These editorial guidelines are designed to help you understand what we accept
and don’t accept for inclusion in our article database.
An e-mail message with the article as an attachment to Your Training Edge should
be sent to editor@yourtrainingedge.com. Use “Submission” as the subject in the
email address block. The message should include (1) the author’s name, (2) the
title of the article, (3) an abstract of no more than 150 words, (4) any
relevant information about the author, including institutional affiliation,
mailing and e-mail addresses, and (5) a photo of the author for inclusion in the
author bio.
Before you submit to our site, we would appreciate if you would please READ this
page first.
To Be Qualified For Our Site, Your Article:
a. 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. This should also be an article targeted towards our readers (training and development professionals).
b. MUST NOT BE AN ARTICLE YOU RIPPED-OFF FROM THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OR BOUGHT (PLR).
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. 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.
c. MUST BE informative and share your unique expertise. Include tips,
strategies, techniques, case-studies, analysis, opinions and commentary in your
articles. We do not accept articles that contain more than 5 lines of quoted or
sourced material.
d. MUST NOT be a press release, advertisement, sales letter, promotional copy,
or blatant and excessive self-promotion or hype.
e. 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.
f. 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.
g. MUST NOT contain: pornography/adult material, hate or violence-oriented,
suggest racial intolerance, advocate against any individual or group, have
insulting, obscene, degrading tone, or contain profanity.
h. MUST NOT contain information on: Hacking/cracking content, bomb creation,
support for terrorism/ radicalism/ religious fanaticism, illicit drugs or drug
paraphernalia, steroid use or advocacy, weapon/ firearms/ ammunition/ balisongs/ butterfly knives or brass knuckles, or the promotion of hard
alcohol/tobacco-related products or prescription drugs.
i. MUST NOT contain information that promotes: Term papers or essays for sale to
college students, PLR (Private Label Rights) articles as a good thing (it’s
not), the promotion of email Safe-Lists as a good thing (it’s not) or bulk email
spamming as a good thing (it’s not), advocacy for paid auto-surf programs as a
good thing (it’s not), advocacy of click fraud or clicking on Adsense ads as a
good thing (it’s not), advocacy of creating MFA’s (Made For Adsense) sites as a
good strategy (it’s not), or advocacy of Adsense Arbitrage (this policy is
created to protect our advertisers interests).
j. MUST NOT contain any content that is a violation of any law, be considered
defamatory, libelous, or infringes on the legal rights of others.
k. 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.
l. MUST NOT include a reply to a personal email, letter or other correspondence.
m.MUST NOT contain excessive and/or bolded keywords/ phrases. Bolding is limited to headings and subheadings.
2. Your Training Edge Editorial Guidelines: (FORMAT)
a. ARTICLE TITLE:
i. Your Title MUST Be In Upper and Lower Case Letters With The First Letter of
Each Major Word Capitalized.
ii. We will not accept your TITLE in all CAPS.
iii. It is not required that you capitalize common words such as “a” – “the” –
“to” – “for” etc, we accept these
either way.
iv. We do not accept QUOTES around your entire TITLE.
v. Do NOT end your TITLE with a period.
vi. 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.
vii. Refrain from excessive repetitive punctuation in your TITLE. One
exclamation “!” or question mark “?” is enough to make a point.
viii. We do not allow HTML tags of any kind in your TITLE.
ix. Your TITLE must begin with the first word flush to the LEFT of the TITLE
submission box.
x. We do not allow your AUTHOR NAME or any WEBSITE URL to be in your TITLE.
xi. Your TITLE must not be keyword stuffed (too many redundant keywords used
over and over again), but rather should read as a natural language TITLE that
any human could easily appreciate. Do not over-optimize your TITLE please.
xii. We do not allow Prescription Drug names in the title of your article.
xiii. We do not accept One Word as the article TITLE, a MINIMUM of two unique
words is required.
xiv. We do not accept articles that use slang terms or profanity in the TITLE.
xv. We do not accept articles that do not deliver on the article title. You must
deliver in the article body on the promises made in the article title.
b. 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
AUTHOR NAME:
i. YOUR FULL AUTHOR NAME: You must include your first and last name as the
author of the article.
ii. Your AUTHOR NAME must have a First name and a Last name.
iii. We do allow “First name – Last initial” or “First initial – Last Name.”
iv. Your First and Last name must begin with a Capital Letter.
v. We do not allow company names to be your AUTHOR NAME.
vi. We do not allow email addresses or URLs to be your AUTHOR NAME.
vii. We do not allow adjectives or nouns or descriptors to be a part of your
AUTHOR NAME.
viii. You may NOT include your title after your AUTHOR NAME unless you hold a
master(or higher) level degree (Dr., MD, DDS, PhD, MBA, CFA, PM, etc.)
ix. We do not allow religious titles before or after your name.
x. In order to include a Co-Author you must first list them as an authorized
Alternate Author on your submission.
xi. We do not allow numbers to be included in your Author Name.
c. ARTICLE BODY:
i. Must be a minimum of 750 words and no more than 5,000 words. For us, an ideal
article size is 750-1,250 words.
ii. Please do not repeat your TITLE and AUTHOR NAME at the top of the ARTICLE
BODY.
iii. 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.
