How to promote your organization without drawing editorial ire

Promotional material will always put your guest post in the rejection pile. Here’s how to steer thought leadership articles away from marketing while keeping leadership happy.

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It’s very tempting to try and get promotional content into your thought leadership piece.

However, whether it’s data from your platform or a plug for your service, editors will cut it—or worse—it will cause the publication to reject the piece completely.

Many editors won’t accept content from anyone with a sales title because they have such an issue with promotional content. After all, they are called the free press for a reason: objectivity.

Given this contentious issue, here are a few tips to help guide content away from being promotional while keeping your clients happy.

Place content about an offering before its public release.

The best way to promote your client’s business is to write offer insights about an industry development that hasn’t been released yet.

If a report isn’t in the market yet, the piece talking it up won’t be flagged as promotional. For example, if you are a marketer who is about to release an artificial intelligence product, you have until that press release goes out to write about AI.

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