We love it when our fans want to share their own content with the GarageSpot community! And we receive lots of article ideas and submissions each month, so thanks for that. While we attempt to review every article submission, not all fit within our editorial calendar or support our editorial mission.
Please understand that because of our stringent guidelines, there are far more articles that are rejected than accepted, so we simply do not have the time to notify those authors whose articles we’ve decided to pass on at this time. If you haven’t heard from us within a few weeks, it’s likely we’ve passed on your article, for now.
With that, here are some important editorial guidelines to consider prior to submitting your article idea:
- We want to ensure that the GarageSpot community is exposed to content from credible sources. Therefore, we require that you have some level of online presence that we can point your bio to at the end of your article (e.g., your own blog, some kind of online profile with your expertise outlined, etc.).
- To maintain editorial integrity, we do not accept articles from those with an SEO backlink agenda, advertising or marketing agencies, staff writers, or those working for a particular brand if the article is related to that brand’s own product or service offerings. We do, however, work with brands to publish unique, useful and relevant content around their offerings. Contact us for details.
- We do not publish copyrighted materials—text, images, audio or video—outside of the “Fair Use” doctrine.
- Your article headline will need to be strong and must clearly explain the intent of the article. We will not post click-bait headlines (e.g., “You Won’t Believe What Happens Next!” or “Read This Amazing Review and You’ll Win at Life!).
- We encourage the use of and may edit your article to include subheadings, bold highlights, and bulleted lists to ensure the article is easy to navigate and read.
- We prefer articles end up at around 400-600 words. For long-form articles (e.g., step-by-step how-to articles, usually with lots of images), please contact us first to discuss the topic of your article before you spend too much time developing it in full.
- Your article must be genuinely useful—always be asking, “will the GarageSpot community benefit from this?” as you’re writing or editing.
- We will not include your own affiliate links or any other form of endorsement or advertising within your article, but we may edit the article to include our own.
- Articles must be submitted as Microsoft Word documents and please be prepared to accept our request for edits or changes to the article so we can make it as successful as possible (we may go through several rounds of revisions together).
- Your final article may be edited for clarity, grammar or punctuation but please check your writing very carefully prior to submission, as we’re only willing to edit so much.
- You can include ideas/links/inspiration for imagery when you ultimately email your article to us if you don’t have any of your own images. If you do have imagery, make sure you/we have the rights to use those images. Include textual placeholders within your article that correspond to the image files (e.g., “Image123.JPG Goes Here”) and send the images as an attachment to the email when you send your article to us. We may or may not use your images—some, all or none—and may opt to use our own imagery within the article from our own sources.
- If you need to share a video with us, please post it to your own YouTube channel and make it viewable by the general public. We can grab the embed code from there. Videos must not have advertisements, annotations or any other distractions in them—at least not the versions you’re sharing with us for inclusion on our site.
If you do agree with all of the above, please send your article idea via our contact page and be sure to tell us what your idea is, why you think it’ll be interesting to our audiences, your unique angle, etc. If we’re interested, we’ll respond with further information on how to keep things moving, so you can send the actual article and any accompanying images via direct email.