Guest Posting

1. Unique & useful content

We probably shouldn’t even mention this, but all submitted content must be unique, keeping in mind Google’s “duplicate content” stance. As for usefulness, a good rule of thumb would be: write content that you’re not ashamed to share or that any store owner / retail professional might find useful.

2. A minimum of 750 words

This is the only rule we’re willing to bend as long as the submitted guest post contains insightful data (i.e. case studies, new interesting tests or campaigns, downloadable resources for stores etc.) or qualifies as ground breaking news in the retail world. Otherwise, we wish to limit cookie-cutter articles that were hastily written just for the sake of an extra link. We’re sorry, but we get those a lot and we’ve put in too much work to let other people treat this community as a dumping ground or a Facebook feed.

In case you want to publish a new store design or a creative idea, please consider the Design Submission page. We will still link to the desired location and promote it as if it were our own content.

3. Check existing Zen Merchandiser content

Please check existing content on ZenMerchandiser.com to ensure you’re not submitting an article that’s too similar to one already published or of “lower substance”. For example, it would be useless to submit “15 jewelry store merchandising tricks” if there’s already an article that covers “40 Jewelry Merchandising Tips, Tricks & Best Practices”.

4. Stick to the recommended topics

As specified in our Guest Posting Program page, please stick to the existing topics and try to make sure your guest post is relevant to retail professionals and/or business owners. We are not looking to expand the number of topics under which we publish content on Zen Merchandiser at the moment.

5. Only relevant / useful links

Feel free to link to any relevant resources and services around the web as long as you make sure the links are safe, relevant to your article and useful to the readers. Keep in mind that due to our internal guidelines, we will check each link and in time we may (temporarily) remove them if the pages they link to are broken (i.e. error 404, 500 etc.).

6. Authorship implied & required

As for your author box & description, we actually advise you to link towards your personal blog / company / product as long as you do not insist on having extremely specific anchor text. Our website is already setup to use proper authorship tags, so you can safely attribute this content to your personal brand.

7. Avoid affiliate links (only for new writers)

Although we use affiliate links from time to time, we do not allow this on new guest posts in order to keep away all sorts of spammers that waste our time. After your second published article on Zen Merchandiser, this rule does not apply anymore and affiliate links may be introduced to previous articles.

8. Other useful information:

a. Feel free to include graphics/images as long as you don’t violate any copyright laws. b. Feel free to include videos / presentations / downloadable content (only in the form of PDFs). c. You must be available to respond to relevant comments. d. You must proofread your guest post.

Optional: Try to collaborate with us

Last but not least, please understand that our goal is to provide a great experience to our visitors and keep the coming back for more quality content. That’s why we’re open to collaborations for various guides and resources that might not fall under the “guest post” title. In exchange for your time invested in Zen Merchandiser, we will do our best to promote you or the company you represent through additional means (other than just the author box links).