Four Dots Contributing Guidelines
Interested In Submitting A Guest Post To Four Dots Blog?
Great! Be Sure To Read This Post
We at Four Dots appreciate well-written, engaging, useful, good content.
As a continuously growing SEO agency that serves a great number of clients from all over the globe, it’s in our best interest to always keep our blog active and full of informative content that has the power to actually help our readers level up their skills.
Our goal is to continuously keep providing our audience with all sorts of different tips, tricks and hacks that could help them elevate their brand and business online.
We at Four Dots are interested in covering everything from SEO, content marketing, PPC and growth hacking, to entrepreneurship.
Having said that, we’re always looking for brilliant contributors who know a lot about these subjects and are willing to write an amazing blog post for us.
If you consider yourself an expert and you feel like sharing your process, strategy, success story, research, case study, or anything in between – we would love to have a look at your content and eventually publish it on our blog, if it meets our criteria.
Please spare a minute or two from your busy schedule to read this page from top to bottom. It should answer any questions you might have about what kind of material we want to publish on our site:
General Guest Blogging Requirements
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- Original content is a must. We are looking for unique, detailed, professionally written and edited writing.
- Make sure you put in an extra hour to fact check your material.
- Your guest post should be at least 1,000 words long.
If you take a closer look at the content that has already been published on our blog, you’ll see that the vast majority of it is longer than 1,500 words. Our authors know that you cannot really teach anyone anything just by throwing a couple of words in your CMS. Out of respect for them, and for everyone who frequently reads our blog – we have decided to ignore all those writers who are cranking up content just for links, and to only focus on collaborating with people who have the patience and the know-how to produce compelling articles.
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- Write in short, poignant sentences.
- Use H1, H2 tags.
- Contributor’s posts must be in line with the tone and style that our regular writers are using on the site. They aim to be casual, but helpful. Even though our content team uses jargon in our blog posts, we would like to ask you to stay away from it.
Acceptable Topics
- We are looking for well-written, data-driven, and interesting content that teaches our audience something new about SEO, PPC, growth hacking, content marketing and entrepreneurship.
Example:
Creating Content That Your Audience Will Adore – The Human Oriented Approach
Why You Need SSL to Rank Better in 2017 and How to Set it
Creating Content that Generates Links Like Crazy
Page Speed Observation: Is Your Website Driving in the Slow Lane?
Why Your Content Isn’t Attracting Links, and How to Fix it
The Inbound Growth Hacking Bible
- As you can see from the examples above, we are interested in publishing:
a.) In-depth actionable, tactical takeaways, that are backed by recent relevant examples, quotes, or findings.
b.) Creative, light hearted content, built around an internet trend, but relevant to our core audience. Example: “The Shut Up and Take My Money” Content Strategy.
- Regardless of that fact that our blog is full of SEO and content marketing posts – we are also interested in promoting stories that marketers and business owners genuinely care about.
If you have a cool story about on-boarding, team and task management, growth hacking, business development, writing, blogging, etc. – our editors would love to read it.
What We Won’t Publish On Our Site
- Topics that have already been covered on our blog. Before you decide to write a particular article for us, be sure to first do a site search for your chosen topic.
- Content that’s too promotional and blindly in favor of a company, tool or services that are being mentioned in your guest post.
- Anything that’s offensive to our readers and industry. Also, we do not accept posts that are overly critical of individuals or companies you’re mentioning. Four Dots isn’t interested in running a gossip blog.
- Content that isn’t backed by facts. Even though we love to theorize, we do not publish random ramblings.
Link Policy
- Focus on proper attribution of data, citations, and outside content references in your article. When you link out, be sure to clearly state your intent and avoid keyword links.
How to Submit Your Guest Post
- Send us your guest post in Google Doc file at contribute [at] fourdots.com
- We only accept custom images. Be sure to send them in a separate file. If you want us to feature some graphics in your guest post, you cannot send us random images you found online. They need to be made for this post only. Same goes for screenshots. You cannot reuse ones you’ve already published elsewhere.
- Make sure you include your short bio, with a maximum of ONE LINK to your own/company’s website. Also, we ask all of our guest blogger to ALWAYS send us a professional mugshot, so our readers can see that a living and breathing person stands behind a specific piece of content.
If your article meets our editorial standards and aligns with our content strategy, one of our editors will send you an email informing you when we intend to publish your article.
Even though we try our hardest to publish our guest bloggers ASAP on our site, the process usually takes up to 2-5 weeks.
The Fine Print
Once you send us your content, Four Dots reserves the right to adapt and edit your material in ways that the company sees fit. By sending us your material, you’re allowing the agency to reuse, republish, and update that specific material in any number of different ways.