FAQ > What are Biznik's Editorial Guidelines for Submitting an Article?

Biznik accepts articles for publication that meet the following editorial guidelines. Your article must be:

1. RELEVANT to business.
2. HELPFUL to people who are building businesses.
3. NOT overly self-promotional.

Relevant: It has to be an article on a topic that is related to BUSINESS. It should be DIRECTLY related, not just indirectly related. For example, "how to work with a massage therapist" is possibly indirectly related to business, because having a nice massage can make you more productive at work. But it's not directly related, so we would not publish an article with that title. It's possible that an article about massage therapy as it relates to running your business better could be a fit, but it would have to pass the "directly relevant" test, and I think that would be difficult in the case of massage as it relates to business.

Helpful: The idea here is that all articles will be rated on a helpfulness scale. It will have to pass a basic test of helpfulness before editors approve it for publication. You should be able to read the article and think, "yeah, that would be helpful to me as an independent business owner."

Not overly self-promotional: There is a fine line here - you will write on topics you know, which will raise your profile, and make you more likely to be hired or consulted. That's fine and encouraged. But you can't use an article to sell your service directly - that's what member promotions are for. We generally don't allow direct links back to the author's website within the article, unless it is somehow directly relevant to the topic. Blatant self-promotion is frowned on; indirect self-promotion is encouraged!

Articles must be between 500-1,500 words in length. Longer articles can be broken into multiple parts, but that is strongly discouraged (rating such articles is difficult). We recommend re-writing longer articles to fit within the length limit, or creating two stand-alone articles from one longer piece.

You can get a pretty good feel for what we're looking for by reading through a few of the articles themselves.

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