Industry Voices: HAR's Guest Blog Guidelines

Oh hey there! Welcome to a peek behind the curtain of HAR¹. If you’re here, *high five!* Welcome to the HAR community. Community is the operative word here: We’re really excited to expand our blog to use HAR as a platform to highlight the diversity of travel industry voices.

Here's what Industry Voices is all about: It's all about YOU! HAR's Industry Voices series is all about travel professionals sharing unique experiences, personalities, interests, obsessions, and/or industry expertise. Contributions can run the gamut from personal stories (in the vein of Travel Agent Chatter) to personal opinions on industry trends, to wildly creative marketing ideas for travel professionals that only you could ever think of. We want to hear it, publish it, promote it, and shout it from the mountaintops!

Here's a list of great info we'll cover:

1. Industry Voices Guidelines
2. Steps to Submit an Idea or Pitch
3. What You Can Expect After You Submit a Pitch

Here’s What Makes Us Tick: Big Picture Stuff

First things first: if you’re familiar with our site, you already know that we’re a small crew that does big work. We follow our wild whims and we follow them all the way through. We’re a combination of creativity and pragmatism to make our ideas come to life.

Interested in joining us in our fantastic shenanigans? Fabulous. The most important thing is that you get to be yourself. We’re more concerned about originality, reader engagement, and quality than we are about you matching HAR’s writing style. Our primary aim is to highlight unique voices, perspectives, resources, and stories.

Guidelines (What We’re Looking for):

Great pitches will be on-topic, well-written, original (no plagiarism, obviously), and add value to our site (not self-promoting or otherwise spammy). Here’s more on what we’re looking for:

Any travel industry professional, peripheral player, or advocate can submit a pitch.

1. We’re looking for travel industry professionals (or industry advocates): Our site caters to advisors, but any travel industry professional, peripheral player, or advocate can submit a pitch. If you're an advisor, that great. But you definitely don't have to be! You can be a supplier BDM, a lawyer, an accountant, a professional sweater-knitter with a unique POV on trying to transition to a career in selling travel, or you can be a traveler with thoughtful insights on what you look for in an advisor. If you have something to add to the conversation that's relevant to our audience, we want to hear it!!!
2. We’re looking for diverse perspectives: HAR has a commitment to embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion on the site. My personal aim is to curate an industry voices series that reflects this commitment. At its very best, industry voices will be a prismatic expression of racial/ethnic identity, ability, gender expression, sexual orientation, class, or age. Ultimately, we're looking for travel industry professionals with a unique story to tell.
3. All writing must be high-quality and original: Do you have to be a professional writer? Absolutely not. But we want something new. If we’ve already covered the topic on our site, we suggest you find a different topic. Also, it probably goes without saying, but if some/all of the content is plagiarized or previously published we’ll reject it out of hand (even if it’s only published on your personal blog or information included in an education course you offer).
4. No links to your business or affiliate links in your content: Industry Voices is not the place to promote your business. We know, backlinks are gold. But any links you include in your post must be relevant to the content. No links to your business may be included in the body of your content unless it’s abundantly relevant to the post (know that will be a red flag for us). Absolutely no affiliate links. We will allow a link to your site in your bio. Don’t worry, our smart and very engaged readers will find you 🙂

1. If you’re Ryan Gosling, Steph will shamelessly allow you to post just about anything on our site: Ryan? Is that you? Steph has been waiting to hear from you. She wants you to know that my editorial guidelines don't apply to you. You can post your grocery list for all she cares.

Steps to Submit an Idea, Pitch, or Full Post to HAR

We’ll accept thoughtful pitches or full posts for review. It’s really easy and you can do it in two steps. Here’s how!

1. Make sure we don’t already have a blog on your topic:

We have so many great blogs on the site that sometimes I even surprise myself with what I find (yes, even if I wrote it!). To make sure you’re not repeating content here’s how you can search our site:

1. Go to Google
2. In the search bar enter, site:hostagencyreviews.com
3. Hit the space bar and enter your topic. Here’s an example: site: hostagencyreviews.com Ryan Gosling. (Like so)

You’d be surprised how many posts we have that mention Ryan Gosling!

2. Develop a phenomenal pitch or post!

We’ll have a form you can fill out to submit your pitch. In summary, a great pitch will include:

1. An introduction to who you are, your POV, and how you heard about HAR
2. A clearly communicated topic or story and how it relates to your personal experience as a travel professional.
3. How that topic or story will benefit our readers (the takeaways!)
4. Email it to Mary [at] HostAgencyReviews.com with Industry Voices in the subject line.

What You Can Expect from Us

I know, I go on and on about how awesome I want your pitch to be. But what about YOU?! What can you expect from us? Here’s what will happen after you submit your amazing idea:

1. We’ll get back to you within two weeks tops, but probably much sooner: Wow, that sounds like a long time, right?! But we want to be intentional about this process.
2. If your topic is already in our backlog of posts, we’ll let you know: We’re busy bees here. We have a never-ending scroll of ideas for our blog in our queue. We understand that you can’t read our mind, but if your topic coincides with something that’s already in HAR dugout for pieces that we want to create in-house, we’ll discuss other ways to partner or ask for a new topic from you!
3. If you send us a form email, we’ll send you a form rejection: If you're reading this, this probably isn't you. But if your pitch starts with “Dear editor” or “Hey you" or "Dear ma'am or sir" that does not bode well for your familiarity with our site.
4. We’ll follow up with the next steps: If we’re unable to use your story, we’ll tell you why. If we want to hear more, we’ll follow up with details on submitting a full (and final) draft if you haven’t already.
5. We’ll pay you an honorarium if we publish your blog post: If we publish your blog post, we’ll pay you an honorarium as a token of our gratitude for your time and talents. Not gonna lie: it's not going to make you rich (like all the other writers out there), but the HAR crew will also be added to your long list of huge fans (which I'd like to think is invaluable). :)

You're Ready to Pitch Us!

Honestly, if you've come this far, I really want to hear from you. I'm giddy with anticipation about what you have to share with us! We can’t wait to hear from you and build our online community.

You can email me your fabulous pitches or burning questions at Mary[at]HostAgencyReviews[dot]com . . . Please put "Industry Voices" in the subject line (this will bump it to the top of my inbox!)

Chat soon! 💚

~Mary & the HAR Crew

Footnotes

1. If you’re not familiar with what HAR means, it probably means that we’re not a great fit for your awesome blog! Go ahead and familiarize yourself with our site and come by again soon! ↩