Crowdbotics Article Submissions & Editorial Guidelines
By: William Wickey
Tags: Call For Submissions, Technical Writing, Writing, Submission Guidelines, Editorial Design

Crowdbotics accepts contributing articles from writers on Medium.

Crowdbotics is looking for technical and how-to content for a variety of web applications categories and code frameworks including Blockchain, Browser Extensions, Dashboards, Voice-Enabled Applications, Online Payments, Django, Solidity, Swift, React, Node.js, Ruby, and more.

We’re also interested in content individuals leading technical teams or working on product strategy. For example, topics like,

Engineering project management

Sprint planning

Developer management and efficiency

High-level product planning

Remote work management

Strategic technology and framework choices

If you’re interested in writing for Crowdbotics, send your article idea (title and short summary) to editor [at] crowdbotics [dot] com.

Editorial Guidelines

Audience. Crowdbotics’s audience includes a variety of semi-technical and technical individuals. Identify your audience in the post by describing their characteristics and needs. Help readers complete tasks quickly and efficiently.

Drafts & Revisions. An editor from Crowdbotics will proofread and make suggestions. Plan for 2 rounds of revisions.

Length. A post should be a minimum of 300 words but will likely be much longer. Crowdbotics’s best performing posts are 2000+ words. Write long, then pare down with an editor.

Grammar. Run your content through Grammarly and make edits before submitting a first draft to an editor and again before pushing “publish.” Write for clarity. Do not include unnecessary words or sentences. Remove bulk words that do not contribute valuable information. For further reading on grammar, check out The Elements of Style and Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.

Media. Include code snippets, screenshots, and other media when possible. Crowdbotics will provide a featured image to lead off the post. Please include credits for images you provide yourself.

Keywords. Crowbotics posts should be optimized for web search. An editor will identify a “focus keyword” for your post. Include the focus keyword in the title, headers, and throughout the body of the post.

Active Voice. Use active voice. It is more clear and direct. In a sentence written in the active voice, the subject performs the action. In a sentence written in the passive voice, the subject receives the action. For example, “Connect to the API,” not, “The API is connected to.”

Formatting. Web readers scan content to find information they are looking for. Use clear and simple headings and subheadings, bulleted lists, and highlighted keywords. Group short sentences into short paragraphs for easy scanning.

Addressing the Reader. Where possible, address the reader as “you”. Refer to yourself, the author as “I”. It makes the content more personal. For example: “In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to build a custom Alexa skill.” Text should also be gender-neutral when possible.

Authorship. Medium posts will be under your name unless otherwise specified. Crowbotics may re-purpose blog content on other platforms with attribution.

Calls-To-Action. Posts should end with 2 calls to action: a CTA to engage users (For example, “Show us what you built in the comments.”) and a postscript Crowdbotics CTA. The latter will be added by an editor.

Links. Include 2 ‘crosslinks’ to other Crowdbotics medium posts, and 2 ‘external links’ to other sites. ‘Backlinks’ to crowdbotics.com will be added to by an editor if relevant.

Timeline. The timeline for outlining, writing, revising, and publishing a post is about 1 week. Posts should take approximately 6–14 hours to complete.

Duplicate Content & Plagiarism. Crowdbotics typically publishes new, previously unpublished work. However, we do sometimes syndicate previously published article if we think they are valuable to our audience. When submitting your article, please specify whether it has been previously published elsewhere, and include a link. You should never submit an article that contains unattributed content published by another contributors elsewhere.

Syndication

If you are submitting an article for syndication (meaning, it has already been published), Crowdbotics will make edits to the title, subtitle, featured image, and add postscript text with a Crowdbotics call to action. A Crowdbotics editor may make additional edits for clarity or content as well. Most posts are published within 2 weeks of submission.

All submissions are subject to editing and publication is not guaranteed.

Additional Writing Tips

Inverted Pyramid. Use the inverted pyramid methodology of writing. Start with the conclusion, then include explanatory information. End with background information. This way, readers can quickly read what the content is about, and make a decision to continue reading or continue their search.

Maximum Word and Sentence Count. A paragraph should generally contain less than six sentences, around 100 words. Keep the number of words in a sentence to 20. Make the first sentence of a paragraph the topic sentence that describes the rest of the paragraph.

Examples of Posts We’re Looking For

More Tips