Contributor guidelines

The Teamed blog publishes practitioners, L&D leaders, and the vendors who build the tools our community uses. If you have something specific to teach, we want to read your pitch.

What we publish

One thing, taught well. The posts that work here take a problem an instructional designer, eLearning developer, or L&D leader actually has on a Tuesday afternoon, and leave the reader able to do something they couldn’t do before.

We publish for three audiences, and a good pitch names one:

Instructional designers and developers — craft, tools, portfolios, career moves.
L&D leaders — hiring, team structure, budget, measuring impact.
Tool and platform vendors — what you have learned from watching hundreds of teams work, not what your product does.

What makes a pitch work

Send us one idea, in a few sentences. We are looking for three things:

Who it’s for. “Instructional designers moving from K–12 into corporate” beats “L&D professionals.”
What they’ll be able to do afterwards. Not what the article covers — what changes for the reader.
What you’ve seen that backs it up. Your own project, your own data, your own hiring experience. Specifics are the whole reason we would publish you rather than write it ourselves.

Pitch the idea before you write the piece. We would rather shape it with you than decline 1,500 finished words.

What we turn down

Anything that reads as a product tour. Naming your tool once in context is fine; walking through its features is not an article.
General AI commentary with nothing specific to L&D in it.
Pieces assembled from other articles. If the sources are all secondary, the reader should go read those instead.
Content written primarily to place a link. See the link policy below — it is designed so this is never worth anyone’s time.
Anything that disparages a named competitor, candidate, or employer.

Links

One link, in your author bio, marked nofollow. That’s the rule, and it applies to everyone equally — practitioners, partners, and vendors.

You can name your company, your product, and your role in the bio, and link once to wherever you want readers to go. Inside the article body we link only to things that help the reader follow the argument: a standard, a study, a tool you are genuinely instructing them to use, our own research.

We don’t offer followed links, and we don’t trade them. Google treats exchanged or paid followed links as a link scheme, and the risk lands on both of us. We would rather publish you because the piece is good.

Format

900–1,600 words. Shorter is fine if the idea is done.
Subheadings every few hundred words. Most of our readers are scanning first.
American English. We say “job post”, not “advert” or “ad”.
Plain text, a Google Doc, or Markdown. Don’t send a formatted PDF.
Original to Teamed, and not republished elsewhere for 30 days after we publish.
If you used AI to draft or research any of it, say so in the pitch. It isn’t disqualifying — we write about AI in L&D constantly — but we check claims, and knowing where a number came from saves us both time.

What you get

Your name, role, company, and a photo on the byline, plus a “Guest post” label so readers know whose view it is.
One nofollow link in the bio.
A copy edit, and the final say on anything that changes your meaning.
A heads-up before it goes live.

We don’t pay for guest posts, and we don’t accept payment for them either. If that changes we will say so here.

Editing

We edit for clarity, length, house style, and accuracy. If we need to change something substantive — an argument, a claim, a number — we come back to you first. If we can’t verify a statistic, we’ll ask for the source, and if there isn’t one we’ll cut the sentence rather than publish it. That rule applies to our own writing too.

We may decline a finished draft that doesn’t match the pitch. That’s rare and we’ll tell you why.

How to pitch

Email support@teamedforlearning.com with “Guest post pitch” in the subject line. Include your idea in a few sentences, who it’s for, and a link to something you’ve written or built.

We read everything and reply to pitches we can use. If you haven’t heard back within two weeks, it’s a no this time — please do pitch us again.