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Submission Guidelines – or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Writing Cool Blog Posts
We’d like to say a few words about submission guidlines for blog posts, but first of all, we want to say thanks for all of the great contributions that we’ve received from our players recently. We’ve gotten fantastic posts that were really well thought out and very well written – so thanks again.
Without further ado, following are a few suggestions on how to write great blog posts.
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First of all, take a deep breath. Relax. It’s just a blog post.
Now that you’re cool, calm, and collected, we’d like to give you a few suggestions about what types of posts to submit. The first thing we’d like to say is that we’re not looking for sellout pieces or ’shill’ posts; you know, the kind that use ‘Full Tilt Poker’ in every other sentence. We’re looking for loose and informal articles about what brings us all together – playing poker.
On the other hand, we don’t want our primary focus to be articles on poker strategy. Let’s face it, there’s already a billion-and-one great poker books out there, and we don’t think that our blog can (or should) be a substitute for reading Sklansky’s ‘Theory of Poker’, Mike Caro’s ‘Book of Poker Tells’, and the ‘Harrington on Hold ‘em’ series by Dan Harrington.
We hope that this blog can help build a sense of community among our players, and that it can give us a chance to get together and talk about whatever comes to mind. The blog is a place where you can discuss which pros are doing well in a tournament, a hand you recently won, or how likely it is that Chris Ferguson will achieve his goal of turning zero dollars into $10,000 – or whatever.
With that in mind, we’d like to you to submit articles that meet at least some of the following guidelines:
- Well-written – While we don’t mind a few typos here and their (you know that was intentional, right?), we’re not going to publish an article that looks like it was written by your four-year-old nephew. So at least turn on spell-check.
- Well-mannered – Ok, well not actually well-mannered. Just don’t curse in every other sentence. We don’t care if you get a little risqué in a post, as long as you don’t take it to an extreme. Like, don’t call anyone a MILF or anything.
- Creative – We like to see people having a bit of fun with their articles – we want our content to be funky-fresh. Put on your thinking caps, splash a little more gin in your tonic, or listen to some Parliament – whatever it takes to bring out your wild n’ funky writing side.
- Personal – The best writing comes from the heart. So put a bit of yourself into your writing! We like to see people talking about what matters most to them.
- Original – On a similar note, we’ll give preference to all original content. While we don’t mind if you submit an article from your own personal blog, we’d prefer to see original posts. We check to see if articles are posted anywhere else on the Internet, and give preference to articles that don’t appear on other blogs. Also, we can read minds. So no matter what, we’ll know whether or not you wrote the article from scratch.
We don’t expect every article to conform to all of these rules – after all, we want our blog to be an informal, comfortable place for people to talk about what’s on their minds. However, your post should meet at least a few of these guidelines, so that we can try to make our blog as fresh and interesting as possible for all of our players.
To give you an example of one of our favorite blog posts, check out this recent post from clown. It’s got everything you’d want in a blog post… from charisma to comedy to character defamation. It’s a great example of the funky, creative, original stuff that we’d like to see people send in. Congrats to clown for sending in such a great post!
We look forward to your next submission!
