Guidelines for guest authors and contributors
Vision
- MarTech Advisor looks for thought leadership and expert advice in the guest posts from marketing leadership.
- Sales and marketing professionals form a majority of our 700,000 subscribers. The content must cater to furthering their knowledge, ideas, vision and be their professional go-to source. Guest posts should ideally, address and find solutions to the issues facing sales practitioners, or discuss the challenges marketers face, and present out-of-the-box ideas and approaches to solve them.
Objectivity & Transparency
- Content published on MarTech Advisor should present an all-round view. When highlighting an issue, discussing product or tool details, or showcasing challenges faced by stakeholders, we expect our guest authors to cover the subject in a fair and transparent manner, and to provide our readers with an objective view as far as possible. A post cannot be based on the relevance of just one or two tools, products or marketing technology companies.
- Demonstrate or support your posts with examples, so as to suggest to marketers how they can replicate a successful campaign in their fields. Experiences, anecdotes, ideas exchanged with other marketing professionals, interactions with CMOs and other C-suite professionals, learnings from events attended, day-to-day best practices, and other topics that further one’s skills as a marketer are of great interest to our audience and makes for a better connect with MTA readers.
- In posts that discuss your own experiences in MarTech, please disclose if you or the company you work for has a business relationship or alliances with any of the persons or firms being spoken of. Refrain from focusing on a brand unless as instances or to showcase best practices. We prefer observations and opinions which are feature-centric rather than product or brand-centric.
- Personalizing a post makes it more relatable for readers, so share experiences you’ve been through or seen, marketing exercises you have taken up, customers you have converted, issues you have resolved for clients etc. Using statistics that support these definitely add to the piece.
- If quoting a survey or research study, the source needs to be attributed to. Each guest post must not have more than 3 hyperlinks in total.
- Text or phrases, if sourced out from either web or print resources, have to be attributed to the origin using hyperlinks. If authors can simplify and explain these, then even better.
- If using surveys to base a post on, then mention the sample size and demographics from which the survey data has been culled out preferably in the beginning of the post.
- If content is syndicated, please share where it has been published before.
Editorial Requirements
- Images, graphs or infographics either created or sourced from contributors or stock images should be relevant to the topic at hand, and the ownership of the same needs to be mentioned with the content piece.
- Guest posts must have an intro / excerpt that explains in brief what the post discusses, which can also be used for social promotions (approximate 30 words). Also, Twitter handles for both, the guest author and the company they work for need to be shared.
- All guest posts are to be accompanied with a headshot and a short (approximate 100-word) bio on the author’s professional journey and personal interests.
- Blog posts must follow a logical flow with an introduction (which has a clear idea expressed), a body text to support the intro and the conclusion that maps out the complete thought process of the opinion. The content piece should be a composite one by itself.
- There’s no specific stricture for the length of the post, as long as it’s engaging and doesn’t veer away from its focus. MTA reserves the right to make editorial changes.
- Images if accompanying the post should be in hi-res (at least 600 x 600 pixels) JPEG or PNG format.
- For the Maven blog, posts need to be contributed either weekly, fortnightly or as agreed. All posts need to be sent at least a week in advance of actual publish date for fact-checking, planning of graphic / visual presentation, editorial iterations and appropriate scheduling. This can be reduced to 3 days in advance as per the writer’s itinerary (primarily for C-suite writers who have time commitments).
MarTech Advisor Style Guide
For the benefit of those who would like to publish their work on MarTech Advisor, find below our style guide to high quality written work – with a little help from the great George Orwell.
- For any writing to connect with a reader, it should be simple enough to be easily understood. Well-written posts are usually a result of logical thinking. So, the general rule of thumb to follow is to put your thoughts together on a topic and then put them down in as simple words as possible. The idea of simplicity is best explained by George Orwell’s ‘Six Rules for Writing’ (published in 1946 in his ‘Politics and the English Language’):
- Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out.
- Never use the Passive where you can use the Active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous (remember these are just guidelines).
- Readers will be interested in what you have to say and choose to read through or give up depending on HOW you say it. So, put yourself in the reader’s shoes, and write in a way that would make you want to read till the end.
- Write as you would speak in an everyday conversational style and try to avoid unnecessary flourishes that do not add to the narrative. A first-person approach works best most often as it has a good balance of the business-like and reader-friendly approach.
- Try to persuade readers to your point of view through use of rational arguments, analyses and evidence supporting your ideas rather than being assertive.
- When discussing achievements or successes, do not be too boastful. Instead explain the processes that led to those accomplishments, so readers are not kept engaged.
- Do not be gossipy or chatty. The use of slang and popular idioms should be kept to a minimum, so as to keep a professional business-like tone of voice in the article.
- Do stick to the KISS principle, which is tweaked here to mean ‘Keep It Simple and Straightforward’. Simple, short sentences help in clarity, because complex sentence constructions and long paragraphs can confuse and distract the reader.
- Try to cover the 5Ws and 1 H (who, what, when, where, why and how) in all posts, so the reader is not left unanswered.
For any other queries, doubts or suggestions, give us a shout on news@martechadvisor.com
As the first step to contributing content to our site, you can create an account either using your LinkedIn credentials or by signing up with a login to the site.
Your account can serve multiple purposes on our site, besides of course, helping you have control on the content you create and facilitate its publishing.
Your Single Sign On login also lets you
With one account for all your various tasks on MarTech Advisor.com, you can navigate every section of the site without thinking twice.
MarTech Advisor welcomes opinions, ideas, best practices from our 700,000+ global community of marketing and sales professionals. To further ease the exchange of views through our platform, you can now submit content through our author back end open to all registered users of MarTech Advisor.
To submit your post / article for review:
-
Login with your MTA account to land on the ‘Author Profiles’ section where you can ‘Add’ your profile as an author by filling in the required fields. For a new user, these fields are open. For an already existing user, the fields are pre-filled with an option to edit details.
-
Do fill in details such as your social media links as it helps to amplify your content on our social channels. The bio needs to be a 100-word write-up on the author’s professional experience and personal interests either related to work or outside of it.
-
Once your author profile is created / updated, you can proceed to adding your content. The ‘Add New’ tab is available in the ‘My Posts’ section – where you can also see all the posts you may have submitted before. To submit your content, you will need to fill the fields indicated above – Title, short introduction to the gist of the topic being written about and the final draft of your bylined content piece.
-
In addition to adding text, we also provide options to add images, embeddable documents, videos and a featured image (‘Content Image’) to your article. Please use only original content or copyright-free images and media. Once you have added content to the form, you can now submit your content.
Following your submission, our editorial team will review your post based on our Editorial Guidelines. Should an article not meet these guidelines, the editorial team will request changes and updates. Once approved, the content will be processed and published on MarTech Advisor.
In some cases, we may make a few changes to your content to meet our site requirements.
When an article is published, an author profile with your details will be publicly displayed, with your content linked to it.
Please note: Incomplete author profiles may lead to articles not being published. In such cases, our team will get in touch with you for any updates to be made or changes that are required.
For any other doubts, queries or suggestions, please email news@martechadvisor.com and we’d be happy to help!
In keeping with our vision of ‘Helping Marketers Succeed’, we aim to bring the latest news in the martech space to our 700,000 subscriber base of sales and marketing professionals.
In news, we primarily cover updates on product upgrades, appointments, funding, M&A information, appointments of key executives, global expansions or setting up of new offices – all inputs that are of value to a marketer in their day-to-day functioning.
Like all content on the website, press releases will be published following an editorial review of the material sent.
Embargoed press releases can also be uploaded with their scheduled date and time prominently displaying right at the beginning of the content in all caps and bold for attention.
