CityRoom Submission Guidelines

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Once you have been accepted as a regular CityRoom contributor, these guidelines will help you submit your pieces to us in our accepted format. Following these guidelines makes our job a lot easier, and increase the amount of articles we are able to publish to our site. The more articles we publish, the more exposure you get, the more exposure you get, the bigger your portfolio will become and the more writing opportunities you will have.

Article Submission

Format: Submit your articles online via our Article Submissions Page. You will need to copy and paste your content into the online form. We do not accept Word or PDF documents.
Article Length: 800-1,200 words
Formatting: Limit links within the article to three (more than this makes them difficult to read by the search engines.) Please do not include any HTML in the body of your article.

Image & Video Submission

Accepted image formats: JPG or PNG
Resolution:

High-Res when possible, not to exceed 5 MB per file.
Minimum width: 520 pixels
Maximum file size: 4 MB (per image)

Credit: Supply author credit for all photography. Please do not submit any photos you don’t have the rights to use.
File naming: Name image files how you would want them to appear in your article. Example: If your photo is a picture of an Iowa Cornfield, title the image: “Iowa-Cornfield-from-the-Field-of-Dreams.jpg”.

Photo Selection: We will not publish blurry or distorted images. If such photos are submitted, we will replace them with photos from the CityRoom image bank. We are very mindful of imagery and want CityRoom to always publish material that looks polished and sophisticated.

Video Submissions: We love video! Please include the link to your video in the article where you would like it placed, we reserve the right to relocate the placement. Please pull the video URL from YouTube via the “Share” >> “Embed” option located under the video.

Video Blogs. Yes, we do accept video blogs, they must be accompanied by at least 150-250 words of copy to support the video. Example of a video blog.

CityRoom Story Categories

Primary Categories:

Secondary Categories:

*Pitching a Story: If you have an off-beat article idea but it doesn’t fit exactly within the categories mentioned above, run it by us – we love publishing stories about unusual subjects and can almost always find a home for it.

Exposure & SEO

CityRoom owns and operates more than 200 active websites and iGoogle Gadgets. We will almost always place articles on multiple sites within our network, with original publication on CityRoom.com. This is done systematically to ensure that smart SEO indexing is achieved with every post.

Article Titles: Try to keep article titles clear and concise. How would you search the article topic you are writing about? That should be your title. Feel free to dice it up a bit, but make sure that the exact topic of your story is clearly laid out in the title.

Keywords: Keywords should be used throughout the article, and linked when they assist in enhancing the article (preferably back to another article on CityRoom, but is okay to link to a page on your site if appropriate.)

Contributors and Bylines

To publish on CityRoom.com, your author biography must be live on our site. If you are not already been accepted as a CityRoom Contributor, we invite you to become a CityRoom Contributor TODAY! Linking your articles back to your bio on our site improves search engine rankings for your articles, for our website, and for your name online.

Bylines:

We will be placing your name (linked to your bio on our Contributors page) and a short title of your profession and website at the top of every article. We are trying to make this site look as clean as possible, so we will no longer be publishing bios or bylines in the article footer.

Bio: 250 words, with your name in the saved title.
Image: JPG attachment (No smaller than 180×210. We will re-size the image to fit our site.)
Link to your site: we will provide one (1) link to an outside site. Please include at the end of your bio.

Rules

Endorsements: If you have special interest in seeing an article published, i.e., you are receiving compensation or payment for publication, we require that you familiarize yourself with the

Federal Trade Commission Endorsement Guidelines.

Never approach a company or brand as a representative of CityRoom Inc. without clearing it with us first.

Please feel free to contact us at any time about procedures, exposure, our websites, or anything else regarding contributing to CityRoom.com and our sister sites.

Thank you,

Editors, CityRoom Inc.