Blog Guidelines for Chamber & Initiative Members

Please read and adhere to our guidelines on submitting a blog to ensure your post is successfully approved and published by the editorial team:-

The purpose of the Members' blog on www.businesswest.co.uk is to enable the sharing of valuable expertise and knowledge with a large business community across the region through original, high quality content that aims to educate, inspire and inform businesses. 

Successful submissions are detailed and valuable posts that help our visitors learn something new about business, whilst also helping contributors to raise their profile in their field of industry. 

Submissions will be approved by the Business West team before going live. We will also promote any high quality blogs to additionally appear under the main Business West blog at our Editors' discretion. 

Submissions must: 

  • Be well-written, from 400 to 2000+ words 
  • Be 100% original, exclusive to our site and not already published on other websites 
  • Not be copied to other sites (but can be linked to easily from our site) 
  • Be detailed content that provide actionable advice 
  • Include links to statistical resources referred to and any other source referenced in the content 
  • Reference links in a post are non-promotional, and relevant to the post 
  • Include 1 or 2 sentence ‘About the author’ bio with a headshot (please update your 'profile' in your online account) 
  • Consider your topic and in particular your title - ensure your article is relevant and of value to our business audience and it includes relevant SEO keywords and phrases so your article is optimised for search (ie can be found through search engines)

What we won't approve: 

  • An existing blog that has already been published on other sites 
  • Blogs considered as a link-building scheme 
  • Thin or irrelevant content providing little value to a business reader
  • Content which is all about advertising your business services
  • Blog posts that heavily promote your business (Our blog is not a sales channel, and overtly sales focused and advertorial style content will not be accepted.) 
  • Plagiarised content 
  • Misleading or inaccurate content 
  • Defamatory, abusive, offensive or excessively negative content 

Featured images

  • Purchase quality stock images which best represent your blog and business. Examples of credible stock photo libraries include Shutterstock and iStock.
  • Images will need to be landscape
  • Resize image so it is 750px wide
  • File size should not exceed 1GB
  • Image format should be either jpeg or png

Featured images: what we won’t approve

  • Images downloaded from Google – these belong to someone else and using them without permission could result in legal action
  • Images which have been used by the same author on multiple occasions
  • Images which are not representative of blog content or business
  • Images that are not of good quality
  • Image is too small or too large
  • Images that may cause offense

Business West Editors reserve the right to reject contributions at their discretion. Editors reserve the right to edit, adapt, update, and republish contributions at their discretion. Calls-to-action to Business West content may be added to published submissions. Contributed posts may be removed from the blog at Editors discretion. 

How to submit your blog content 

Login to your membership online account at www.businesswest.co.uk to access your dashboard and content management tools. You can also download the Members Website Guide that is available on your dashboard, providing details of how to use your online account & publishing tools. 

Content ownership 

By contributing content to websites and microsites owned by Business West you are granting us a license to this content. Business West retains the right to decline or take a post down; and may need to edit a post where appropriate. 

About the editing process 

All submissions will be reviewed but may not be published subject to above guidelines. Our blog is not a sales channel, therefore sales focused and advertorial style content will not be accepted. 

We retain the right to decline or take a post down, edit a post where appropriate and include links to our own services or content when relevant. Content sharing guidelines. 

If you’re here because you want to share content that you’ve found on the Business West website, that’s fantastic! We really appreciate it. 

Here are a few guidelines which cover how we’d like you to share our content: 

  • Feel free to share links to any of our content. If you’re sharing on social media you’ll catch our eye if you mention @bw_businesswest on Twitter. We can also be found on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. 
  • Feel free to republish any images or videos created by Business West. But please respect our attribution policy. 
  • Feel free to reference or quote up to 50 words of any of our content. But please respect our attribution policy. 

Content attribution policy 

  • Attribute Business West as the source. 
  • Link to the original Business West source you're referencing. 
  • For references to a Business West blog article, link to the URL of the specific blog article you're referencing

2018 v1.2

PDF icon Download the Report (282.24 KB)
  • Call the team

    Call the team directly about any Chamber service on 0800 980 2789