Up and Running Blog

Blog with Us

We love having guest bloggers on the Up and Running Blog on Bplans.com! Here’s a quick overview of the blog and some guidelines that we ask our guest bloggers to follow.

About Us

Up and Running is geared toward entrepreneurs, small business owners, and those thinking about starting a business or who are in the early stages of planning and starting up. Additionally, it provides compelling, relevant information for anyone interested in business ownership, planning, and management.

Bplans.com is visited by over 1 million visitors a each month, making it one of the most visited small business websites. The Up and Running blog is a critical part of the Bplans.com site and is featured prominently on the home page. Visitors typically consume multiple pages and posts per visit. Blog posts are publicized with premium placement on the Bplans homepage, as well as through bi-monthly newsletters to a subscriber base of over 300,000. In addition, we publicize posts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and other social media channels.

Blog Topics:

    • Business planning tips and advice
    • Small business technology
    • Marketing (social media as well as more traditional methods)
    • Business management strategies
    • Meeting the challenges of entrepreneurship/starting a business
    • Financing a business, finding funding, dealing with investors
    • Budgets, taxes, and legal issues involved with starting and running a business
    • Current events relevant to small business owners

Submitting a Guest Post:

  1. Send an email with the general topic you’re interested in writing about and a few links to previously published material to marketing@paloalto.com. Please include in your query any links that you require be part of the post.
  2. Once the idea is approved, you can send your post in any format (Word, .rtf, plain text, etc.). We do not prefer to receive posts in HTML, however.
  3. Attach the image (or images) you would like to use. The image should be 250-300 pixels wide in JPG format.Please ensure you follow copyright and fair use guidelines when sending an image. We encourage you to use Flickr creative commons licensed images or stock images from istockphoto.com, shutterstock.com or similar stock photography site.  If the images need attribution, include that info as well.  This post contains some helpful information on choosing an image for your blog post.
  4. Include your bio and a head shot-style photo.

Guidelines

First, please look over the following guidelines. Then send story ideas or questions related to becoming a guest author to our team at marketing@paloalto.com.

  • We only publish original content – no reposts of blogs or articles that have been published elsewhere
  • No overt sales pitches or content solely for SEO purposes. We understand the value of links back to your site, and will allow them when the content is valuable to our readers and the link is natural in context.
  • Posts should be appropriate for the small business audience and should be written in simple, easy-to-understand language. Topics should be timely and applicable to a broad range of readers. What makes a good blog post?
  • We will not allow any links to or promotion of competitive business planning products or services.
  • Up and Running editors reserve the right to reject guest blog submissions and/or edit for length, content, grammar, or readability. If a post is edited significantly, it will be sent back to the author for approval.

Guest bloggers will be provided a space for both a short author bio and a longer author bio. The short bio will be limited to one or two short sentences, such as “Sherisa Aguirre is the Content Editor for Palo Alto Software and Bplans.com.” The longer bio will have space for the author’s photograph, and can include up to a paragraph about the author as well as a link to the author’s website and Twitter account. This paragraph may also include two or three contextual links.