Contribute to Upmarket Magazine
Add your expertise, know-how, and creative flair to the Upmarket community.
Want to contribute content to Upmarket Magazine? We’d love to have you! Here are our general tips for contributors, including how to become one.
Getting Started
We may accept one-off content or previously published content on a case-by-case basis when you email MEM to submit an item.
(Want a wild time travel experience? Here’s the Wayback Machine’s snapshot of the original submission form! Don’t use that one though :-) Email MEM instead.)
We’re particularly interested in fresh ongoing content from regular columnists. If you’d like to discuss being one of our regular columnists, email MEM and tell her what you’re interested in writing about!
In your email, include the following information:
What are you interested in writing about on an ongoing basis?
How frequently would you like to submit articles for publication?
Where can your writing be found on the web? (If you don’t have anything you can link us to, please include a few samples of your work as attachments to your email.)
What kind of content is Upmarket Magazine really interested in right now?
art as business, business as art
the connection and people-oriented side of business
how to make a business sustainable and ethical (without losing its art)
how to inspire and utilize your creativity in business
how to stay true to yourself in business
what happens when business is about meaning, not money
how to make business human
how to make business about the experience, not the transaction
How to Get Your Articles Seen & Shared
If you want your article to have a shot at being featured at the top of Upmarket’s main page, follow these guidelines closely:
Keep your article title under 80 characters.
Keep your tagline under 107 characters.
Make sure to submit a beautiful photo with a link & name as credit.
Make sure all your photos have link & name credits at the bottom of your content.
Make sure all your photos are credited to you, an artist whose permission you’ve received, public domain, or Creative Commons licensed.
Make sure at least one of your photos is high quality, gorgeous to look at, and 990x668 in dimension for the Substack feature image. Photos of people (especially headshots) can be tricky to fit well into that feature image, so submit more than one if you can.
How to find great photos:
Check out Flickr’s Creative Commons section. This link will take you straight to a Creative Commons “attribution only” search sorted by “most interesting photos,” and that’s a great place to start. (We prefer “attribution only,” but any Creative Commons license is fine as long as it follows the rules. For instance, we can use “non-commercial” images in posts as long as we’re using the image as an adjunct to free content, but not if we were creating an advertisement out of it.)
Other great photo finding options: Many contributors also like to use Wikimedia Commons or Compfight — browse and see what you like!
Photos of people are great, but make sure you stick to the 990x668 guideline — otherwise, the top of your headshot might get chopped off, which will probably make us decide not to feature that article.
Promoting your article to your peeps:
Boost our existing signals. We like to promote articles on Upmarket to Twitter and Facebook as often as we can, and we appreciate your help! We will particularly be featuring Upmarket items in our Telegram channel and attached community chat space, since Telegram is part of our AAC infrastructure in the Intuitive Network and many of our group members have more immediate access there. Please boost the signal for any and all of these posts by re-sharing, retweeting & commenting on them. (Thank you!)
Ask your fans to comment, especially when you tell your personal & professional audiences about your article. Posts with comments are more likely to keep getting comments. Likewise, think about what kind of conversation you’d like to start when you’re writing your articles, and feel free to reference previous articles and comments when you write your next piece.
Make sure you’re subscribed to Upmarket Magazine here on Substack, and encourage your contacts to subscribe as well. When your article is sent out to our list, you have a great opportunity to forward that email newsletter to your colleagues, friends, and family to ask them to boost the signal further. Doing this is a wonderful way to promote collaborative relationships and caring, human business.
Make sure you’re also on our contributors updates list — if you don’t know what that is, ask MEM and she’ll add you. We’ll send out information about how articles and columnists are doing in our platform stats, what subjects are of greatest interest, and what they can do to get more eyeballs and comments on their articles.
Publish in your own Substack account, which will be linked at the top of any article of yours that we feature on Upmarket. This way, readers can follow you back to your Substack and subscribe there as well — and people interested in your content can discover more opportunities to be in conversation with you across Substack and in more places on the internet. (The cross-post feature is a neat way to highlight your Upmarket contributions — and remember that you can restack our Notes about your and others’ work here, too.)
Be active in the article comments across the whole magazine, in addition to the comments for your articles — this will encourage more community to grow around your articles. Many of our most well-known contributors have been active commenters on each other’s articles, and the more our audience sees your name on the site, the more likely they will recognize you and click through to read your items when they see them.
Make sure to list your author page on your other web presences, wherever those are. We’ll tag each contribution with the author’s name and include a link to that author tag in the article we publish, so you’ll be able to share a list of your Upmarket contributions with others to promote your work on this platform.
Want to learn more about how to promote your work on Upmarket Magazine?
Join us in Notes on the Substack platform, and in our Substack chat each time it’s open. We’ve noticed a lot of additional oomph in attention to Substack articles coming from Substack’s Notes and Chat features, so we’re interested to build awareness using that set of algorithms together.
Follow, share, and comment at our public Facebook page for Upmarket Magazine. There are great communities of business people using Facebook to promote their offerings, and we’ve had some beautiful conversations with heart-centered professionals there. We’d love for you to be part of that, too.
Join our private LinkedIn group for Upmarket Magazine. This is where we’ll expand on strategies to collaborate with one another to highlight our work here more effectively.
Got questions?
Reach out to MEM. Email is just fine — and you can message her on Telegram, too, at t.me/MaxMorris. Whatever you’re searching for, she’ll help you locate a great solution.
View more Upmarket Magazine articles from the Start Here archive.
View more Upmarket Magazine articles from the How to Contribute archive.
View more articles by Upmarket Magazine.