Fancy joining our team of guest bloggers?
123-reg guest blog contributor guidelines
Thanks for your interest in contributing to the 123-reg blog. We’re really keen to feature guest contributions from experts with in depth knowledge, and our existing audience of small business owners means your content has the potential to reach several thousand readers. These guidelines will let you know what we want from you, and what you can expect from us.
Our audience
The 123-reg blog exists to educate online business owners about how they can be more successful. So, that’s what we want articles on.
You can get a better idea of the kind of things we cover by reading the blog itself, but the topics we’re mainly interested in are search engine optimisation and digital marketing for smaller firms.
We also need our articles to be easy to understand – most of our audience isn’t at expert level and doesn’t want to be drowned in jargon. They’re busy people who want quick, actionable tips that will allow them to improve the way they do business.
In short, we want to provide small business owners with interesting, unique content packed full of practical advice they can use.
Article guidelines
Length: Although there’s no set minimum, we find that articles have to be at least 750 words to be of any real use to our readers. Of course, if you’ve written something exceptional that’s shorter than that, we’d still love to publish it. Equally, longer doesn’t always mean better, so please avoid sending articles that have been padded out just to boost the word count.
Uniqueness: We don’t publish content that has been published elsewhere, nor do we want content that has been spun or rewritten. We want unique articles that aren’t going to be found anywhere else. That said, if you’ve written something you’re proud of and we like it, we’ll consider sharing it via our social media channels.
Relevance: Digital marketing and related topics are our main focus, and we’re not going stray very far from this. Please don’t send off topic articles or suggestions – even if your article or idea is excellent, we won’t be able to publish it on our blog.
Images: If you have images that add extra life to your post, then please include them when sending your draft. We’re particularly interested in images that help people understand what you’re writing about, or graphs and charts that bring your statistics to life. Please make sure you own the copyright to any images you send us for publication. If you don’t have any images, then don’t worry – we’ll include some copyright-free images when we publish the post.
Links: Please include any links which help readers understand what your post is about, back up claims you make in the post, or direct readers to resources they will find useful. We won’t be able to include any links that are obvious self-promotion and nothing else. However, we’re happy for you to mention your own business if it’s relevant and helpful. Also please note that all links on the 123-reg blog have the “no follow” attribute applied.
Pitching
If all that sounds good, feel free to email marketing@123-reg.co.uk with a pitch detailing your idea(s). We prefer pitches to full articles because they allow you to quickly check whether we’re interested in your idea without you having to write a full post which, unfortunately, may not be suitable for the blog.
In your pitch include not only your idea, but also an explanation of why you think it will be suitable for our audience and how they will benefit from reading the article you’re proposing.
If you can, also include links to articles you’ve written elsewhere. This lets us get an idea of what your final article will look like.
Once we’ve looked at your pitch, we’ll get back to you and let you know if we’re interested. If we are, we’ll suggest a submission date for you to work towards.
Style
We do have an in-house style guide, but we don’t expect you to follow it when writing your post. Instead, we’ll edit the post prior to publication to make sure it fits in. These changes will be small and will relate to things like formatting and so on. If any major changes are needed to the content, then we’ll provide you with feedback and invite you to edit and resubmit the post.
Sending the final article
When sending an article, please attach it in Word form and email it. The email should also include a short bio, which will be included on your author page on the blog. Also, we’ll set up an author account using your email address to publish your post. We would also ask that you create a Gravatar account linked to your email address and upload a suitable headshot. This will then appear alongside your post.
Any questions?
If you have a question that isn’t covered by these guidelines, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.
(Last updated 11/02/2016)
