What is a Community Blogger?

Community Bloggers are independent authors that can choose their own topics to write about (with an environmental theme). The beauty of writing is that it can be done wherever you have an internet connection i.e. at home, work, school, or the cafe. If you contribute more than three articles to us, we will consider creating an account for you so you can have your very own author page. Otherwise we will post your article under a generic “Guest Blogger” author page but still post your author bio and your name above or below the article.

What does a Community Blogger do?

Community Bloggers provide helpful information, resources, and tools related to their area of expertise. For example, if you are knowledgable of conservation, you could cover the efforts to protect wetlands, forests, and rivers. If you are knowledgable on air toxics or pollution, you could cover the dangers of coal power plants, traffic induced smog, etc. The possibilities are endless and we will help you focus your expertise in the right way.

What’s in it for you?

TheEnvironmentalblog.org works very hard behind the scenes to make sure your content is exposed to people looking for information on your topic. Because of these efforts, Community Bloggers often appear at the top of Google, Yahoo, and Bing search results. In addition, if your well written article goes viral, social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ will give you additional exposure.

Difference Between Guest Blog Post and Sponsored Blog Post

Guest Post: A guest blog post is offered to the writer for free. However, the guest post should not promote your business and must contain related content typically covered on The Environmental Blog. We will not allow links back to your site in the body of the post. External links are allowed in the guest post but must be related to the topic of the article.

An author bio may be included at the bottom of the post. The author bio may include one external link to your website only and may not be for a company or business you are writing in place of or contain phrases or keywords linked to the company or business you are writing for. View our Sponsored Post section for these options.

Sponsored Post:
A sponsored blog post will allow you to freely promote your business, company, or product. Please keep in mind that the sponsored post still needs to be promoting a business, company, or product with an environmental theme. The post may include up to three external links to your website or another that you might be writing for. If you’d like to provide us with a set of keywords for your post, we will include those as well. We will also place a small disclosure image at the end of the post signifying that it is a sponsored post.

A sponsored post that is written by you will cost $50 made via Paypal to email address JT@theenvironmentalblog.org. It may include 3 external links and keywords if you provide them.

Submission Guidelines

• Please include in the subject line whether your post is a guest post or a sponsored post
• Please try to make the post at least 400 words long.
• Please keep it about the environment. If you are unsure, please send me an email before you write something.

Other things to keep in mind:

Original/Unique Content Only: We will publish original content only … we check all submissions through Copyscape.com for plagiarism and content published somewhere else. We will reject your submission if it does not pass copyscape or we find the article published elsewhere online. Additionally, submission of a guest post does not guarantee you will be published. We reserve the right to selectively choose which articles we’d like to publish, that being said we are not overly picky, we are just trying to avoid spammers.

Be Creative and Noteworthy: Check our site for topics that have already been covered. Your chances of submission go down if we’ve already covered a subject matter you’d like to submit.

Sources: Please link your sources for content so we can avoid any issues with plagiarism.

Images/Videos: Please include photos or videos with your submission. Images must be attached as an extra attachment, be 650 x 450 pixels, and must be an original picture by you, from public domain, from a corporate media publishing kit, or from creative commons (Flickr Creative Commons is a good source). Please link the source of your image, this will not count as an external link in-post.

Captivate Us: We want submissions that are fresh, new, different, and unique. The more flare the better! Your chances of getting published are reduced with boring, dry, and un-interesting writing styles.

Again, if you’d like to submit a one to two sentence author bio, that is okay, again please no more than one external link in the bio and no more that two sentences.

Submit your posts to JT[at]theenvironmentalblog.org.

Photo Credit: Some rights reserved by Joe Wilcox via Flickr.