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After having published quite a few guest blog posts, I’ve figured out a thing or two about editors.

While there are certain elements they love to see in a submission, there are also a number of factors that will land you a spot on their list of people they’d rather not work with. Knowing the difference between the two will make it easier for you to earn a spot on their blog. 

So if you want to experience the power of guest blogging, here’s what you need to know abotu working with editors. 

12 Things Guest Bloggers Should Know About Editors

1) They’re in a hurry.

Most people are in a rush, but it seems like editors are especially so. This isn’t to say that they do sloppy work. After all, an editor’s job demands that they be meticulous and detailed. 

In spite of their hawk-eye attention for the tiniest things, they sure can plow through things. They know when brevity is necessary, and they use it.

2) They want to trust you.

Most editors want to get into a trusting relationship with you. Why? Because reliable writers are hard to come by. It’s pretty easy to find someone who writes good copy. But to find someone who writes good copy and can produce on a consistent basis is very difficult.

If you’ve gotten an editor’s attention with a well-written piece of content, then you can be fairly certain that the editor wants to trust you to produce more.

3) They know their audience really well.

If there’s one thing that editors know really well, it’s their audience. A good editor can tell at glance if an article will be helpful for the site’s readers or a dud.

If you’re invited to produce more articles for a site, ask the editors if they have any advice about the kinds of content that their audience wants. Chances are, they’ll be happy to give you some insight and recommendations.

4) They don’t mind rejecting articles.

If your article gets rejected, don’t be offended. It’s all in a day’s work for an editor. Editors of prestigious websites may receive dozens of submissions a day. They simply can’t publish all of them.

Good editors must decide quickly whether they’re going to accept or reject an article. Often times, by necessity, they have to reject most new submissions.

5) They can spot weak articles in a flash.

I don’t have any official numbers, but I’d bet that an editor can tell if an article will work or not in ten seconds or less. Here’s what they might consider:

• A great article starts with a killer headline. If the headline is no good, then the article is gone.
• After the headline, the editor will read the lead sentence or paragraph. If the article doesn’t grab one’s attention from the very start, it’s a no-go.
• Finally, the editor might skim the outline. Many times, a shaky outline means a weak article, and the article is a goner.

If you have a strong title, cogent opening sentence, and solid outline, then your article merits the editor’s attention.

6) They might check your article for plagiarism.

How can an editor tell if your article is copied or an original work? They can run it through a plagiarism checker such as Copyscape.

A Copyscape analysis determines if your content has been published elsewhere on the web.
If you are stealing content, you will get nailed.

7) They aren’t afraid to ask for massive revisions.

Editors have a tough job. They have to please their audience, serve their writers, and adhere to a set of editorial guidelines.

If your article doesn’t 1) meet the audience’s need, or 2) match the editorial standards, then the editor may ask you to revise it. Hopefully, these will just be quick and easy revisions. Sometimes, however, the revisions are extensive, involving removing or adding huge sections of your article.

8) They will ask you for more if your content is good enough.

If you deliver up a great article, then editors will ask you for more. Remember, they’re constantly looking for good, reliable writers.

Editors are tired of having to chase down good writers, respond to inane inquiries, and field poorly-written articles. They want to get the best of the best producing content on their site. A good first article will get you noticed and producing in no time. 

9) They have to respond to a lot of people.

Be patient.

It may take time to get a response from an editor. They get a lot of emails, and may not be able to respond to you right away.

10) They might ignore you.

Don’t take it personally. With the massive amount of content that editors are receiving, they simply can’t respond to everyone’s inquiries or submissions.

The editor isn’t ignoring you, as much as she is managing workflow strategically. The job of an editor involves selectively responding to the emails and submissions that will be best for the site.

If you don’t hear back from an editor in a week or two, it’s okay to be persistent. Just recognize that they’ve got a tough job that makes it difficult for them to email you back.

11) They’re going to hunt down and root out link building.

If you think that guest posting is a quick way to build links, think again. Editors don’t play that game.

Thousands of would-be guest bloggers have been blacklisted from writing for certain websites. Why? Because they tried to make a buck selling links or gaming the system for some easy backlinks to their website.

Editors are trained to sniff it down and cut it out. After all, their jobs are on the line. Besides, they are trying to protect the legitimacy of their brand.

12) They don’t want to proofread your articles. 

Some bigger websites have full-time proofreaders. Their job is to hunt down typos and fix them.
Other websites just have an editor. This person is typically responsible for getting the best content published at the right time, coordinating teams of writers, and ensuring that it all gets pulled off without a hitch. (Typically, such an editor will have the title “managing editor.”)

