Write for Us

 

We publish practitioners, not content mills. If you have run the campaign, built the tool or served the clients, we want to read your pitch.

Last updated: 20 September 2026

 

20 Minute Marketing teaches small business owners how to do their own digital marketing. Our readers are owner-operators: time-poor, budget-conscious, and looking for something they can act on this afternoon. We publish across three market sites, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, and every article is written or edited by a practising Head of Digital.

If you are a brand looking for a sponsored placement rather than a contributed article, skip to Sponsored and Paid Placements below.

 

Who We Publish

Practitioners. People who have done the work and can show what happened. You do not need a following, a byline history or an agency behind you. You need something real to say and the numbers to back it up.

 

What We Are Looking For

• A campaign you ran, with the results attached.

• A tool or workflow you built, and what it actually changed.

• A mistake that cost you money, and what you would do differently.

• A comparison you did the work on, rather than one assembled from vendor websites.

• An explainer on something genuinely difficult, written so a business owner can follow it.

 

What We Are Not Looking For

"What is SEO?" Nine tips for social media. Ten reasons your business needs a website. Anything that could have been written without leaving the browser tab.

If the draft reads as though it was assembled from the first page of search results, we will send it back.

 

Editorial Guidelines

Content standards

• Original and exclusive. Not published elsewhere, and not syndicated afterwards. We check before publishing.

• 1,200 words minimum.

• First-hand experience, specific numbers, named tools and real screenshots. One concrete example is worth three paragraphs of definition.

• Written for a small business owner who has twenty minutes, not for a keyword tool.

• AI assistance in drafting is fine. AI-generated filler is not. Padding, generic advice and invented statistics are rejected without a revision round.

House style

• Australian and New Zealand spelling on our .com.au and .co.nz sites, US spelling on our .co site. We handle the localisation.

• No em dashes or en dashes anywhere. Use commas, colons or parentheses.

• Sentence case headings. H2 for sections, H3 beneath. No H1 in the body.

• Paragraphs of three sentences or fewer.

• Every numeric claim needs a source, linked to the primary source rather than to a summary of it.

• A Quick Answer block of 40 to 60 words sits under the introduction. We add the FAQ schema.

Links

• Up to two links to your own site: one in the body, one in your author bio.

• Anchor text must be branded, a naked URL, or a natural partial match. We do not publish exact-match commercial anchor text.

• Destination pages must be live, indexable, on the domain you told us about, and not sitting behind a redirect chain.

• We will add two to five internal links and at least one authoritative external citation to every article.

Images

• One featured image at 1200 by 630 pixels, plus in-body images where they explain something.

• Supply them licensed, or we will source them. Annotated screenshots beat stock photography every time.

 

Rights and Permanence

• You keep copyright in anything you write. We hold an exclusive licence to publish it.

• Published articles are permanent. We do not remove them, and we do not quietly change a link's attributes later. The exceptions are where the law requires it, or where a destination becomes malicious, deceptive or defunct.

• We may edit for style, accuracy, length and search performance. Substantive changes go back to you before publication.

• We may update the article over time, including refreshing statistics, the year and internal links. Your links stay exactly where they are.

 

What We Do Not Accept

Categories. Gambling and casino, adult, CBD and cannabis, crypto and forex trading, essay writing and academic assignment services, payday and short-term lending, prescription pharmaceuticals, vaping, weight loss supplements, multi-level marketing, and anything selling guaranteed search rankings.

Practices. Exact-match commercial anchor text. Links to private blog networks or thin affiliate pages. More than two links to one domain in a single article. Requests to remove or hide a sponsored label. Bulk orders of near-identical spun drafts. Cloaked or redirect-chained destinations. Requests to backdate an article.

 

Sponsored and Paid Placements

We run a limited number of paid placements each month across our Australian, New Zealand and US sites: guest posts, link insertions and full sponsored features. Inventory is capped at four paid placements per site per month, and category exclusivity is available.

All paid placements are clearly labelled as sponsored, in line with our obligations under Australian, New Zealand and United States advertising law.

For current rates and availability, email [email protected] and we will send the rate card through.

 

How to Pitch

Send us the following. It takes about ten minutes and it is the fastest way to a yes.

• Three headline ideas.

• One paragraph on each: the angle, and why you are the person to write it.

• A link to something you have published before, anywhere.

• Which of our three sites you are pitching, and why that market.

Please do not send a finished draft with your first email. We would rather shape the angle with you than reject 1,500 words you have already written.

 

What Happens Next

• We reply to every pitch within five business days, including the ones we turn down.

• If we say yes, you get a brief confirming the angle, the word count and the deadline.

• One round of revisions is included.

• On publication you get the live URL, and we will let you know once the page is indexed.

 

Contact Us

Pitches, questions about these guidelines, and rate card requests all go to the same place.

20 Minute Marketing

[email protected]