Dropzone.com Article Submission Guidelines

Dropzone.com aims to provide its audience with quality content that is relevant and factual. We have established this style guide to help our authors produce fresh and interesting content that fulfils our users’ needs, while branding yourself as expert in your field.

About Dropzone.com

Dropzone.com is a leading publisher of enjoyable, informative, and exciting skydiving safety and industry related content. The site receives over 4.3 million page views every month, from more than 100,000 absolute unique visitors (May 2008). Dropzone.com users are passionate about skydiving; many of them have been skydiving for years, many work in the skydiving industry while others have just started their skydiving career but are nonetheless excited about learning and advancing their skills. This audience:

• enjoys practical information, clearly explained
• are eager to learn and implement your teachings
• seeks current, timely information
• expects to be addressed in a friendly tone
• wants to be respected, not "spoken down to"

Part 1 of this guide outlines what is required of content submissions to the site.
Part 2 of the document provides information about the terms governing the acceptance and publication of your article.
Part 3 outlines house styles and formatting standards for the submission of such elements as images, links and so on.

Voluntary submissions to Dropzone.com must:

• be at least 1000 words in length
• be be about safety, training, skydiving gear or general skydiving information
• avoid rehashing content that has already been covered on the site
• be submitted in Microsoft Word or plain text format—our CMS allows text only, so HTML submissions are not advisable
• avoid the use of HTML tags to indicate the formatting of text
• exemplify a reasonable amount of skill with communication in the English language
• be the original work of the author, and give full credit for any passages quoted from other sources
• not contain link/s or reference/s to the authors own business(es), unless the article is a case study
• be submitted to editor@dropzone.com along with an author bio of no more than 35 words (including link/s to your site/s) and an author headshot

Please note: We do not pay for the publication of event announcements, event reports or press releases. Presuming that they comply with the guidelines in this document we will gladly consider publishing them for you at our own discretion.

Submitting to Dropzone.com

Once we receive your submission, Dropzone.com will review it and get back to you within 7 days. If we haven't contacted you within 7 days, you can assume that we are not interested in the article. If you decide within that 7 day timeframe that you no longer wish to publish your article with Dropzone.com, simply email editor@dropzone.com to let us know.

If your article is accepted for publication on the site, we'll pay you for it. Articles that are accepted for publication will attract a minimum remuneration of US$50, which will be paid via PayPal. If the article is of a standard that allows us to publish it as the feature article on the site, you'll be remunerated up to US$100. The featured article is the top main article on the Dropzone.com home page.

In exchange for payment, we request that you give Dropzone.com unlimited, exclusive rights to the article. Dropzone.com requires complete exclusivity over the article for 90 days from its date of publication, after which time you may publish the article on your own site. Any other reproductions of the article, in any form, in part or whole, must be approved by Dropzone.com in writing before the reproduction is published.

Links

• Include links as appropriate. If you refer to another person's work, a book, an online resource, or any topic on which the reader might want more information, include an appropriate link.
• Don’t encode links into a Word document. Instead, simply paste the URL immediately before the text from which you’d like it linked.
• Do not include links to your own sites, or the sites of your clients (unless you’re writing a case study) in your article – articles that include these will be returned unread. We will provide an appropriate link from your biography information.
• Do not include affiliate links in your article – articles that include these will be returned unread.

Photos and Images

• Images associated with your article should be submitted as separate .jpg or .png files.
• Please provide the name of the photographer and a short caption for each image.
• Images should be no larger than 800 pixels wide. If you submit images that are larger than 800 pixels in width, they will be returned to you for resizing.
• Images should be no smaller than 300 pixels wide. Images smaller than 300 pixels in width will not be used and can affect whether your article are published.
• Good photos can greatly increase the chances of your article being published on the site.

Consistent Spellings

The following is a list of words that are commonly used in Dropzone.com articles, and which have several possible variations of spelling and/or capitalization. This list reflects the spellings we require in Dropzone.com articles:

• skydiving
• skydiver
• wingsuit
• the Internet
• site
• Dropzone
• Dropzone.com
• the Web
• web site, web page, webmaster