Guest Post Guidelines

Opinions, insight, research, case studies, interviews, company profiles, technology developments, bleeding-edge science. There’s so much happening and we want to hear about anything that helps businesses understand and apply behaviour science.

And we’d love to hear from you. If you’ve got news, hints, tips or pointers to great stuff, then do drop us an email, tweet @ChinwagPsych or post in the PsychMatters Linkedin group.

If you’d like to pen (pen? type, maybe) something a bit more substantial for PsychMatters, well, we’d be honoured. Posting to the site is a great way to share ideas, thoughts, research and more with like-minded folk.

Our community is important to us, they’re a pretty influential bunch who appreciate great content and events. Creating a collaborative, engaging environment is much more important to us than links (and keywords within links).

But, before polishing your purple prose, please take a couple of mins to skim through the guidelines.

Topics/Content

We don’t dictate length. If anything the shorter, the better – stop sniggering at the back – for the most part our community prefers 300 – 500 word stories, with an increasing number reading posts on their mobiles or tablets.

PsychMatters covers a range of topics including, but not restricted to, the following areas:

Aim for originality, even when covering established subjects – adding your own expertise may provide a fresh perspective on old stories. You might have heard them before, but we want to help introduce business and marketers to the subject.

We prefer blogs that show the arguments and cite the facts that led to the writer’s conclusion, drawing from all sides of the argument so the reader can decide for themselves.

Language / Tone

• Please avoid any hint of racism, sexist or religious bias
• Similarly, snide or nasty comments, or a condescending tone won’t go down well
• Colloquialisms and slang are generally accepted, obscenity and vulgarity are not

Formatting: Headlines, Titles and Sub-headers

• Titles should be around 10 words if possible. We do love a pun.
• Use Heading 2 for main headings and Heading 3 for sub-headings
• Short paragraphs and bullet points help the reader scan the story

Images / Videos / Infographics

• We welcome the use of images, all images must be properly attributed AND have been credited.
• Don’t be afraid of including graphs, infographics or embedding videos where relevant
• Please make sure any images, videos or other content is properly credited with links to the source
• Flickr (advanced search example) and Creative Commons Search are great tools for finding images to use
• Each post should have a featured image – ideally 750px wide or larger. If you can’t find one, don’t worry we can help.

Once it’s live… / Sharing the Social Love

• Participation will raise your profile and broaden your contacts
• Respond to comments if possible. Engagement shows an open-minded attitude
• We’ll automatically send it out through @ChinwagPsych, ChinwagPsych Facebook, PsychMatters on Linkedin amongst others
  
• Don’t forget to promote the post through your social networks: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc.

Signature and Credit

• If you’d like an author profile on PsychMatters, contact us, we’ll create one and you’ll be able to add contact and social network information, your profile and links will show after all of your blog posts and at the top of your author page.
• Alternatively, if you’d prefer a simpler life, send us the copy and we can post it on your behalf with a by-line including links.

Other

• All blogs are moderated before being published.
• Please don’t be offended if we make alterations, or email you to suggest changes.
• Please note: excessively promotional posts will not be published

Most important, and above all the guidelines above, the editor’s decision is final.

What do I do next?

Contact us with details of your guest blog post – a very short outline is fine if you’ve not written anything yet. It may take us a little while to get back to you – we get a lot of emails – so feel free to chase in a week or so if you’ve not heard back.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.