WELCOME TO THE LIFE BY DESIGN MAGAZINE TEAM!

We are so excited to have you. Here are a few tips and tools that will help you write awesome content. We will be here to help along the way, but we want you to start strong and continue to get better. The more you write, the better you get. It’s as simple as that. Please read this through in its entirety to avoid commonly asked questions.

Check all articles in Word, Grammarly, or Google Docs before submitting

ARTICLE LENGTH

Print Article Word Count: 300-500 words

There is an easy and effective way to catch simple spelling and grammar errors before you submit your article; we recommend checking your articles here in Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or Grammarly first.

NOTE: We reserve the right to change headlines if we determine a different headline is better suited to your article. Stick to 2-3 sentences per paragraph. For easy reading it’s important to keep your paragraphs short and flowing onto the next one. Create a voice and style for your writing.

The best part about writing is that you can give your opinion and your voice on the matter. We want all contributors to establish their voice and feel comfortable in their writing. Be creative and professional. Create a style of writing that our readers will love and want to follow you. Bold certain words, include quotes you love, insert videos, pictures, infographics, etc.

Please submit your article in this format:

Please send your article to lbdsubmission@gmail.com with all of the above information preferably in a Google doc.

Thank you and we look forward to publishing the best content online and in our publication!

ARTICLE TYPES TO AVOID:

•    General articles about entrepreneurship

•    General mindset articles without take-aways or actionable points

•    Super technical articles

•    Articles that use a lot of jargon

•    No Kickstarter or Indiegogo Campaigns

•    Avoid self-promotional language and articles promoting yourself with no reader value

FORMATTING

Do not use excessive bolding, underlining, or styling. 98% of your text will be Paragraph.

Note: You can use bold to emphasize certain points, but don’t overuse it or it defeats the purpose of making anything stand out. We prefer that you use Oxford commas. This ensures that there is no confusion when you are writing a list of things. If this confuses you, Grammarly is a free plugin that will help you catch your punctuation mistakes.

You’ve definitely heard this in high school English class, and it’s no different here. Please, for the sake of our editors, read over your content before you click “SEND.” Minimizing as many simple errors on your end saves everyone time. The better you write an article, the faster we edit the article, the quicker we can publish it.

Tool: GRAMMARLY (It’s awesome!) www.grammarly.com

After Submitting Your Article

•    You will receive an email when we schedule the article with the date and time in PST time zone.

•    You will also receive an email when the article is live with a live link.

•    Please do not email or contact us asking for article status. Rest assured that we will push them through ASAP!

Plain and simple, you get out what you put in. We share your content, too, but there is no better endorsement than from you, the author.

Engage with your content by responding to social comments, comments on the article itself, and Liking and Retweeting/Sharing. All of this helps with engagement on your article. You can also support other authors by doing the same with their articles. When we all support each other, we collectively get more engagement and traffic.

If you have great advice to share with our readers to motivate them to succeed, then we are looking to feature you. Please have a browse through our website and take a look at the categories and articles that we cover.

We do not accept paid guest posts for promotion. We do not offer do-follow links either. We work with writers to produce unique and highly valuable content. So, if you’re looking for any of these things, you came to the wrong place.

Type of Articles We Are Looking For

• Motivation and success is our focus. We like articles that fit within the self development genre: Motivation, Success, Inspiration, Spirituality, and Life. We also like articles about Startups/business and Entrepreneurship.

• We like our articles to be informative, interesting, a little personal, but not too personal and positive. We want to help our readers grow and feel inspired. So using long quotes and speeches for the bulk of your point or information is not something we are looking for.

• Please limit the formatting of your article when submitting. Plain text is preferred. Underlined text, bold text, and italicized text isn’t needed. Our editors take care of that.

• Make your article interesting and easier to follow by including subheadings to break up content. Single sentence lines are not what we are looking for. Make sure to submit your article in paragraph format. Short paragraphs make the article easier to read. If you need an example, have a look at any article on our website and you will see our formatting style.

• We do not promote guest contributors’ websites, products, or services in the body of the article. Our focus is to provide our readers with practical advice, not for us to promote your products and services. We do allow you to provide 1-2 links within the body of the article to articles you have written for other websites. Just make sure they are to articles you have written, not to your eBook or mastermind class. The links will be reviewed and if the editors feel the links are not relevant or don’t belong, they do have the right to remove them. Links that you submit in your article are not guaranteed to be in there when we publish it.

If the editor feels there is a better article that should be linked, they will change it. Keep this in mind.

• Our readers want originality. We will not accept already published content. Whether it has been published on your own personal blog, social media platforms, or with another publication, we will not consider it.

• We do not accept articles submitted in PDF or HTML. Please submit articles in the body of the email or preferably in google docs. Google docs is the easiest and quickest way to have your article reviewed. If you use Google docs, please remember to send us the “Editable” version.

Please make sure to read and understand our guidelines before submitting. If you don’t submit your article in the way that we have requested, we will return it to you for you to make corrections and resubmit. This will save our editors and our contributors valuable time.

If you have read our guidelines and are ready to submit your article to Life By Design, then please send the following to lbdsubmission@gmail.com:

• Short paragraph for your author bio with your first and last name. We allow you to provide two links of your choice in your bio. It can be a link to your website and your eBook. It can be a link to your website and one social media page. It’s up to you. You choose the two links you think are most important.

• Completed final draft of your article with a unique working title. Remember, the title is the first thing that catches the reader’s eye. Be creative, but also keep in mind that you want your title to be inviting.

Please submit your article in this format:

Please send your article to lbdsubmission@gmail.com with all of the above information preferably in a Google doc.

Thank you and we look forward to publishing the best content online and in our publication!