Guest Author Guidelines

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

Target readers

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.

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

Reach

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.

Logistics

First, please look over the following guidelines. Then send story ideas or questions related to becoming a guest author to Jay Snider 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.
• 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 “Jay Snider 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.

If you’d like to submit a guest post, please 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.

Procedures:

1. Initially authors will submit guest posts via email in whatever format works best.
2. If things go well (generally after a few posts are submitted and published), we’ll set you up in our Word Press admin as a Contributor. This will allow you to submit posts in Word Press itself, edit your bio, and approve/reply to comments on your posts. Posts will automatically be set to a pending status, and the blog editor will edit, approve, and schedule. When your post is published, you’ll receive an email notification. If you have questions about scheduling, feel free to contact us at marketing@paloalto.com

Illustrations:

We encourage you to include an image with each post. Ideally it’s 250-300 pixels wide, a JPG file, set about a paragraph down from the top, and aligned to the right. We encourage you to use Flickr creative commons, istockphoto.com, and shutterstock.com photos, in which case we’d like you to identify the copyright holder at the bottom, following this example: (image: so-and-so/Shutterstock)