Because this is true, they want to see grammatically impeccable and stylistically flawless articles. Don’t send your articles in, expecting them to be copyedited and proofread. Sure, editors have the know-how to correct your silly spelling mistakes, but that’s your job … not theirs. 

That said, go the extra mile and proofread your own work before you submit it to a publication. The editors will respect you for it. 

Conclusion

The best way to work with someone is to understand where they’re coming from. It’s helpful for you to try to see their challenges and understand their role.

Editors are a critical part of the web publishing process. The best way to become a guest blogger is to create great content and become a helpful partner to the editors you work with.

Are you an editor? What’s your perspective on guest blogging and working with contributors?

Every year, the marketing industry undergoes some serious changes. New technology emerges, people’s behaviors change, and as a result, marketers are often left with an entirely different playing field. 

To make better sense of these changes and trends, we did some research and collected insights from 4,000 marketers and salespeople. HubSpot’s new State of Inbound 2015 report is available today, and we have a ton of valuable industry data to share with you.

While the report dives deep into a number of different focus areas, we wanted to highlight a few quick takeaways that really stuck out. That said, check out these three revealing statistics that emerged from the research.

3 Must-Read Stats on the State of Inbound Marketing in 2015 

1) 3 out of 4 marketers across the globe prioritize an inbound approach to marketing. 

Okay, so this statistic isn’t really a surprise to HubSpot, but we were extremely heartened to see how inbound has taken off globally.

Inbound is especially popular in smaller organizations, who are running lean and mean marketing teams and leveraging inbound concepts to attract visitors and leads to their brands on a limited budget. Larger organizations have more equally distributed their resources, focusing half their efforts on inbound tactics and half on traditional outbound campaigns like print ads and investment in events.

2) Inbound campaigns achieve higher ROI than outbound.

Marketers who track marketing ROI reported a clear payoff with inbound campaigns. This holds true across different company sizes, regions, and budgets. Inbound campaigns return more value than traditional paid tactics because content generated through inbound has the potential to attract visitors and shares long after the marketer has moved on to their next project. What’s more, marketers who could prove positive ROI are 2x more likely to get higher budgets in the next year compared to those who couldn’t.

The lesson from the data is clear: Inbound creates higher ROI. Tracking and proving ROI makes marketing teams more successful. And successful marketing teams often get more budget.

3) Outbound marketers think outbound marketing tactics are overrated.

Every year we ask marketers to identify the most overrated marketing tactic. We admit that inbound marketers tend to be biased and rate outbound tactics, like paid advertising, as the most overrated. We cut the data to compare the responses of inbound marketers and outbound marketers and got a big surprise. Outbound marketers seem to loathe outbound marketing tactics too.

Perhaps it’s because it’s really hard to measure the success of outbound campaigns, or because once you stop paying for an ad, the flow of leads and contacts immediately disappear. At any rate, this has a lot of interesting ramifications for marketing in general. As marketers move away from traditional marketing channels, what will crop up to fill the gap? Native advertising is now getting its stride, and many brands are further exploring social and interactive advertising. We’ll keep asking this question in future State of Inbound Surveys and track how sentiment changes over the years.

The full State of Inbound report contains even more fascinating insights about today’s sales landscape. Download the full study to discover:

• The #1 challenge marketing teams face globally               
• The #1 priority marketing teams are tackling
• How marketing budgets have changed since last year
• Who’s creating content for marketing teams
• Whether alignment with sales means success within marketing

You’ve heard it before: The web is a noisy, noisy place. People are inundated with content all day long, from every direction.

Did you know the average person around the world spends 490 minutes of their days consuming media, with 109 of those minutes taken up by the web? And, that every minute people process 4 million Google searches and post 1400 blog posts? For publishers in particular, this noise is increasing rapidly.

With over 800 digital magazines launched in the last year, standing apart isn’t a task for the faint of heart. Surfacing your content to new and existing readers can be exhausting, if not impossible, if you don’t have the right tools in place. 

Social media is one such tool. It’s long been touted as an efficient, easy way to reach both existing and new target audiences. With over 74% of online adults using social media, the sea of fresh eyes these networks provide is vast. While people may not subscribe to your publication because of one post they saw, social media is the ultimate low hanging fruit when it comes to increasing traffic to your website. 

Most publishers understand that social is a powerful resource, yet they still lack the time or resources to focus heavily on these channels. So how you can make the most of your time on social media? Here are several ways you use social media to increase traffic to your content in just ten minutes a day.

