Editorial Guidelines For Submitting To epicidiot.com

These editorial guidelines are designed to help you understand what we accept and don't accept for inclusion in our article database. Before you submit to our site, we'd appreciate if you'd read this page first. :-)

1. epicidiot.com Editorial Guidelines: (CONTENT QUALIFICATIONS)
   
   To Be Qualified For Our Site, Your Article:
   
    
   • MUST BE AN ORIGINAL ARTICLE THAT YOU WROTE. If you work for an author as an employee or contractor and are submitting the article, please submit the article as if it was from the original author including his or her email address and name.
      
   • MUST NOT BE AN ARTICLE YOU RIPPED-OFF FROM THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OR BOUGHT. If you did hire a ghost writer to write your articles, you MUST have an EXCLUSIVE LICENSE that *only* allows your name to be associated with the articles produced for you. Do not waste your time or ours by buying article packs that have non-exclusive licenses as we reject those articles. Why do we do this? #1) It makes you look like a fraud because you're putting your name on someone else's works that already may have hundreds or thousands of other authors who already put their name on the exact same works and #2) We do not want more than one copy of any article in our directory.
      
   • MUST NOT CONTAIN AFFILIATE PROGRAM LINKS. See Section #3 below.
      
   • MUST BE informative and share your unique expertise. Include tips, strategies, techniques, case-studies, analysis, opinions and commentary in your articles.
      
   • MUST NOT be a press release, advertisement, sales letter, promotional copy, or blatant and excessive self-promotion or hype.
      
   • MUST HAVE proper English, spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization and sentence structure. While we know there is a variation in what is considered "proper English," we ask that you at least be consistent within your article. Your article must also be proofed and double checked for accuracy. If English is your second language -- we strongly suggest that you have it proofed by someone who has English as their native tongue before submitting your articles to us.
      
   • SIMPLE PUNCTUATION RULES: One or two spaces after each period, colon, or semi-colon; Periods should be inside of quotes; When doing "..." -- you should use only 3 dots minimum and maximum; When using dashes, use two in a row, ex: "--"; There is never a space BEFORE a period or BEFORE a comma.
      
   • MUST NOT contain pornography/adult material, hate or violence-oriented, suggest racial intolerance, advocate against any individual, have insulting-obscene-degrading tone, or contain excess profanity.
      
   • MUST NOT contain information on: hacking/cracking content, bomb creation, support for terrorism/ radicalism/ religious fanaticism, illicit drugs or drug paraphernalia, weapon/ firearms/ ammunition/ balisongs/ butterfly knives or brass knuckles, or the promotion of hard alcohol/tobacco-related products or prescription drugs.
      
   • MUST NOT contain any content that is a violation of any law, be considered defamatory, libelous, or infringes on the legal rights of others.
      
   • MUST NOT be a submission of the exact same article as one that you already submitted. Some authors have submitted the same article multiple times with only a few words changed in the body -- we reject these and ban authors who engage in this practice.
      
    
2. epicidiot.com Editorial Guidelines: (FORMAT)
    
   • TITLE: Your Title MUST Be In Upper and Lower Case Letters With The First Letter of Each Major Word Capitalized.
      
     1. If you submit your TITLE in all CAPS, we will change to "Upper and Lower Caps."
     2. It is ok not to capitalize common words such as "a" - "the" - "to" - "for" etc...unless you want to. We accept these either way.
     3. Please do not put QUOTES around your entire TITLE. This makes very little sense to us. If you want to use a quote or an apostrophe to call attention to one word or a phrase, this is ok, but the entire TITLE must not have quotes around itself.
     4. Do NOT end your TITLE with a period.
     5. Please do not submit Microsoft Word smart quotes in your title. This includes quotes, apostrophe's, double dashes, and 3 dots in a row. Replace smart quotes with standard quotes/apostrophe's/double dashes/or 3 periods in a row.
     6. Refrain from excessive repetitive punctuation in your TITLE. One exclamation "!" or question mark "?" is enough to make a point.
     7. We do not allow HTML tags of any kind in your TITLE.
     8. We do not allow spaces in your TITLE before you begin your TITLE. In other words, your TITLE should begin with the first word flush to the LEFT of the TITLE submission box.
     9. We do not allow your AUTHOR NAME or any WEBSITE URL to be in your TITLE.
     10. Please do NOT repeat your TITLE in the ARTICLE BODY.
      
