I’m Sam, Michael’s web designer. First, we’d like to thank you for contributing to Michael’s blog! In order to make this a painless experience for everyone involved, I’m going to take a brief moment to walk you through how to make your guest post the very best guest post a guest post can be.

If you’re already familiar with WordPress, then everything is probably self-explanatory, and you’re probably already deciding to skip this.

That’s cool.

1. Finding your guest post.

• Find the menu on the left of this screen.
• Click on “Guest Posts”.
• Look for your name in the post listing.
• Click “Edit”.

If your name doesn’t seem to be present, then choose “Add New”. This won’t publish or go live until it’s approved by Michael, so don’t be scared! I’ve got your back.

2. Give your post a title.

This is most commonly just the title of the book you’re promoting, but if you’d like to choose something else, go for it!

3. Put your main content into the text editor.

Instead of telling you what to put into this text editor, I’m going to tell you what not to put into it.

• Book blurb
• Purchase links
• Cover of the book you’re promoting
• Book excerpt/preview
• Your bio
• Your social media/website links
• Your photo
• Blog Tour information or promotional image
• Giveaway information or promotional image

This is because we’ve got special sections on this page to input that information in a way I worked very hard to properly organize.

Anything that doesn’t fit into the below sections can totally go into this box, though. Alternatively, you can just leave this thing blank. No pressure here!

4. Scroll down to the expandable boxes

Click the little arrow on the box to expand it, if it isn’t already.

5. Author details

This section is where you can add:

• Your name (if it isn’t there already)
• Your bio
• A photo of yourself or your logo

Only your name is required, everything else is optional.

6. Your links

This is where you can add links to your social media accounts, websites, emails, profiles, etc. Anything goes! There are only two fields:

• Link name (ex. “Facebook”)
• Link URL

To make multiple links, just click the little red plus sign at the bottom of the box. You can add as many as you like.

These are optional, though recommended.

A fully filled-in Author section will appear on the site like this:

7. Book details

Aha! This is where you can add information about the book you’re promoting. The available fields are:

• Title
• Blurb
• Cover
• Excerpt

If you want to add info about an unrelated book, you can do it in the first text editor. But if you want to add info about/links to another book in the series, it might be best to do it here.

All fields are optional.

This is a very casual encounter we’re having.

8. Book links

This works exactly like “Your Links”. You’ll want to tell visitors how to buy your book, so put in as many links as you’d like. If it’s in ‘pre-order’, then you can just add that to the “Link name”, no problem!

Alternatively, you can choose to add no links at all. But that’d defeat the purpose of promoting your book.

A fully filled in Book section will appear on the site like this:

9. Promotion

If you want to promote your blog tour or a giveaway (or maybe even both!), then this is where you do it.  The available fields are:

• Name (ex. “Bob’s Brilliant Blog Tour!”)
• Type – Blog Tour, Giveaway, or Other
• Expiration – For giveaways or other time sensitive events
• Image – If you’ve got a cool banner thing
• Details – Links to stuff, blog tour schedule, haiku about toast; whatever floats your boat.

To make multiple promotions, just click the little green plus sign.

10. Save your changes

Hit that button!

You can come back and edit this post at your convenience, so long as it hasn’t been published yet.

You can also ‘Preview” the post.

There! We hope this has helped you make a slammin’ guest post that gets you lots of readers. If you’ve got some questions, shoot Michael or Sam an email and we’ll hold your hand. We’re in this thing together.