Seven Tips to Help Your Publication Increase Traffic From Social Media

1) Posting Something is Better than Posting Nothing

You don’t need to hire a consulting firm or have a dedicated social team. If you post something relevant and valuable to your readers, your audience will find you more so then if you didn’t post anything at all. Don’t spin your wheels for hours getting too hung up on a content strategy. You already know your audience and produce content they love. Draw inspiration for posts from articles in your archives, new features, sponsored content, or other industry publications that you have a relationship with… then get posting. 

2) Use Analytics to Your Advantage

Find out what your top performing content is on your site and reshare it on social channels. You likely already know which articles, videos or guides readers are consuming most frequently and for the longest amount of time. Get more social-specific metrics by using link tracking to see which site traffic or conversions on content offers most commonly result from your social activity. If you have content buckets or topics that you’re already pre-segmenting your content for on your site,  use these categories to track post category performance as well. You may find that one draws more traffic on social than others.

3) Streamline Your Process

Schedule daily posts in one short session that fits into your daily routine. Trying taking ten minutes in the morning to schedule posts for the rest of the day, or ten minutes at the end of the day to prepare for the next day (or week).

4) Repurpose Your Content

As a publisher, content is your greatest asset. You already have a wealth of content, so why not reuse it? If you have an ebook or article that your readers have been responding well to, find new ways to share it. Quotes, images, extra content, behind the scenes looks all make for great Tweets, Youtube videos, and more. One of the great things about social media is that shorter is usually better, so short soundbites often resonate best with your audiences and draw them in to consume more full-length content. 

5) Simplify Your Channels

Focus on executing well across three channels rather than struggling to keep fresh content up on ten. This list might be helpful in narrowing down your choices. Make sure you’re tracking performance, and that each network you consider is a strategic fit based on where your audience lives. While Periscope might be one of the hottest new social networks, as a publisher, you’re better off dedicating your time to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram.

6) Keep Your Marketing Hat On

Just because you are writing a Facebook post or Tweet, doesn’t mean the fundamentals of marketing no longer apply. Use language that tells your readers the benefit of clicking on a link or includes a clear call-to action. Social media is a lead generation tool, and should be treated as such. 

7) Check Results Often

With social media, 10 minutes of analytics every week can can be more helpful than 4 hours once every month. Driving engagement on social requires you to make swift adjustments, often. This doesn’t mean you have run full reports, but keep an eye on how much traffic each post and network is driving to your site on at least a weekly. Start by looking at clicks, shares, likes/favorites on the platform side, and sources of traffic to your site from your own web analytics.

(Bonus points if you can tie visitors who’s first touch came from social to net new subscribers or leads for advertisers.)

At the end of the day, getting readers to your site doesn’t need to be an overwhelming task. And neither does social media. By putting in a focused effort for a short amount of time each day, you’ll see the positive impact it has on your site traffic build over time. 

By now, you’ve probably seen the commercials filled with celebrities ordering Domino’s Pizza through various channels. There’s the smart watch order, the Twitter emoji order, the smart TV order, the text emoji order, and of course, the simple website order.

First of all: Wow. That kind of accessibility across a wide array of mobile and online channels is pretty stunning. It’s designed to grab attention, to impress, to rub other pizza delivery companies’ noses in the fact that Domino’s did it first. They did it first, and then they lined up a star-studded cast to introduce the technology to the world.

Now that we’re done being impressed, let’s decide if omnichannel ordering (and if ever there was an example of omnichannel, this is it) is the way of the future or the way to really irritate your consumers.

Who Benefits?

Aside from Domino’s, which has the world murmuring in muted, impressed tones right now, who really benefits from the ability to order pizza via Twitter emojis? Obviously, the first person that comes to mind is the buyer who loves instant gratification. Then there’s the teen who talks only in emojis and text-speak. Who’s left? Maybe families with weekly pizza nights that feature the same order over and over.

Let’s consider the consumer that’s jonesing for pizza without pomp and circumstance. Who really has the time to call in an order anymore, especially when call waiting and hold buttons are still so widely used? When you go online, you have to take the time to type in all your information, and no one really wants to do that, either. A simple emoji by text or directed @dominos should do the trick.

Those teens and college students who prefer to cut their communication down to smiley faces and other emojis also benefit from the new ordering options. But, setting up an account for easy ordering requires a credit card.

The reality is, creating an account, entering financial information, ordering your first pizza so you can set up your preferences—this all adds up to a kind of frustrating set-up situation, as one emoji-ordering customer discovered.

The Real Story

The set up process for ordering pizza is a bit of a pain, especially for new Domino’s customers. Those willing to go through the process for the instant gratification later might find they’re happy enough in the end. Beyond the initial setup, you must prefer to eat the same pizza over and over again. If you like to change things up, you have to go online or call in your order anyway—you know, the old-fashioned way.

