Write For Us

Editorial Guidelines

Who We Write For

The ELEVATE NEXT blog serves small-to mid-size business owners, founders, and decision-makers. Every article should give the reader something they can apply to their own business. We're looking for insight, frameworks, and lessons that travel — not a profile of any single company. If your piece draws on your own experience, use it as the example that illustrates a broader point, not as the subject of the article itself.

Contributor Agreement

• Contributors must agree to our Blog Contributor Agreement before their works are published.

Originality

• Articles accepted for publication must be exclusive to ELEVATE NEXT and 100% original (or unique to our site).

• Quotes or supporting data must be properly attributed to the source (see “In-Article Links” guidelines below).

• Articles must be written by humans, not by generative AI models.

What We Don't Publish

To keep our content useful to a broad business audience, we don't accept:

• Single-company spotlights or pieces centered on the author's own business, products, or services

• Promotional or advertorial content, including "how I grew my company" personal case logs

• Articles that don't offer takeaways a reader could apply to a different business

• Content outside our suggested topics, or written primarily to place a backlink

Want your own company featured? That's something we do for clients — see below.

Looking to Feature Your Business?

Company-specific stories — your results, your transformation, your numbers — are work we produce for clients and publish as case studies, not as contributor posts. If you'd like ELEVATE NEXT to tell your company's story, reach out about working with us, and we'll talk through a case study.

Content

• Headline: Should be catchy and to the point

• SEO Description/Excerpt: Provide a sentence or two (suggest 50 words) to summarize your article and pique the reader's interest.

• Length: Target a range of 800 to 1,500 words. The absolute floor is 500 words.

• In-Article Links: Self-promotion of other author content/sites, affiliate links, and links to disreputable sites are not allowed. (Authors may submit one link to their social media accounts or website in their author bios.) An in-article link must always cite the source of any quotes and references to statistics.

• Focus Keywords: Provide at least one focus keyword applicable to your submitted article.

• Media Attribution and Alt Text: If you are providing photographs, please provide an ‘alternative text’ describing the content of the image for accessibility purposes. Stock photos from royalty-free sites such as Unsplash, Pixabay, and Pexels are accepted, but please provide a link to the photos for proper attribution. Links to stock photos from Adobe or Shutterstock are accepted and will be licensed by ELEVATE NEXT.

• Suggested Topics:

  • Digital Marketing and Public Relations

  • Brand/Reputation Management

  • Company Culture

  • Mergers & Acquisitions

  • Website Design and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

  • E-commerce, Inventory Management, and Supply Chain Management

Structure

• Titles are formatted as H1

• Subheadings should be formatted as H2, H3, etc.