I read submissions from the other side of the desk.
Most people who sell guest posts have never had to decide whether one is good enough to publish.
I do that every week. I am an editor at ILLUMINATION on Medium, which has 324,000 followers, and at Technology Hits, Writer's Favorite, Readers Club and ILLUMINATION Local News & Documentary. Submissions arrive, I read them, and I decide what goes out and what goes back.
That is an unusual place to be standing if your job is also placing content for clients, and it changes what you can see.
What it taught me
Most rejected articles are well written. Writing quality is almost never the problem.
What goes wrong happens earlier. The piece is about the product rather than the reader's situation. The brand name appears so often that readers stop reading and start scanning. The article could have been assembled from ten other pages without anyone opening the product it describes.
If the piece could have been written without touching the product, it will not do much for the product.
How I work
I work on individual pieces of work rather than retainers. A named publication, a named topic, a fixed price, agreed before anything starts.
I tell clients what will not work before they pay for it. Medium links are nofollow. A placement on a page nothing else references does almost nothing. A site with a high domain rating and no readers is a number, not an audience. These conversations cost me sales and they are the reason the clients I keep, stay.
I do not sell packages of ten links. A qualified list in most categories is three or four sites, and quoting ten means padding it with placements I would not recommend.
Who I work with
Mostly software companies. AI tools, SaaS products, and the agencies who work with them. Clients are mainly in the United States and Europe. I work from Hyderabad, Pakistan.
The work is usually one of four things. Getting a client's product written about properly. Getting a brand into the sources that AI answers are assembled from. Writing content somebody will actually finish reading. Or looking at a site and explaining, in order, what is holding it back.
The parts I am not
I am not an agency. There is no team, no account manager and nobody between you and the person doing the work.
I do not do link schemes, private blog networks, or bulk placements on sites built to sell links. Not on principle alone. They stop working and they take the client's domain down with them.
And I cannot guarantee a ranking. Anyone who does is describing something they do not control.