Guest Post Guidelines

A hand with a pen writing a guest post on a notepad

A hand with a pen writing a guest post on a notepad

We hope you have gone through this post before reading further.

We value our blog audience/readers at Aha!NOW, and want to serve them the best. 🙂

For this reason, we put in our best efforts in creating the blog posts.

Personally, we spend many hours on a post before it is published. A lot of time goes into writing a post, which includes drafting, proofreading, editing, revising, and giving the finishing touches.

Thereafter, time is spent in formatting the post in WordPress, creating appropriate images, and adding relevant links, and much more.

If you wish to write for Aha!NOW, we expect you to put in the same efforts too.

Of course, we will be assisting you to create an outstanding blog post that impresses the readers and gets YOU the accolades.

These are a few guest post guidelines that we’d like you to kindly read carefully before you proceed to submit your post pitches or write the post.

Guidelines To Write A Guest Post For Aha!NOW

For your convenience, we have written a short form and long form of the guidelines. Please go through both of them.

SHORT FORM

  1. Write on a topic that is related to this blog.
  2. Cover the topic in detail and have something valuable as takeaway.
  3. Make sure the post is at least of 1500 words.
  4. Do not make the post promotional – about yourself, your product, service, or blog.
  5. Submit new and original ideas/post.
  6. Pass all tests for plagiarism and respect copyrights of the content.
  7. Ensure the post is well-written in simple English, grammatically correct, and formatted as per our specifications.
  8. Avoid including any affiliate links, irrelevant links, and more than four contextual/related links.
  9. Send links of free images that go with the post, your author bio, and your Gravatar email address.
  10. Reply to all the comments to your guest post and publicly promote it to your social media followers.

If you are a regular blogger, these guidelines should be sufficient for you to write a proper guest post. If you want to go into the details, please read the long form of the guidelines.

LONG FORM

We have divided the guidelines into five sections – topic and post specifics, originality and correctness, formatting and editing, linking, image and author bio, and finally, commenting and social promotion.

Topic and Post Specifics

1. Please write on a topic that is related to this blog (check out the post categories on Aha!NOW) and something that is not written here (check the previous posts in your selected category of Aha!NOW).  

2. The aim of the blog post will be to provide content that is helpful, meaningful, and useful for the reader. Therefore, your post should cover the topic in detail and should have something valuable as takeaway, worthy to become a resource for later reference for the readers.

3. To ensure that, you are requested to send a couple of guest post pitches here for the selected post topic. This will help us decide and set the right course for you to avoid re-writing of the post.

4. The first draft should be between 1500 to 2000 words. We may suggest corrections or share ideas on how to make it better.

5. The post should not be about promoting yourself, your product, your service, or your blog. If you intend to do that for yourself or for a third party, please visit this page.

Originality and Correctness

6. Please submit new and original ideas. We will not take up any of your pre-written posts, spun articles, or a copy of ideas presented on any other blog or site. The post should not have been published anywhere else, including on your own blog or website.

7. The post should pass all tests for plagiarism using the popular plagiarism software or Google search facility, else your post submission will be canceled.

8. Your post must be grammatically correct and without any spelling errors. Please check your post with spell checker and other software like Grammarly before sending it to us.

9. The post should respect copyrights of the content in the post. Infringement of copyright will lead to removal of the blog post without any notice. Please check all resource references in your post for their authenticity, validity, and freshness. We may remove any mention or resource link that we deem as not suitable for our blog.

10. Also, by submitting your post to Aha!NOW, you give us the exclusive copyright ownership of the post for the first 15 days after it is published on this blog to avoid any duplicate content issue. This also means you’ll not be able to publish the post anywhere else in the future. However, if you want, you can publish the post after 15 days on your blog with a canonical link to your guest post on Aha!NOW.

Formatting and Editing

11. Your post must be well-written in simple English that is easy to understand and read. If we are not able to comprehend your post or if it contains too many errors, we may outrightly reject it without any information. It is mandatory for you to follow the below-mentioned guidelines.

12. Please break the content into easy-to-digest small portions and use proper formatting. Kindly make paragraphs of not more than two sentences each, which makes it easier to read. You should use subheads (H2, H3, H4) for each section of the post.