The following HTML TAGS ARE ALLOWED in the ARTICLE BODY:
<b>BOLD</b>
<strong>STRONG</strong>
<i>ITALICS</i>
<em>EMPHASIS</em>
<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 simpler to reprint.
HTML TAGS NOTE: Be sure to CLOSE every tag that you OPEN. Common mistakes that
an author will make are to 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.
iv. The following HTML TAGS ARE NOT ALLOWED in the ARTICLE BODY:
<p> and </p> are not allowed anywhere in your article. To
accomplish the same thing as the <p> tag, just make sure there is one vertical
space between each of your paragraphs. Our system interprets vertical spaces
between paragraphs as an indication that the paragraph has ended and we insert
behind-the-scenes the <p> tags so you don’t have to.
<JAVASCRIPT> is not allowed in any form.
<IMG SRC> Image tags are NOT allowed.
FONT SIZE changes or COLOR tags are NOT allowed.
<H1>, <H2>, <H3>, etc. tags are NOT allowed.
The <HR> horizontal line tag is NOT allowed.
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).
v. Please do not submit articles with excessive HARD LINE BREAKS. A hard line
break is when you use the HTML <P> or <BR> tag to force a carriage return rather
than allowing each line to wrap naturally. We may either reject or convert any
articles that are sent in with hard line breaks. It’s ok to force a hard line
break when you’re making a small list of items but it’s not ok to arbitrarily
force hard line returns on every single line at a certain character width.
vi. We do not accept articles that use any ALLOWED HTML in the article body that
is not relevant to a specific heading, subheading, or defined text.
vii. 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.
viii. Your article MUST be single spaced, MUST use appropriate paragraph breaks,
and MUST use correct formatting for bulleted or numbered lists. We will not
accept articles that are not single spaced, that do not use paragraphs to
appropriately break up the body text, or that provide bulleted or numbered lists
that are not formatted correctly.
d. WEBSITE LINKS/URLS There is a total limit of (4) active or inactive links
allowed in the article, which consists of both the BODY and the RESOURCE BOX.
i. Maximum of (2) “Self-Serving” active or inactive
links/URLs to a website that you own, control, or have an interest in.
ii. Maximum of (2) active or inactive non-self serving
links/URLs to a website that you do not own, control, or have an interest in
which adds value to the article.
iii. Confine your self-serving links to your RESOURCE BOX.
iv. We do not accept articles with active or inactive links
in the first 1-3 paragraphs. Please put your active links in the resource box
below the article body. The article BODY is your “GIVE” and the RESOURCE BOX is
your “TAKE.”
v. We do not accept links that use HTML to add style
attributes to the link, URL, or text link description.
vi. We do not accept links formatted with Smart Quotes by
using MS WORD.
vii. We will auto format valid URLs included in your RESOURCE
BOX.
Example of an invalid URL:
Your-Company-Name.com
www.your-company-name.com
Example of a valid URL:
http://Your-Company-Name.com/
viii. We will NOT auto-format URLs that are included in
the BODY of your article.
ix. Your links MAY NOT contain a file to be downloaded of any
type.
x. 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.
xi. We do not accept articles that have the same ACTIVE link
more than once. Do not submit duplicate URLs.
xii. 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. 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 of
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. Please limit your anchor text link length to 3 words.
Example: Within your article, you link the word “bird watching” to an article
that you wrote about bird watching. 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.
xiii. If you put both of the active self serving links that
we allow in the body of your article, we will reject it.
xiv. We will not accept articles with links (in the Article
Body or Resource Box) to adult-oriented websites, including but not limited to
websites that include pornography, adult-oriented sexual content.
xv. We do not allow links to websites that are under
construction. Websites must be active and have content in order for you to link
to them from your article. We will reject your article if it contains a link of
this nature.
e. 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. It’s better to include a valid
website URL and let potential customers find your email address on your website.
f. KEYWORDS: Adding the top keywords related to your article helps us to
bring more traffic to your article.
i. Please make sure you put a comma between each KEYWORD.
ii. Ideally, your keywords should be optimized based on the
most commonly searched keywords as published by Google.com for your particular
niche. It helps to use a good keyword research tool to help you determine which
ones are best to use.
iii. You should have a minimum of 4-5 keywords and a maximum
of 25.
iv. We do not accept keywords that are completely unrelated
to the content of your article.
g. SUMMARY: The purpose of the ARTICLE SUMMARY is to give an abstract or
summary of the benefits that your article delivers.
i. Every article must have a 2-5 sentence article summary and
not exceed 200 words. If you don’t know what to put in your summary, just use
the first paragraph of your article.
ii. We do not allow HTML tags of any kind in your ARTICLE
SUMMARY.
iii. We do not allow blatant self-promotion in your ARTICLE
SUMMARY.
iv. We do not allow your AUTHOR NAME to be in your ARTICLE
SUMMARY.
v. We do not allow any website URL or Email Address to be in
your ARTICLE SUMMARY
h. CATEGORY:
i. ARTICLE CATEGORY or SUB-CATEGORY: Please choose the best
category or sub category based on the theme of your article and not the theme of
your business. Here are some general hints on how to select the best category
for categories that are often confused.
3. Your Training Edge Editorial Guidelines: (AFFILIATE PROGRAMS):
Affiliate links are NOT allowed.
Any article with an affiliate link will cause the article to be rejected.
