Want to submit a guest post to Gist’s Blog?

The Gist Blog has over 40,000 subscribers and attracts more than 150k monthly visits, and we’re always looking for more brilliant contributors to join our ranks.

If you have exceptional writing and/or design skills and would like to share your expertise with a large audience of marketers, growth hackers, and business owners, we’d love to hear from you.

Please take some time to review this entire page – it should answer any question you have about what kind of content we’re looking for and how the submission process works.

The Bare Essentials for Every Post We Publish

Successful guest contributions are comprehensive, data-driven, and interesting posts that teach our readers something new about the world of business. While we tend to skew toward content about specific marketing tactics, that’s not all we talk about. We’re also interested in publishing any topic that marketers care about, which includes things like hiring, team development, job hunting, writing, design, and larger internet trends, among other things.

We also look for a few things in everything we publish:

• Original concepts, compelling arguments, and high-quality writing. We will not republish anything that’s been published elsewhere.
• Article reflects the writing style/tone of the Marketing Blog. We aim to be casual, yet helpful, and typically we stay away from buzzwords and jargon.
• Proper attribution of data, quotations, and outside content referenced in the article.
• No more than one link to your company’s website in the body of the post.

The “Why” of Contributing to Gist

We’ll go over the “why” of guest posts for our audience, for us (Gist) and for you!

1. For Our Audience

The Gist: We are striving to create a place of value for marketers and business executives who handle the marketing, sales and support of their organizations.

Tall order, right?

95% of content online is barely worth reading. And marketers know that already. This means that every single thing we post on our blog has to be:

• Hyper-Relevant to the Buyer Journey
• Backed Up by Data and “Real World” Use Cases
• Easy-to-Read (Just because it’s valuable doesn’t mean it can’t be entertaining)

2. For Gist

Gist is a platform created to house all the necessary tools for the entire marketing, sales and support spectrum.

Valuable content (properly promoted) attracts visitors.

We want those visitors to sign up for a free trial of Gist and install one of our products onto their website.

3. For The Contributor

Every piece of content that goes through our rigorous process and is published will be promoted by a dedicated person in multiple ways.

Note: You can check out our content strategy here to see a little of that promotion, right here.

Our promotion means that more eyeballs see your name and read your valuable contribution to the Gist library of content.

In addition to our dedicated promotion, contributors will benefit from:

1. A Backlink: One link directly to your site in the bio. (You can include another link or two to blogs, but they have to be contextual and fit the content.)
2. Author Bio: Any post published on Gist will get the author a well-designed profile. Your image and other details will be included.
3. More Posts: Write one good post and you’ll have a direct line to getting more of your quality content published. Every post will be reviewed/edited, but the pipeline will be shorter.

The “What” We Expect Out of Your Content

Now, you know why. It’s time to lay out the expectations.

1. The Content Itself

To say the content needs to be good is an understatement.

We won’t publish things unless they help marketers, sales pros and customer success folks be better at what they do.

Here’s a list of broad topics (You can find and suggest subtopics within these large categories):

• Marketing (Content marketing, email, nurturing, top/middle funnel, etc., etc.)
• Sales (Closing, cold email, pitching, etc., etc.)
• Support (Onboarding, customer success, handling tickets, etc., etc.)

Here’s a few examples of the types of content we love:

• Case Studies: Something you’ve done that has worked (or hasn’t). A blog that details that journey with the results to prove your answers is a type of post marketers LOVE.
• How-To’s: Know how to navigate a tough process in the marketing, sales or support? Show our audience how it’s done.
• Round Ups: If you know several professionals and can get their opinions on a relevant topic, we’d love to get that in front of our audience.

Here are some non-negotiable things we need to be included (or not included):

• At least 1000+ words
• Screenshots or attributed, relevant images
• Absolutely ZERO stock images within the content (The feature image can be stock, but nothing else)
• Short sentences and paragraphs (1-3 sentences in a paragraph)
• 10+ Sub-headings (H2, H3 and H4 all acceptable to break up the content)
• Concise, not fluff
• Here’s a great example of the style and format of content we expect from Moz (and it’s about writing good content 🙂

Important: We reserve editing rights for the life of the content, but will inform you of changes being made.

2. Your Promotion

Promoting the guest post across your social channels is a great way to get started (we’ll be doing the same thing on our end).

A few social posts over the course of a week or two. Then, intermittent posts over the course of time would be awesome.

Important: One thing we do require is a link back to your site. We will work together to find a relevant blog or resource on our respective sites to keep things contextual. Then, once that link to your site is live — we’ll schedule your content to go live on ours.

3. The Life of the Content

Times change.

This statement is especially true in the marketing world. How we do things changes, even though the keywords we rank for don’t.

For instance, “link building” in 2008 is dramatically different to “link building” now. Even the term “marketing” is totally different from 20 years ago.

For this reason, depending on the performance of your content, we update it annually to improve relevance.

As long as we have a working email for you, you’ll be notified of the coming changes.

The “How” to Get Started

If you’re still up for the challenge and would like to submit a draft, please fill in the Guest Post Request Form below, and we’ll be back in touch soon.

Fill This Form:

Next Steps

Once the above form has been submitted, here’s what happens next.

1. I’ll either choose one of your topics or ask you for some more ideas.
2. Then, you’ll write and submit the draft for review.
3. Upon approval of a final draft, we’ll find discuss a link opportunity.
4. The post is then scheduled to go live after we receive a link.
5. Finally, both you and Gist will promote the post.