   • TITLE KEYWORD RICHNESS: Your title should be "Keyword Rich." The first 3-4 words of your TITLE determines the success of the article in terms of how much traffic your article will generate...so choose the first 3-4 words wisely.
     
     Example of a Bad Keyword TITLE:

     Top 9 Ways To Acquire Fractional Jet Ownership

     Example of a Good Keyword TITLE:

     Fractional Jet Ownership - 9 Strategies to Help You Acquire Your Private Jet

   • YOUR FULL AUTHOR NAME: You must include your first and last name as the author of the article.
     
      
     1. Your AUTHOR NAME must have a First name and a Last name.
     2. We do allow "First name - Last initial" or "First initial - Last Name."
     3. We do not allow two initials for your AUTHOR NAME.
     4. Your First and Last name must begin with a Capital Letter.
     5. We do not allow company names to be your AUTHOR NAME.
     6. We do not allow email addresses to be your AUTHOR NAME.
     7. We do not allow adjectives or nouns or descriptors to be part of your AUTHOR NAME.
     8. You may NOT include your title after your AUTHOR NAME unless you hold a doctorate-level degree (Dr., MD, DDS, PhD, etc.)
     9. We do not allow religious titles before or after your name.
     10. We do not allow more than ONE author name to have an account. If your article was CO-AUTHORED, then please put the CO-AUTHOR's name in the RESOURCE BOX and we will manually add them as a Co-Author to your article BY-LINE.
      
   • ALTERNATE AUTHOR NAMES: We only allow one author membership account per human but you are allowed to have alternate author names under your account (such as a pen-name or if you are an author's assistant or manage articles for multiple different author's).
      
     1. ALL of the same rules for the FULL AUTHOR NAME above apply to the ALTERNATE AUTHOR NAMES.
     2. The AUTHOR TERMS OF SERVICE applies to any ALTERNATE AUTHOR NAMES just as it does to you directly, so be sure you have written permission to submit the articles under any ALTERNATE AUTHOR NAME that you might setup.
     3. ATTENTION AFFILIATES: We don't accept articles with affiliate links in them. With that said, PLEASE do not setup an alternate author name of the guru of an affiliate program that you want to promote.
     4. You can add alternate author names from your MEMBERS PROFILE once you are logged in to the members only area.
      
   • ARTICLE BODY: Must be a minimum of 200 words and no more than 3,500 words. For us, an ideal article size is 250-700 words.
      
     1. Please do not repeat your TITLE and AUTHOR NAME at the top of the ARTICLE BODY. We will remove it.
     2. Copyrights must be at the bottom of your article. If you put it at the top of your article, we will move it to the bottom of the article body.
     3. If you include a REPRINT RIGHTS statement in your article, it must be at the BOTTOM of your article. If you put it at the top, we will move it to the bottom. We will not accept articles that have REPRINT RIGHTS statements that conflict with our posted Author Terms of Service.
     4. If you sell hard in the ARTICLE BODY by including your URL or product pitch or blatant self-promotion, we will toss your article without notice. The RESOURCE BOX is where you get to pitch yourself or your website address.
     5. The following HTML TAGS ARE ALLOWED in the ARTICLE BODY:
         
