Want to contribute content to Upmarket Magazine? We’d love to have you! Here are our general tips for contributors, including how to become one.
Getting Started
We may accept one-off content or previously published content on a case-by-case basis (here’s the submission form), but we’re particularly interested in fresh ongoing content from regular columnists. If you’d like to discuss being one of our regular columnists, email MEM and tell her what you’re interested in writing about!
In your email, include the following information:
- What are you interested in writing about on an ongoing basis?
- How frequently would you like to submit articles for publication?
- Where can your writing be found on the web? (If you don’t have anything you can link us to, please include a few samples of your work as attachments to your email.)
What kind of content is Upmarket Magazine really interested in right now?
- art as business, business as art
- the connection and people-oriented side of business
- how to make a business sustainable and ethical (without losing its art)
- how to inspire and utilize your creativity in business
- how to stay true to yourself in business
- what happens when business is about meaning, not money
- how to make business human
- how to make business about the experience, not the transaction
How to Get Your Articles Seen & Shared
If you want your article to have a shot at being featured at the top of Upmarket’s main page, follow these guidelines closely:
- Keep your article title under 60 characters.
- Make sure to submit a beautiful photo with a link & name as credit.
- Make sure all your photos have link & name credits at the bottom of your content.
- Make sure all your photos are credited to you, public domain, or Creative Commons licensed.
- Make sure at least one of your photos is high quality, gorgeous to look at, and 600×340 in dimension. Photos of people (especially headshots) can be tricky in the feature widget, so submit more than one if you can.
How to find great photos:
- Check out Flickr’s Creative Commons section. This link will take you straight to a Creative Commons “attribution only” search sorted by “most interesting photos,” and that’s a great place to start. (We prefer “attribution only,” but any Creative Commons license is fine as long as it follows the rules. For instance, we can use “non-commercial” images in posts as long as we’re using the image as an adjunct to free content, but not if we were creating an advertisement out of it.)
- Other great photo finding options: Many contributors also like to use Wikimedia Commons or Compfight — browse and see what you like!
- Remember that if your article is featured, there will be a black title bar across the bottom of your image — so make sure you use something that has an obscurable area at the bottom. In other words, if your image has crucial details or text along the bottom, you might want to find something else.
- Photos of people are great, but make sure you stick to the 600×340 guidelines — otherwise, the top of your headshot might get chopped off, which will probably make us decide not to feature that article.
Promoting your article to your peeps:
- Boost our existing signals. Currently, every article on Upmarket goes out automatically to Twitter, Google Plus, and Facebook. Feel free to boost the signal for any of these posts by re-sharing, +1ing, retweeting & commenting on them.
- Ask your fans to comment, especially when you tell your personal & professional audiences about your article. Posts with comments are more likely to keep getting comments. Likewise, think about what kind of conversation you’d like to start when you’re writing your articles, and feel free to reference previous articles and comments when you write your next piece.
- Make sure you’re subscribed to the Upmarket Newsletter. If your article goes out to that newsletter, you’ll know you’ve provided some of our best recent content, and can proclaim your awesomeness appropriately!
- Make sure you’re also on our contributors updates list — if you don’t know what that is, ask MEM and she’ll add you. This is how we make sure ongoing columnists are aware of how their articles stack up, what content is doing particularly well, and what they can do to get more eyeballs and comments on their articles.
- Be active in the comments across the whole magazine, in addition to the comments for your articles — this will encourage more community to grow around your articles. Many of our most well-known contributors are active commenters on each other’s articles, and the more our audience sees your name on the site, the more likely they will recognize you and click through to read your items when they see them.
- Make sure to list your author page on your other web presences, wherever those are — you can find it by clicking on your name from one of your articles. Here’s MEM’s author page, for instance.
