Before you send us your submission, please make sure it:

1. Conveys quality, practical advice presented with Revenue-IQ readers in mind
2. Is able to be used exclusively at Revenue-IQ
3. Includes all the information—links, link text, reusable images, etc.—you want the published version of your post to include
4. Infringes no copyright laws, either in terms of text or images
5. Includes a headline, body text, your byline, and an image.

Unless previously negotiated, we ask that the posts you submit to us are written exclusively for use by Revenue-IQ. While you’re more than welcome to write on the same topic elsewhere, our hope is that posts that appear on Revenue-IQ don’t appear in the same form elsewhere.

Posts work best on Revenue-IQ that are relevant to our overall topic—raising service contractor revenue. Of course there’s a lot of room to move in this overall topic. Anything that helps a contractor improve their new business development will be helpful for readers.

Revenue-IQ readers love practical tips and how-tos. Give readers information that they can apply to their blogs immediately, and you’ll be popular here. Even more theoretical posts that have something in them that readers can “do” rather than just “know” are good.

Topics in which we’re particularly interested right now include (but aren’t limited to):

• Selling & marketing
• Sales proposals & presentations
• Sales management
• Sales training
• Account management, retention & relations
• Customer satisfaction
• Pricing
• Competitive landscape
• Customers’ buying behavior

Some guest posters worry about what voice or style to write in. Ultimately this is up to you. We encourage you to bring your own voice to your post.

Feel free to submit your content in Word or plain text format. It’d be great if you could also follow these points in preparing your post for us.

• Please don’t use bold font in your post’s prose.
• Subheadings: wrap any subheadings in your post in tags, or simply bold them so they stand out
• Links: if you want to mark up a link and link text using HTML, by all means do so. Otherwise, include the URL in brackets within the prose, immediately after the text you’d like to use as the link text. Note that we don’t publish affiliate links in guest posts.

Please do include everything you want to have included with your post in your submission. If you want to include links, paste them in the spot where you want them to go. If you want to use particular link text, tell us. If you want to include a specific image, send it in (see below for more on this). Don’t assume we’ll know what information you want, and where: tell us clearly.

If it’s relevant to the topic you’re writing about, you’re welcome to link back to your blog within the post. Keep in mind that this relevancy is very important. If we feel your post includes too many links back to your own blog, we may remove them, or reject the post. We don’t mind promoting you, but subtlety often works best. A high-quality, helpful post will get people checking out who you are more effectively than will lots of links back to your blog.

We love to include images in posts on Revenue-IQ. As the theme here is fairly text-oriented, images add personality, break up content and grab attention. We find that posts with at least one good image gain more attention than posts that lack images.

Image Requirements

If you’re submitting an image to be published with your post on Revenue-IQ, you must:

• ensure that image is available for legal reuse (for example, under the Creative Commons license)
• ensure the image’s reuse is not restricted (for example, many images are only available for non-commercial reuse; they can’t be used on Revenue-IQ)
• send us a link to the original image location online
• include in your article full credit to the image’s owner (including their name and link to their site).

A few other suggestions for images:

• Images can be of any size, but the maximum width is 540 pixels.
• It’s up to you to ensure that the images you submit are able to be reused in terms of copyright.
• Images can be illustrative (screenshots), descriptive (something that’s more attention-grabbing on the theme of the post), or anything else that you’d like to include.

Feel free to either submit images as separate files in your email, or send us a link to the location on your own server where we can download the image. We’ll then grab the image and host it on the Revenue-IQ server (so there are no worries about us crashing yours). Please don’t submit images by pasting them into your post document.

Your post should be as long as you need it to be in order to convey your message.

We publish posts that vary greatly in length. Anything goes—length isn’t a factor, but quality is. Stick with your own style and voice, and choose a length that sits well with you.

All posts that appear on Revenue-IQ are edited. We rarely edit them heavily, but we will change titles, rework openings or conclusions, or correct grammar and spelling.

Don’t be offended by this—we’re just trying to make every post we publish as successful as possible. We also know what generally works well with the Revenue-IQ audience.

Occasionally, we’ll send a post back to you with suggested additions, omissions, or changes. This generally suggests we feel the post could be further enhanced in ways that go beyond some basic editing.

Our hope is that we get a post that hits the mark with the readership—that’s good for you as the author, good for Revenue-IQ readership, and good for the blog as a whole.

You’ve worked to give us great content, so let us help you promote you. We want to highlight you, your blog, or any product or service that you have to offer. This is largely done in your byline.

Bylines should be a sentence or two explaining who you are and what you do. Feel free to include up to two links in it. Some guests include a link to an RSS feed here, which can convert well. Your byline will appear at the bottom of your post, but we’ll also write a short introductory sentence that will include your main link, and will appear at the top of the post.

If you have any questions or concerns or would like to contact us with your post, please contact Chris Arlen via our contact form.

Thanks for your involvement with Revenue-IQ.