Blog Guidelines
Successful guest contributions are comprehensive, data-driven, and interesting posts that teach our readers something new about how we as African-Americans see the world of medicine and helpful strategies for success in various topics. We’re interested in publishing any topic that our readers care about, which includes things like personal stories, social issues in medicine, op-eds, and advice pieces ranging from negotiating your first contract to how to study for your board exams.
We also look for a few things in everything we publish:
- Original concepts, compelling arguments, and high-quality writing.
- The article must reflect the writing style/tone of the Melanin Doc Blog. We aim to be casual, yet helpful, and typically we stay away from buzzwords and jargon.
- Proper attribution of data, quotations, and outside content referenced in the article.
The Different Post Types We Accept
Canonical/Informational: These posts give readers in-depth tactical takeaways that are supported by relevant, recent examples, original quotes, original graphics, and current data. While we don’t like to put a word count on our posts, these tend to run at 1,500 words and above. When readers finish this type of post, they should be able to immediately execute on the given topic and have very few questions left on how to do it. If we feel it’s too long or find any errors we’ll send it back to you for revisions.
Example: The Start-to-Finish Guide to Nailing Your Next PowerPoint Presentation
Opinion: These posts give readers in-depth opinion on a writer’s experiences and thoughts on a certain topic. They’re meant to inform and persuade. They can be critical but be careful to not make them overly critical. Just share your opinion without besmirching another person, company or organization’s reputation.
We prefer blog to be no more than 1000 words.
Example: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/opinion/trump-impeachment.html
Personal Story: These posts give the reader an opportunity to relate to a personal experience you had in medicine or in life! These should not be too long.
Example: https://travelnoire.com/traveler-story-travel-self-care-routine
These are just some of the examples. We accept all types of blog posts so send them in and we’ll let you know if we can publish it!
Submission Requirements
Please email guest-post to submissions@melanindocs.com with the following:
- Your completed post as a Word Doc.
- Image files (with attribution) in a separate folder. Please send at least 3 into the body of your post and a personal picture to go with your byline
- Short author bio including a maximum of one anchor text link to your own website if applicable. Can link up to 3 social media handles.
General Information
Tips for smooth blog acceptance:
- Please include a image that will be posted on the home page. We prefer images that are in landscape orientation
- Please use free stock images which can be found on Pexels.com and Unsplash.com
- Please include an author bio 50 words max
- Include a professional quality headshot
- Include your Twitter, LinkedIn, company and/or Instagram so we promote your work!
- We may edit your post or bounce it back to you for revisions
- If you see your post on our page please feel free to share it and publicize it on your social media platforms!
What We Won’t Accept
There are some things we simply can’t accept:
- Anything that’s too promotional for your company or organization.
- Anything that’s offensive or inaccurate.
- Anything that’s overly critical of individuals or companies — (It can be a little critical but don’t go overboard!)
If your article meets editorial standards and aligns with our content strategy, we will respond to let you know your article will be published. That process may take up to 2 weeks.
Due to the volume of requests we receive, we cannot respond to all submissions but we do read all posts.
Legal, not-so-fine-print stuff
The Melanin Doc blogging team reserves the right to edit and adapt your guest blog content as we see fit, and update it in the future for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
Hope to add you to the Melanin Doc Family soon!