        • <b>BOLD</b>
        • <i>ITALICS</i>
        • <u>UNDERLINE</u>
        • <br> is used to force a hard line return. Use this HTML tag to prevent our system from trying to wrap your short sentences together into one paragraph.
        • <pre> and </pre> To make a text table look right.
        • <blockquote>TO INDENT A PARAGRAPH</blockquote>
        • <XMP> and </XMP> are used to display HTML code if you want to show the HTML code but not have our system interpret your code as HTML commands.
        • <OL> and <UL> tags to create a NUMBERED LIST or a BULLET POINT list. See the Essential HTML article link below for further instructions on how to implement if this is your first time using these tags. These are OPTIONAL tags as you can always just left justify a numbered list or * asterisks for bullets and it makes your article much simplier to reprint.
        • HTML TAGS NOTE: Be sure to CLOSE every tag that you OPEN. A common mistake that an author will do is OPEN a BOLD tag and then forget to CLOSE it causing the rest of their article to look BOLDED when they didn't intend for that.
        • We do allow ACTIVE website URLs in the body of your article. Please read the section below on "WEBSITE ACTIVE LINKS / YOUR URL" for a detailed explanation of what is and is not allowed.
        
         
     6. The following HTML TAGS ARE NOT ALLOWED in the ARTICLE BODY:
        • <JAVASCRIPT> is not allowed in any form.
        • Microsoft Word Smart Quotes are NOT VALID HTML code. Do not include them in any of your HTML statements (or your article in general if you can help it).
     7. At the very END of your ARTICLE BODY, please help us by removing any excess vertical spaces and do not include any HTML tags that would create or force the creation of additional vertical spaces after the end of your ARTICLE BODY.
     
      
   • WEBSITE ACTIVE LINKS / YOUR URL: We allow a maximum of 3 "Self-Serving" Links/URLs, active or inactive, in your article. A "Self-Serving" Link/URL is a link/URL to a website that you own, control or have an interest in.
      
     1. Double check your links before submitting to be sure they work. Your article may be rejected if your website links do not work.
     2. You can use HTML code to make your link active.
     3. Microsoft Word smart quotes are never valid HTML code.
     4. Absolutely do not include break tags (<br>) or font attributes in your HREF statements.
     5. Your links may NOT contain a file to be downloaded of any type.
     6. We do not accept articles that have the same ACTIVE link more than once. Do not submit duplicate identical URLs.
     7. We do not knowingly allow any URLs in any of our articles that are banned by Google or if your website engages in questionable SEO practices -- we may reject your articles.
     8. We do not auto format URL's that are in the BODY of your article.
     9. We do not allow active links in the first sentence, first paragraph or above the fold of an article. Please put your active links in the resource box below the article body.
     10. We do not allow articles which have strategic keyword anchor text links in the body to your domain that do not add informational value to the article. If you put all 3 of the active self serving links that we allow in the body of your article, we will reject it. Any use of anchored text links to websites that you own should add value to the article topic rather than stand out as an obvious abuse an anchored text link. The goal with this policy is to be a good net citizen by only allowing articles that add value with the anchored text links rather than for pure SEO reasons.
         
         Example: Within your article, you link the word "bird dog" to an article that you wrote about bird dogging. This is a good example of an anchored text link vs. linking the same text to your home page as it doesn't really add value.
     
      
   • EMAIL 'MAILTO:' LINKS: We highly recommend including a link to your website but do not advocate including a mailto: or email link to your personal or work email account. Spammers will abuse it. Better to just include a website URL and let potential customers find your email address on your website.
     
      
   • ARTICLE SUMMARY: Every article must have a 2-5 sentence article summary. The purpose of the ARTICLE SUMMARY is to give an abstract or summary of the benefits that your article delivers.
     
      
     1. If you don't know what to put in your summary, just use the first paragraph of your article.
     2. We do not allow HTML tags of any kind in your ARTICLE SUMMARY.
     3. We do not allow blatant self-promotion in your ARTICLE SUMMARY.
     4. We do not allow your AUTHOR NAME to be in your ARTICLE SUMMARY.
     5. We do not allow any website URL or Email Address to be in your ARTICLE SUMMARY.
     
      
3. epicidiot.com Editorial Guidelines: (AFFILIATE PROGRAMS)

   Sorry, we do not allow ANY affiliate links in any articles. Please don't send them in or your article will be rejected.