Our Blog: Guest Post Guidelines

Do you want to write an article for the PM.FAM Blog?

We know that your content would be great to share with the Project Management Family. To fully get value from your contribution you have to follow these guidelines and, after a brief review by the PM.FAM, your article will be published.

Rule #1, Post Content

Your article must be in italian or english and has to fit in with PM.FAM blog themes. It must be on Project, Portfolio or Program Management, not necessarily in a strict or academical sense. You can refer (or get inspired by) any well recognized standard and/or methodology (PMBoK, PRINCE2, Agile - Scrum, XP, Lean, etc. -, ISO 21500:2012, PPMC and so on). Our lives are themselves made by projects, portfolios and programs, so we encourage you to write articles that show how to apply managerial disciplines to any new, non-conventional or non-professional scenario.
Rule #2, Post Lenght

Your article must be detailed. What we mean by detailed is that your post needs to be at least 500 words with no fluff. You can always make an article meatier by adding details and steps, so why not take an extra hour and write a better blog post?
Rule #3, Only Unreleased Posts

Your article must be original and unreleased. That is, your post must be not previously published either on the Web (including your personal blog) or in printed version.
Rule #4, Content Ownership

We need to fully own guest contents. So you agree not to publish your guest post anywhere else. As a guest author you may, however, (and we hope you'll do it) link your guest post from your own site/blog/social update, possibly adding a tease or summary. We are proud to let you showcase your masterpiece.
Rule #5, Links and other stuff

We are not afraid of links contained in your post. This could be a tricky part about evaluating guest posts. Some blogs are known for removing all links while other ones like keep almost every link you add. We will let you link out as many times as you want to as long as those links are benefiting our readers. It doesn’t matter if those links go to your site or even our competitors’ site. As long as these links help educate our readers, people will want to read our blog. We will remove only those links that don’t benefit readers. As a general guideline to follow:
- Your bio (max 80 words) should only contain 1 or 2 links - either to your website/about page, Twitter handle, or your blog
- Your post should contain a minimum of three links. We don't have a maximum number of links that should be in a post, but we do have a minimum. Because people have written blog posts on almost every topic out there, so instead of repeat the same old information, link out to the sites that have already covered it.
Last but not least: images tell a story without words. So add evocative and pertaining images to your article.
Rule #6, Post Review and Publishing

We want to present your content as best we can. So we will copyedit your post for (unlikely) grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc. We will adapt your post to the web page format and we will add images (main image and a 150x150 px thumbnail for footer and sidebar lists). We will email a link to you for preview and approval before publishing. You could provide a brief introduction and/or conclusion to your post to set the context and main message of the article. Otherwise we may provide that for you.
Rule #7, Post Submission

If your post meets the previous rules.
- Email us your candidate post, in english or italian, at blog@pmfam.com. We usually respond within 2-3 days.
- Please include a short bio (max 80 words) to be visualized after the post, along with your eventual blog address and Twitter account.
- Please include the post in the email body. Please, do not include it as an attachment. Please do not include HTML coding.
Even if a guest post is good, it doesn’t mean we will publish it. The content needs to be great! We have to believe in the post because if we don’t, our readers won’t. No matter how good you are as a writer, we don’t accept content we don’t believe in. Let's make an example:
If you propose a post on how active stakeholder engagement is useless in agile project management, even if you are a well-known methodology expert we likely won't publish it because, as agile project managers, we strongly believe that stakeholder engagement is powerful and everyone should practice it.
If we'll decide to not publish your post, you are obviously free to publish it wherever you want.
Rule #8, Contribute to Our Community

Our favorite part about blogging is building a PM community. It is a community that reads our contents, learns from it, and contributes by commenting. In many cases, members’ contributions can teach us things that we never knew before. So, we need you to contribute to it, not just through blog content, but also through replies to comments. Any time someone comments on a post you write, you need to respond to the comment. It doesn’t matter if they write just a simple reply as long as they acknowledge that someone has commented and respond to it. We want to encourage more people to come back to our blog, which not only helps with social sharing and traffic, but it also helps with creation of brand evangelists.
Ask for info or send your post

Send us a mail at blog@pmfam.com.