Omnichannel is here to stay, but depending on what your ecommerce company sells, you may need a more robust ordering system than just an emoji. Seems there are a few more bugs to iron out before we get exactly what we need from emoji text and Twitter orders. Or maybe you’re already ordering your pizza of choice! 

The days of flooding the internet — and even your own site — with overly promotional content are gone. While traditional efforts like this may have worked in the past, many businesses are finding them to be less effective in today’s increasingly contextual marketing world. As a result, they’re turning toward more modern techniques to achieve a high return at a low cost. (On average, these inbound techniques can save you 13% per lead.)

Inbound marketing focuses on earning a person’s attention by offering engaging content aimed at improving the online experience while also staying in the forefront of their minds. In terms of the sales funnel, all levels can benefit from this sort of approach, as content marketing helps brands leverage crucial decision-making moments by offering consumers solutions to potential concerns.

Fractl recently decided to take a closer look and outlined how content marketing can increase awareness, build trust, and convert leads — all important in driving consumers to the bottom of the funnel and ultimately having a positive impact on your bottom line.

3 Tips for Making Content Marketing Work for Your Bottom Line

1) Prioritize on-site content.

For any brand to be successful, it needs to find an established voice. Content marketing is a great way to help your brand distinguish its voice in a highly competitive market, especially with on-site content like a blog. Keep in mind that both visitors and search engines expect content that adds value, so if you deliver, you can expect returning visitors to increase and search engines to index your pages higher — both huge in terms of driving your bottom line.

A great example of an effective blogging strategy is the growth of KISSmetrics’ blog. Last January, the site generated more than 5,000 leads — exactly 62% of the site’s total leads for that month. Note, though, that they did not see these results overnight. Their success required great content paired with effective promotion of said content.

Another benefit to blogging? Your old posts can continue to generate leads long after they’re published. When HubSpot looked at their own blog, they found that more than 90 percent of their blog leads came from old posts. In terms of the sales funnel, you’re hitting your audience during three key stages:

• Awareness. More than 80 percent of consumers use a basic online search to find out more about a brand, and on-site content is crucial if you want to optimize your search engine rankings.
• Trust. Providing valuable on-site content will distinguish you as a thought leader within your industry.
• Conversion. Demandbase generated $1 million in new business from an on-site bundle that included a white paper, infographic, webinar, and Slideshare.

2) Outline a targeted promotions strategy for off-site content.

When designing a content marketing strategy, you should focus on off-site content just as much as (if not more than) on-site content. Why? Not only will off-site content drive traffic to your site and enhance its overall visibility to search engines, but it’s also effective in reaching new audiences. This is crucial in terms of becoming a trusted thought leader and generating new business.

So how do you do this? A great way is through large-scale content marketing campaigns with a strong focus on an often overlooked step: promotion. For your off-site content to be effective, you need to outline a highly focused promotions strategy that targets high-authority sites, specifically those your audience are already visiting. The benefits include the following:

• Improved search rankings through inbound links.
• Growth in traffic to your site where you can host more highly branded content, which presents a better conversion opportunity.
• Focusing on earned reach versus relying simply on natural syndication will ensure you get the desired ROI from your content.

Although most of these benefits assist with the top of the funnel and aim to push conversion events — like email subscribers — more than actual conversions, off-site content can have some direct influence on your bottom line. For example, BuzzStream had strong brand recognition within the link-building and SEO communities, but they wanted to reposition themselves as thought leaders to add more value to their brand. By launching a combination of co-branded, research-based campaigns that earned placements on high-authority sites, the off-site links drove audiences to conversion-optimized on-site content. The result: the CRM earned more than 65,000 social shares and broke its record for new subscriber sign-ups.

3) Be patient.

It’s clear that a mix of on- and off-site content can attract new consumers, drive traffic, and convert leads, but when can you expect results? A successful content marketing strategy can increase traffic by 850 percent, but some of the more impressive results that directly impact your funnel truly can be felt after a year.

Take, for instance, PR Newswire. They launched a content marketing strategy in an effort to accelerate their sales funnel of more than 25,000 potential consumers. Within a year, the company shortened their sales cycle by 30%.

And whether your focus is on or off site, there are similar KPIs you should monitor for both efforts. These are some common KPIs:

• Organic traffic
• Unique visits
• Inbound links
• Social shares
• Domain Authority
• Increased search rankings

Want to learn more about how to make content marketing work for your bottom line? Review this deck of case studies and check out the infographic below for an even deeper dive:

How has content marketing impacted your bottom line? Let us know your experiences in the comments section below.