7 Ground Rules for Writing a Guest Post for Us

By Stewart Gandolf, Chief Executive Officer

The Healthcare Success blog is open to guest posts. We welcome the opportunity to have others write for us and share high-quality ideas to our 16,000+ subscribers. We are most interested in guest posts from healthcare professionals, especially doctors and marketing people who work for hospitals and practices. We appreciate the "client side" perspective.

But you might say that we’re a little bit picky. There are good reasons for being particular, so we have few ground rules.

Internet marketing professionals have increasingly come to believe that “content is king.” For healthcare marketing and everything else, it seems that everyone wants to exchange editorial material, links and real-or-imagined mutual search engine optimization (SEO) brownie points.

The fact is that guest bloggers can bring both benefit and harm to your blog and your marketing efforts. Although guest posting has become a popular activity, only quality, relevant and meaningful content will be of interest and value readers...and benefit SEO objectives.

So, here’s why you don’t want to blindly throw the doors open to your blog: It’s Google.

Without getting technical, Google.com and its online search algorithms so dominate the industry that it sets the criteria for what will appear highest among the search results. With 12.8 billion unique Google searches monthly, and a 66.7 percent share of the US search market, Google can make the rules.

By definition: “PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page, used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set.”

In short, the latest versions of the Google algorithm have placed considerable importance and weight on what they define as quality content. Conversely, poor quality content—including dated material, spam, unimportant links, and other efforts to fool the system—are ranked lower. (It's a lot more complicated, but quality content is the key concept.)

So, if you’d like to write for us, please read this first. And if you’re thinking of inviting guest post material for your blog, you may want to define something like this as your own guidelines for guest authors.

Our Healthcare Success readers are the first consideration. First and foremost our content has to be relevant to or about marketing, particularly healthcare marketing. We are a resource of informative, educational and/or helpful ideas. We like tales of success, from-the-field problem/solution stories, or content about marketing, advertising or PR. (We do not publish information written for consumers about health or healthcare.)
Authoritative authors and sources. Contributors must have a reasonable expertise, stature, experience and/or professional credentials in the subject matter.
Quality content and writing. We welcome material that presents meaningful ideas in a well-written, professional manner.
Custom, original content. Re-purposed or previously published material is not acceptable.
Readable, friendly and you-oriented style. Our readers are healthcare providers and executives from hospitals, medical practices and other healthcare organizations, and we prefer practical information to academic or technical subjects.
No spam, spammy sites or questionable links. Sorry online poker and mail order pharmacy folks.
Read our recent posts as illustrations. Our articles are typically about 450-500 words in length, but to understand our editorial direction, read several recent posts.

Please do no send unsolicited articles, but if you would like to write for us, send your story idea and contact information to our editor via [email protected].