Guest Posts and Pay For Submission on Themekraft

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We have always claimed that we have an educative role in the community and because of that, we’ll share our procedures to manage Guest Posts. Also, if you want to implement a Guest Post or even a Pay for Submission method, this article may help you a great deal.

In ThemeKraft we have a very clear and straightforward way to deal with Guest Posts. With the experience we have gathered in these past few months we have almost the whole thing automatized.

We have several documents stating the most important subjects for the submission of guest posts both for the contributor’s procedures and for our internal procedures. This way, the contributor know everything they need to have a good experience with us, and also our Editorial Team never gets lost in the many steps necessary to create this experience.

In this article, we’ll share some of the steps and guidelines we use. If you want to read the contributor guideline, please read the Guest Post Guidelines.

If you want to know our take on this subject, please read the article Guest Posts Pay for Submission that we published a couple of weeks ago.

Contributors procedures

In the Contributors Document, we state all the requirements we ask for you to have in mind when you write and submit your article, plus the way your article travels until publishing. These documents are very important to create a fluid process with the least questions and emails possible.

Here some examples you can take some ideas from. (These are not our complete Qualify and Submit guidelines, nor our complete Submission Process).

Qualify guidelines

The Qualify Guidelines are to inform all the requirements the contributor need to meet in terms of the article’s structure.

To qualify to submit and publish a guest post you’ll need to fulfill the following requirements:

1. Write an article of, at least, 1000 words.
2. Have original content, never duplicated nor posted in any other Site of the www.
3. Have an article created by the one indicated as the “author” and never use content from another author.

Submit guidelines

In the submission guidelines, we state all the steps you have to take to create a good submission in terms of the article’s content

Every guest post submitted to ThemeKraft Magazine needs to have the following elements.

1. The article itself, submitted on themekraft.staging.wpengine.com (Currently not implemented because of website renovations)
2. A Featured Image (free licensed, created by the contributor, or paid by the contributor) (The image cannot be licensed or not have the requirements for its use) submitted on themekraft.staging.wpengine.com
3. The author’s bio information submitted on the contributor’s account profile page on themekraft

Submission Process

Finally, we have the submission process to let you know which are the steps your submission will travel until published.

1. Submission: After you have submitted your article, we’ll review it along with the backlink.
2. Review: Because of the submissions we receive daily, the reviewing process could take us up to 7 workdays.
3. Changes: If the article needs any correction we’ll let you know by email sent from guest-posts@buddyforms.helpscoutapp.com. You’ll have all the time you need to make changes to it.

Internal procedures

We need clear instructions for our editorial line, and so do you. Here some steps you can take to create a solid workflow.

1. Always send the Guest Post guidelines before the content is written.
2. Receive guest posts only through the site submission, never through the inbox. (currently not implemented because of website renovations)
3. Read the article’s first paragraph to check the editorial line.
4. Check if Guest Post Guidelines are met.
5. Check for duplicate, plagiarized, or stolen content in one of the following sites:
   1. We have four sites we use for this, but we rather let you find your own just by searching “duplicate content checker” on Google.
6. Check all the article’s backlinks against the Google blacklist. The URL should not be downgraded by Google. Check on one of the following sites:
   1. We use three sites to check for blacklisted sites. You can find your own searching “blacklist checker” in Google.
7. Read the full article.

Template responses

To help the whole process we have written responses to use as templates. Of course, we adapt all the templates for every contributor. We’ll share only the template’s titles here because we don’t want to influence our community at that level.

For example:

Asked to Submit.

Only used for the first submission request.

We use it when a soon-to-be contributor asks us for a guest post chance. We almost always say yes and send a semi-prepared response adapted for every contributor and the subjects they propose. Here we give thanks for the interest and share the Guest Post Guidelines page.

Finally, we ask if they have some titles in mind to send us and begin the guest post process. This works as a call to action in case the contributor is not completely sure about what he wants to write. Most of the contributors who leave do so at this point

Article Submitted

Only used for the first submission.

This template response is used when the contributor submits the first article. Here we give thanks for the submission and state how much time will take us to review the article.

A good option is to communicate that you’re going to get in touch with the contributor as soon as the article is reviewed. So the contributor knows what to spect.

Article Ready

Only used for the first article scheduled.

Here we accept the article and share the publishing date, the article’s link, and our social networks inviting the contributor to follow our social networks if they want to see their article there.

We also invite the contributor to write for us again.

The article is Live

In this template replay, we communicate that the article is published and invite them to follow, share, and like the piece on our social networks. We give the final thanks and this concludes a guest post process.

We also have the same templates but for the second contribution of the same author, so they don’t read the same response every time. You don’t want to use fully automatized replies because the contributor might feel he’s talking with a machine. They have worked on the article so they want to feel their work is appreciated.

When a contributor submits for the third time, they know the drill and it’s more effective to write short and on-point replies, and you don’t need templates for that. It’s more effective to write from scratch or use parts of the templates.

Final words

These are our procedures for the guest posts we have generated with the experience gained since we start our humbling blog. For now, it has been a very enriching and successful experience/experiment, full of new learnings and mistakes for our editors, and with a lot of complaints and good feedback as well. We have taken all of those to create these documents and this article.

To create this system as we do you’ll need the BuddyForms Pay for Submission plugin installed.

Here a video tutorial and the documentation for the plugin.

We hope you can use this information to improve your knowledge or even better, your web.

Please let us know what you think about this content in our social networks, we can always use more feedback to keep improving.

Very good day to all!

Lucas Díaz

Lucas Díaz is an advertiser specialized in Digital Marketing and SEM. Also plays with SEO and some other toys. He’s currently Lead Marketing in ThemeKraft.