13. As the author of the article, you would be responsible for proofreading and making edits before the final submission. If the post requires major changes, you’ll be asked to rewrite it as per our suggestions.

14. You need to come up with 2-3 post headline alternatives. Headlines have to be impressive, unique, as well as search engine-friendly. You should wrap up the post at the end with a conclusion and a call-to-action statement.

15. We reserve the right to add additional information on your post if we find it essential to make it more relevant to our blog readers.

Linking

16. You’re requested not to use any kind of affiliate links in the content of the post. Such posts would be outrightly rejected.

17. We allow the guest posts to include a maximum of one link in the author’s bio, and it should point to the root domain of your personal blog (the blog’s whois records should be in your name, else it would be considered a third party site), with the blog name as the anchor text. You can link to one related post on your blog from within the content of your guest post, and we’ll decide the anchor text of this link.

18. Links to irrelevant sites, whether owned by you or not, are not allowed. You should refrain from using not more than 4 such links.

19. Any reference or resource link mentioned in the post should be from an authoritative and popular blog or site like Wikipedia. We reserve the right to remove or change this link and its anchor text with another link or anchor text of our choice.

20. We reserve the right to add contextual and other links of related articles from our blog in the content of the guest post.

Image and Author Bio

21. Kindly send the links (not photos) of 3-4 pictures that are appropriate for the post, along with the article. As a rule, we don’t allow the guest authors to use their personal pictures in the post.

22. We reserve the right to choose the picture to go with the post though we’d try to go with your preference, if possible. Please also send the quotes that match the images to create image quotes.

23. Please make sure that the pictures are free to use and modify and are under Creative Commons License for free attribution and distribution. You may use the image sites like Pixabay.com or any other similar site.

24. You need to have your own avatar registered with Gravatar.com so that we can use your Gravatar image in the author bio. Your email address linked to your Gravatar account will be used for comment notifications and other correspondences.

25. Kindly include an author bio of not more than 50 words. It should not contain any links, other than one to your blog’s root domain. If you want, you can also send your Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ social media links to be included in it.

Commenting and Social Promotion

26. As a guest blogger, you are expected to interact and reply to your guest post’s comments as soon as the post is published, and thereafter. Aha!NOW is known for the quality of its comments, so I expect you to be elaborate in your comments.

27. We will close the comments to your guest post after about 10 days from its publish date to relieve you from the responsibility of replying to the comments. Therefore, you need to reply to all the pending comments within this period.

28. You’re also required to promote your guest post publicly on your personal social media profiles to your fans and followers. If you are a blogger, we’d also appreciate if you promote your guest post on social media communities and groups, as well as to your email list.

29. You MUST tag Harleena Singh and Aha!NOW in your social media promotions, so we are notified.

30. If you fail to reply to the comments and promote the post as explained above, we have the right to remove your blog backlinks from the post, or the entire post itself.

We hope you have read the following guest post guidelines carefully and agree to follow them.

We might be forced to reject your article if it does not meet any of these guidelines. We may sound a bit strict, but these are exactly the rules we follow when we write blog posts on Aha!NOW. And believe us, it will really turn out to be beneficial for you.

Note: Your submission of the post pitches or article is not a guarantee of it getting approved and published on Aha!NOW. We shall let you know if the post can be published or not along with its reasons thereof. If the guest post is not approved and published, the author will retain the right to publish it elsewhere.

How to Send Your Guest Post

Please follow this process to send your guest post to us:

1) After getting your post pitch accepted, compose your post in a MS Word document.

2) Include the links as hyperlinks in the content and your author bio without any links at the end of the post.

3) Add your Gravatar email address and social media links.

Contact us through the contact form and we will send you the email address where you can send over the post. Guest posts sent on any other email address will not be accepted.

Guest Posting Disclosure

As the author of the blog post that you submit to aha-now.com, you agree that the post and its content are a product of your own work and that it is not plagiarized in any way. You also agree that you have the copyright or the written permission to use the images in the guest post. 

By submitting the guest blog post content, you agree that aha-now.com, its owners or managers, will in no way be held liable in copyright complaints or violations and for the views presented in it and that you personally accept full responsibility for the content submitted.

If you have any questions, please ask them through the blog contact page.

Thanks for taking the time to read this before submitting your post pitch. Click here to send your post pitches.

Admin and Editor

Updated: October 30, 2015

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