Contributor Guidelines | Native Advertising Institute

Thank you for your interest in contributing to the Native Advertising Institute’s blog. Before submitting your idea, please familiarize yourself with the Institute, our audience and the type of guest posts we are interested in.

Our purpose

Our mission is to help publishers, agencies and brands become familiar with and master the native advertising discipline. This is the primary focus of all blog posts on the Native Advertising Institute.

Our audience

Media, publishers, and brands that engage in native advertising and branded content.

Our main topics

Your blog post must be at least 1,000 words and no more than 2,000 words. It must touch upon one or more of the topics we cover on our blog:

Native advertising and social media
Native advertising platforms and formats
Native advertising and social networks
Native advertising and design
Native advertising and video
Native advertising and user experience
Trends and best practices within native advertising

Links in guest posts

You are encouraged to include relevant links that provide value to the readers of your post. However, our editorial team reserves the right to remove and add links as we see fit. Any links to specific products and companies will be "no-follow" links. If you want to publish a post that links back to your website or product, this is considered advertising and is thus better suited for a sponsored post.

Links to the author's social media profiles and company website are allowed in the short author bio that will accompany guest posts. These are not considered advertising.

Photos and author bios

You are welcome to submit a photo to accompany your post. If you want to submit an image or graphic, please ensure that it is cropped to 16:9 with a minimum width of 1920px.

All guest submissions should also come with a photo and short author bio. Please submit a photo that is at least 500px wide and a bio that is no longer than 100 words. We reserve the right to edit the bio as needed.

Guest contributors are also welcome to include links to their social media profiles and/or professional website.

Why write for the Native Advertising Institute?

Sharing your expertise with an engaged audience of native advertising professionals is a great way to improve your profile. Your name, company, and views on native advertising will become known throughout the industry and you will contribute to the overall development of native advertising.

Our blog posts

Here are the specific types of posts we would like you to consider writing:

How-to posts:

We look for detailed posts that very clearly outline how to do something ‘native’; templates, checklists and step-by-step guides that explain a successful approach to a given task associated with the discipline of native advertising.

For example, you might want to write a blog post about “How To Make Sponsored Articles As Shareable As Possible”. Such a how-to post might include a step-by-step guide on how to optimize headlines, subheadings and images for shareability on the different social media platforms.
As another example, you could write a how-to guide about “How To Convince Your Boss That Native Advertising Is A Worthwhile Investment”. This post might explain ten figures that demonstrate why native advertising is profitable. Or five ready-made arguments that will convince any boss of native advertising’s efficiency.

The crux of how-to posts is usability. Teach the audience how to master a specific aspect of native advertising.

Best practices posts:

Our readers are always looking for best practices for native advertising. We therefore welcome blog posts that highlight the learnings and insights that you have gathered from your ongoing efforts in native advertising.

These posts should originate from your empirical knowledge of native advertising. If there is an element of native advertising that you have been involved with to a point where you can tell what works (and what doesn’t work), please share that knowledge with our audience.
You might work for a publisher that has partnered with several clients that wanted to convert their brand into fascinating content. Explain how you identify those elements of a company that make for good storytelling. Or how you convince potential clients that sponsored content is a good fit for them.

Best practices posts can also be based on industry studies or reports that you have conducted. What we are looking for is the accumulated experience of your ongoing work in native advertising transformed into actual knowledge that our audience can use.

Case studies:

If you were involved in a native advertising effort that you are really proud of, we would love to hear how you did it and why the campaign worked so well.

These are the four points that we want you to cover in a case study:

Objective: What was the specific objective of the piece of native advertising? What was the piece supposed to achieve on behalf of yourself or your client?
Strategy: What framework did you develop for the piece of native advertising and how would this structure help meet the requirements of your objective?
Execution: How did you execute your strategy? How did you make the actual piece of native advertising and what was the reasoning behind it?
Outcome: What results did your native advertising achieve?

How to submit your ideas

Before you start writing your blog post, we ask that you send an email to our editor at justin@nativeadvertisinginstitute.com. Then we will discuss the submission and set a deadline for the post.

This way we ensure that your post will be as relevant as possible.