Guidelines for RainToday Writers
RainToday writers hail from a variety of backgrounds. They are experts in sales and marketing, experts in service business management, service business leaders, freelance writers, and specialists of many types. But they all have something in common: if you see their work published on RainToday, they all heeded the following guidelines.
We encourage you to submit your articles and content to RainToday, and we request that you read and follow the guidelines below before submitting your work.
For specific information on the topics we are interested in, please visit RainToday Topics.
What We're Looking For: Big Picture
- Applicability to Marketing and Selling B2B Professional Services: Articles must either focus specifically on service firms or be highly applicable to service firms. Thus articles such as "5 Closing Techniques" that might work for the door-to-door salesperson or "Pharmaceutical TV Advertising Best Practices" would fall outside of our scope. Non-service business examples and stories may be helpful as long as the writer clearly connects to our scope.
- Know Our Audience: Articles work when they target a specific audience. You can target RainToday's audience by learning about their demographics.
- Core Topics: We will publish a range of articles, from broad, thought-provoking pieces to focused, specific how-to pieces. For the most part, our readers are looking for content they can use, so we're always keen on receiving great nuts-and-bolts pieces. We also welcome success stories and lessons learned via reader-friendly case studies.
- Compelling Writing: If the writing is interesting and provocative – grabs the reader and pulls them in – that's great and most desirable. If the article is clear, readable, flows well, and is generally interesting that works, too. If it's choppy, wordy, confusing, structured poorly, or boring – even if it's a core topic – we will decline to publish it. We highly recommend that your read Rebecca Gould's article How To Write a Great Online Article: 6 Tips from A RainToday Editor for a better idea of what we look for.
- Willing to Revise: Most articles we publish go through some degree of editing. We therefore enjoy working with writers who realize writing is a process and will collaborate with us to hone an article to RainToday.com's standards.
- Fresh Topics and Viewpoints: Sure, some topics are evergreens (such as branding, networking, marketing strategy, etc.), but we're not looking for rehashes of the same-old, same-old. Original thoughts and original viewpoints interest our readers; thus they interest us.
- I'm Great…Buy From Me!: We're looking for great articles, not marketing copy. Please be aware that if anything crosses the line from confidence to overtly "salesy," we will either reject the article or remove the self-aggrandizement.
What We're Looking For: Details
- Length: 800 to 1,200 words on average. Be pithy. Keep sections short. Label your sections well. (Occasionally, we will consider longer pieces as features or multi-part series.)
- Send articles to Michelle Davidson as a Microsoft Word document, preferably with minimal formatting. If you need to put links in the text, put them in parentheses next to the word/s you want linked -- do not embed them in a Word document. No PDF files, please.
- Copyright is retained by the writer, not RainToday. We may, however, reprint your piece in companion RainToday ebooks and marketing materials.
- We do not pay guest contributors for articles.
Still have questions or comments? Please email mdavidson@raintoday.com.
Learn more about specific topics we seek at RainToday Topics.