automated follow-up sequence.
• The article, written to their rules. Their length and their register, no product mentions where those are unwelcome, and the genuinely useful part left in rather than held back for your own site.
• The editing round with them. Answering queries, agreeing cuts, supplying the author line and the image, and meeting their date rather than one that suits us.
• A record of every approach. Who was pitched, when, what they said, and when it is reasonable to go back. That record is the asset the programme builds, and you keep it.

What you get

Placed articles, at an honest rate. Over a quarter, expect a handful of considered approaches and a smaller number of pieces that actually run. More pitches are declined than accepted, which is true for everybody honest about this work. Anyone promising a placement for every pitch is buying those placements somewhere you would not want your name to appear.

The pieces themselves. Every article, in full, in a shared document you own, whether it was placed or not. An unplaced piece is not wasted; it goes on your own site or into the newsletter, and it is often picked up later.

The relationship record. The shortlist, the correspondence and the notes, kept current, so whoever runs this next does not start from nothing.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A four-person firm in Calgary sells scheduling software to independent physiotherapy clinics. Its own blog is careful and unread. The owner knows, from two years of support calls, why small clinics lose money on late cancellations, and nobody in that trade has written it down properly.

The shortlist runs to ten sites: two provincial association newsletters, three clinic-management blogs run by suppliers who do not compete, a practitioner community site, two regional business publications, and two that are struck off on reading their guidelines, because they charge for placement. Over the first quarter six pitches go out, one at a time, each referring to something the site published recently. Two are declined, one goes unanswered, one asks for a different angle and gets it, and two are accepted. Those two run on the practitioner community site and one supplier blog, which are between them the places the owner’s buyers genuinely read. A declined piece goes up on the firm’s own site a month later, and an association newsletter, having seen it there, asks for a version in the autumn.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Who your buyers are, what you know that is worth reading, and which sites you already read yourself. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Per quarter, stating how many pieces are written and how many approaches are made, never how many will be published.
3. The shortlist. Five working days. You strike anything you would not want your name beside, and I strike anything that sells placement.
4. A recorded call for each piece. Thirty to forty minutes on the subject, because the only reason an editor says yes is material that only you have.
5. Pitch, write, place. Pitches go out one at a time. An accepted pitch becomes a draft within eight to ten working days, then your approval, then the editor’s.
6. A quarterly review. Forty-five minutes on what ran, what was declined and why, and whether the shortlist needs changing.

What it costs

A guest article programme is quoted after the half-hour call, in CAD, fixed in writing before the first pitch goes out. The price is set by how many pieces are written in a quarter and how much research each one needs. It is a price for work done and never a price per placement, because a price per placement can only be honoured by paying for placements. The pricing page shows how the four ways of working here are structured.

What happens next

Three things usually follow a quarter of this. An editor who ran one piece invites another, and a steady run under a single name becomes executive ghostwriting. The print equivalent, aimed at trade magazines rather than websites, is bylined and trade articles. And readers arriving from a placed piece need somewhere worth landing, so the site’s own articles tend to get attention next, with LinkedIn posts carrying each placement to the people who missed it. A quarter of this is complete work on its own. The shortlist and the contacts are yours, and nothing further is assumed.