Small Business Trends

Thanks for your interest in contributing a guest article at Small Business Trends!

We’ve put together the following guidelines to explain what readers are looking for and what makes a successful guest post under our Guest Author Program.

Style

Readers want to hear YOUR voice come through in your writing. Make it sound like you. Try to write like you talk. Let a little personality show through.

Topics

Any topic of interest to small businesses is fair game. We have been blown away with how creative the topics have been. Here are some topics that have gotten excellent results in the past:

• offering a business lesson tied in with current news/events
• anything related to the economy
• how-tos or articles that give the reader actionable advice to put into practice
• tips in running a business based on your own first hand experiences (include a good “war story” for color)
• taking a position that is contrary to standard wisdom or prevailing popular opinion
• practical problems we face in our businesses where little is written about how to solve them
• trends on a given topic or industry (with insight into how to leverage each trend in your business)

Detailed is better than broad and general. Try to stay away from extremely general subjects with thousands of articles already written on them (“5 marketing tips”).

Article Length

Keep posts compact. It is much harder to read lengthy articles on a computer screen than in print:

• Ideal length is 400 – 750 words.
• If a post is going over 1000 words, we strongly urge breaking it up into 2 separate posts. (For comparison, the Guest Posting Guidelines article you are reading right now is over 600 words.)

Paragraph & Sentence Length

• Keep paragraphs to 3 sentences or fewer. Shorter paragraphs are easier to read on a computer screen.
• Keep sentences short.
• Bullet points make articles easy to scan.
• Consider bolded subheadings for long articles. They break up large expanses of text.

Images in Posts

In most cases, we add images to posts — you do not need to worry about images.

Edits

We frequently make minor edits, such as fixing grammar and spelling, revising introductions for better emphasis, and breaking up long sentences or paragraphs.  We may come back to you and suggest revising the article to better hit the mark with readers. Please don’t take it personally. (It’s easier for another person to edit, than it is to edit our own work. )

Original Works

Please submit guest posts that have not been published previously. Google has algorithms that filter out duplicate content (i.e., content already published online).  Also, we do not allow publishing the full text of the article elsewhere afterwards. Consider doing what our CEO, Anita Campbell, does when guest posting on other sites:

• Either write a short “pointer” post on your own site and link back to the original guest post.
• Or, you can always re-write an article and publish the re-written version on your own site or on another site.   Change the words, give it a different title, approach the topic from a slightly different angle, etc.  But make it a completely new article.

Copyrights

Our Terms of Service say that when you submit a guest column, you grant Small Business Trends the right to use that column and redistribute it in RSS feed syndication, in newsletters, in compilations, etc. — provided that we always give you attribution as the author.

Thank YOU for sharing your expertise!  

P.S. if you arrived on this page through a search engine or from somewhere else, and would like to know how to submit a guest post, please read:  How to submit a guest post.