I am incredibly fortunate to write for The Huffington Post. The exposure has been great for my writing career.
That said, there’s not a good “how-to” guide for “How to Be a Successful HuffPo Blogger.” That left me with trial and error.
Here are just a few things I wish I had known before writing for The Huffington Post.
- Your author bio doesn’t automatically appear on the bottom of your posts. Since I had to fill out detailed information for my profile, I thought at least some of it would appear at the end of each post. Plus I had read plenty of other articles on The Huffington Post, and each of them had an author bio included. Well, it turns out authors have to add each of those manually. So my first (and most popular) piece doesn’t include any bio details. I learned my lesson, and now I add a few lines about me at the conclusion of each post.
- The Huffington Post might accept your post, but they don’t always feature it. Like with my own blog posts, self-promotion is key. I’ve been fortunate to have some of my work prominently featured in the Weddings section, but other times, my link has been at the very bottom of the of the Women’s section. My HuffPo writing does best when I promote it myself and get my friends to share it.
- Trolls can hurt. I’ve had a few trolls on my blog, but writing for The Huffington Post has exposed me to a whole new world of hateful people. Some comments are just ignorant, but others are intentionally cruel. I get to a point where I have to just stop reading the comments because it’s not good for my mental health.
- It can take a whole week for editors to approve your submission. So far, everything I’ve submitted to The Huffington Post has been accepted. So far, only one article I wrote was not originally posted here. It was a time-sensitive piece, but it took the editors of the Women’s section an entire week to publish it. I immediately emailed the team with an update, and it took another 24 hours or so for them to update it. I ended up with 1,000+ comments asking why I had written about such an old story and why I didn’t include the latest details. I was just as annoyed as everyone commenting.
- You can’t predict what will be popular. I publish 3-5 posts a week here on Belle Brita. I submit only 1-3 posts a month to The Huffington Post. I choose to submit pieces that performed well here, either in terms of page views or comments or both. Some of my HuffPo articles have thousands of Facebook likes and over one hundred comments. Others have less than one hundred Facebook likes and zero comments. It’s basically a guessing game.
I'm currently a FEATURED blogger on @HuffPostWomen http://t.co/zYLnoTRTCe #winning pic.twitter.com/oE2IFNPB3e
— Brita Long (@BelleBrita) May 13, 2015
If you follow my advice from Wednesday and end up writing for The Huffington Post, hopefully you’ll be more prepared than I was!
