If you have exceptional writing and/or design skills and would like to share your expertise with an audience of Product Managers & Designers, UX designers, growth hackers, and business owners, we’d love to hear from you.
The Userbrain Blog has over 10.000 unique visitors per month and generates more than 10.000 social shares. We’re always looking for more brilliant contributors to join our team.
Please take some time to review this entire page—it should answer any questions about what kind of content we’re looking for and how the submission process works.
Overview
Successful guest contributions are comprehensive, experienced, data-driven, and interesting posts that teach our readers something new about the world of Usability, User Experience, and Usability Testing.
While we tend to skew toward content about Usability Testing and UX and how it contributes to the betterment of the Web as a whole, that’s not all we talk about. We’re also interested in publishing any topic that Product Managers, Saas businesses, and UX designers care about, which includes things like website optimization, usability, conversion, collaboration & team development, user & customer experience, and larger internet trends, among other things.
The Bare Essentials
- Original concepts, compelling arguments, and high-quality writing. We will not republish anything that’s been published elsewhere.
- The article reflects the writing style/tone of the Userbrain Blog. We aim to be casual yet helpful, and we typically avoid jargon.
- While we don’t like to put a word count on our posts, these tend to run at 1,000 words and above.
- Proper attribution of data, quotations, and outside content referenced in the article.
Specifications
The content must be detailed and unique
We don’t accept content that isn’t detailed or unique. What we mean by detailed is that the content needs to be at least 1,000 words with no fluff. You can always make a post meatier by adding details and steps, so why not take an extra hour and write a better blog post?
We also won’t accept a blog post on a topic that has been beaten to death.
We won’t accept posts with spelling or grammar errors. If a post has those, it means the author didn’t spend too much time on it. Please proofread your posts before submitting them.
The Different Post Types We Accept
Here are some of our most successful blog post types:
- Canonical: These posts give readers in-depth tactical takeaways that are supported by relevant, recent examples, original quotes, original graphics, and current data. When readers finish this type of post, they should be able to immediately execute on the given topic and have very few questions left on how to do it.
- Graphics: These posts rely heavily on an Infographic or SlideShare created by the author. Usually, they should feature a few paragraphs of introduction, the embedded media itself, and a succinct transcript of what was written in the media (for Accessibility and SEO reasons). The graphic should be comprehensive and easy to read, have a compelling narrative, and feature up-to-date data that are properly sourced.
- TOFU: These posts are created with broad, top-of-the-funnel traffic in mind. They’re usually related to larger internet trends and topics and are lighter in nature. There are also very few tactical lessons that can be taken away from them.
While we certainly publish posts from time to time that doesn’t fall into any of those categories, your post has the best chance of being accepted if it matches one of these formats.
Formatting Preferences
- You can submit your content either as HTML or Word/Google Docs.
- For headlines, use the H2 tag, and for subheadings, use H3 and H4 tags.
- Use short paragraphs and bullet points as they improve readability.
- When quoting, quote. Don’t just copy-paste the sentences as if they were your own. And always properly cite sources.
Image Preferences
Our every post has a headline image that is 740px wide and 282px high. Apart from that image, we encourage you to submit as many images as you’d like to accompany your post and visually explain what you are talking about in the topic.
All images must be properly attributed and credited.
Outgoing Links
We let authors link out as often as they want to as long as those links benefit our readers. When those links don’t benefit our readers, we reserve the right to remove them.
- A bio should only contain 1 or 2 links – either to the author’s website, Twitter handle, or his/her blog.
- A blog post should contain a minimum of 4 links – we don’t have a maximum number of links that should be in a post, but we do have a minimum. People have written blog posts on almost every topic out there, so instead of regurgitating the same old information, link out to the sites that have already covered it.
Contribute to and Support the Community
Our favorite part about blogging is creating a community. Where would we be without our readers and community?
That is why we encourage the content authors to engage the community with replies in the comments section, answer any reader’s questions, and help in any way possible in the first couple of weeks after posting, and more if you wish. It doesn’t matter if you write a simple reply as long as you acknowledge that someone has commented, and respond to it.
The readers and we will be very grateful for this. Thank you!
Content Ownership
Here’s what you can do with the content besides sharing it like crazy.
- Unfortunately, we can’t let you republish in full any of our text-based content (blog articles, PDFs, PPTs, DOCs) on the web. Why? Well, duplicate content is just bad for SEO, and Google will hate us for it
- Feel free to reference or quote up to 75 words of any of our text content (facts, figures, quotes, etc.) in your own blog articles, presentations, documents, etc. as long as you honor the Content Attribution Policy below.
- Feel free to share links to any of our content by email and social media. We’ll love you for it!
- Feel free to republish in full any Userbrain-original images (such as charts, graphs, infographics), videos, or SlideShares by copying or embedding them and including them in your content, as long as you honor the Content Attribution Policy below.
- You cannot make money off of our content. We gave it to you for free, so you need to keep it free by passing it along.
- Userbrain reserves the right to include calls-to-action to the content, including but not limited to email newsletters, ebooks, and other downloadable content.
We give you full credit to the guest post you write for Userbrain, but we reserve the right to edit and adapt your guest blog content, and update it in the future for accuracy, freshness and comprehensiveness.
Content Attribution Policy
- Attribute Userbrain as the source,
- Link to the original Userbrain source you’re referencing,
- For references to a Userbrain blog article, link to the URL of the specific blog article you’re referencing.
- For references to Userbrain downloadable content offers behind a form, please link to the landing page URL with the form for that individual offer.
What We Won’t Accept
Here are some things we simply can’t accept:
- Anything that’s been covered on our blog before. Please do a search of our site before submitting your articles.
- Anything that may be construed as a link-building scheme.
- Anything that’s too promotional for your company or organization.
- Anything that’s offensive or inaccurate.
- Anything that’s overly critical of individuals or companies—this is not a site to air grievances.
How to Submit Your Post
Please email guestpost@userbrain.com with the following:
- Your completed post as an HTML file or Word/Google Doc.
- Attached image files (with attribution) in a separate (zipped) folder. For reference, our blog is 740px wide.
- Short author bio, 40-50 words, including 1 or 2 anchor text links to your own website, blog, or Twitter handle.
If your article meets editorial standards and aligns with our content strategy, we will respond to let you know your article will be published. That process may take up to 1 week.