Contributor Guidelines

Please review the following contributor guidelines before contacting me with a guest contribution request. Please note that I don’t respond to these inquiries if they don’t meet these guidelines.

Content Guidelines

• Guest pitches that adhere to our blog editorial calendar have a better chance of being approved.
• Please do not submit guest contributions that have been previously published elsewhere. You retain all rights to republish that content after it appears on the site.
• We don’t have word count rules here in general. But please submit posts that are no shorter than 250 words. We’d like them to offer enough information to be of interest to our readers.
• Titles should be 55 characters or less to accommodate their placement in our header when they’re new to the site. If they’re too long, they will screw up our site formatting, pushing those links into our menu bar. I will shorten any titles that are too long before publication.
• You may write on any topic relevant to freelance writers with two exceptions. We will not post articles that are directly promotional. And we will not post articles that support sites, clients, or business models which I feel exploit writers in any way. That includes content mills and bidding sites. I simply won’t offer space here on All Freelance Writing to support the bottom of the barrel in this industry. Other than that, just try to make sure we haven’t extensively covered your topic before. Give us your own spin on it, or share personal stories in the post.
• We do not accept guest contributions from companies. Guest contributions must be submitted by, and attributed to, an individual. A short bio of that individual should be included. More specifically, we do not accept posts from freelancers or marketing and SEO firms submitting articles on behalf of clients. Someone directly tied to the company should be writing the content and submitting it. In that case, the company can be mentioned in the bio as long as it meets the linking requirements below. However, the bio itself must relate to the author.
• I generally do not edit guest contributions unless I have to shorten the title. But I reserve the right to adjust the formatting to fit our site (such as using h2 tags for headings and formatting lists if necessary) and make any other edits as necessary (include editing in-content links that violate our guidelines. Beyond that I generally publish them as submitted, so please proofread your posts. I may fix a couple of typos if I catch them, but if there are a lot, I may send it back to you for a second look, or I might reject it.

Linking Guidelines

• No promotional links (meaning links to your site) may be included in the article itself.
• Promotional links should be limited to two (2), and they should appear only in the author bio.
• The links must also be relevant to our audience here. For example, linking to your professional site or writing blog is okay. If you’re another kind of freelancer, I’m okay with links to your freelance or small business site where services or advice might be relevant to writers. But a relevant article with links to a pharmaceutical site would not be okay. I also generally don’t accept guest contributions from “online education” sites (I receive too many spammy pitches from them here).
• No affiliate links may be included anywhere in a guest contribution.

Bio Guidelines

• Please include a short author bio with your post. Two to four (2-4) sentences is usually enough.
• Up to two relevant links may be included in your bio. That includes your professional site, blog, social media profiles, etc. These links may not be affiliate links.
• You may submit a photo to be included with your bio, but it is not required.

Submission Guidelines

• We receive dozens of guest contribution requests each week, and very few are actually approved. As a result, I no longer accept pitches from people I don’t know unless the full post text is included in the pitch. You may include it in the body of your email, or you can send an attachment in .doc, .docx, or .rtf formats. I reserve the right not to publish any article that is submitted as a guest contribution, and of course you are free to use that material elsewhere. Along those lines,  I don’t provide ideas, so please don’t email me to say “I’ll write about whatever you want.” Those emails won’t get a response.
• Guest contributions or questions should be sent via email to guests(at)allfreelancewriting(dot)com. Please do not use my general email address or our site’s contact form for these submissions.
• If you want your post to appear on a specific day, you may request it. However, guest submissions are not published on days when our regular contributors are scheduled to post.
• Please note that I don’t always have a fast turnaround time on guest contribution pitches due to the sheer volume we’ve been receiving lately, and I don’t respond to inquiries that don’t meet these guidelines. So please review these carefully if you haven’t received a response.

Thank you!