WhyGo Italy Guest Post Guidelines & Requirements
Are you interested in submitting a guest post to WhyGo Italy? Here’s what you need to know.
What I’m Looking For
Since WhyGo Italy is a travel guide, I’m primarily looking for articles that are timeless and will provide readers with travel advice in some way. I’m open to other ideas, however, such as travel essays about an experience you had in Italy – these fall under the category of “travel inspiration.” I’m also happy to consider photo essays, too, if there’s a collection of fantastic images for the topic.
Examples of some guest posts that I’ve accepted in the past:
- What to Eat in Umbria: Food for Every Season
- Night as a Wine Lover in Florence
- Top 10 Things to Do in Sardinia
- How to Visit Rome with Kids
- What to Do in Lucca
- 10 Favorite Family-Friendly Accommodations in Tuscany
Examples of guest post ideas that I’m not interested in:
- Travel diary posts that give a play-by-play of every single thing you did on your trip
- Topics that are so time-sensitive so as to not be useful to travelers for more than a very brief period of time
- Anything “spammy” or overtly promotional, or anything deemed to be offensive or blatantly false
- Anything with extensive grammar or spelling errors
Requirements: What I Need From You
- Word Count: I’m flexible on this, to a degree. Photo posts will have few words, but otherwise I’d like the post to have at least 400-500 words. Anything over 2000 words and we might start talking about breaking it up into a couple posts.
- Content: I’d like original content. Anything I categorize as spam (anything that is overtly promotional towards a specific company, hotel, etc) or which requires extensive editing to correct grammar and spelling errors will not be published.
- Photos: The number of photos needed differs depending on the post, but I’ll need at least one image I can use at or near the top. It can be your own photo that you’ll allow me to use, or a photo that’s Creative Commons licensed – either way is fine. (You can find Creative Commons photos using this Creative Commons search tool.) I’ll also need a photo of yourself to put at the end with your bio.
- Publication Rights: You retain all rights to your work, though we ask that you not publish it elsewhere for at least six months after publication. If you’d like to alert the readers on your blog or website to the post’s existence, I ask that you don’t republish the entire article as it appears on WhyGo Italy. Posting an excerpt with a reference to the full article on WhyGo Italy is fine.
Benefits: What You Get
- Links: At the bottom of your guest post, within your bio, you can link to your personal blog/website and Twitter account (if you’ve got one). Depending on the context of the post, I may or may not be able to link to your site within the post itself – and I reserve the right to remove links (especially if you’re linking to your travel business). If you’re a business, it’s probably best if you explore our sponsored post opportunities instead.
- Exposure: I’ll promote your post on Twitter and Facebook, recognizing you as the author with links to your Twitter or Facebook account as appropriate.
Instructions for Submitting Guest Posts
Since I don’t accept every guest post idea I receive, please don’t automatically send in guest posts before I’ve expressed an interest in it. This helps keep my inbox slightly less cluttered than it already is.
- Send me an email (italy [at] whygo [dot] com) with your guest post idea, including a paragraph or two plus a brief outline of what the rest of the article will be like, and any links to your writing samples online.
- Once a guest post idea is accepted, send the final product to me via email (italy [at] whygo [dot] com) in two formats: a Word file (so I can see where you’ve put in bold and italics and whatnot) and a TXT file (so I can grab the text without Word’s superfluous formatting codes). If you’re comfortable with HTML coding, feel free to send only the TXT version of your post with all the bold and italics (and other) formatting already coded.
- Send any photographs I’ll need for the post, or links to Creative Commons photos you’d like to use. For any photos you’re sending via email, please crop them to 600 pixels wide. You can use sites like Pixenate or Pixlr to edit photos online quickly and easily.
- Don’t forget to include a brief bio and a photograph of yourself that I can use at the bottom of the post. The photo of yourself can be smaller (usually 200 pixels wide at most).