For Love Snowdonia’s people-powered magazine to do its job properly, I need your content!
Types of content you can send in
There are three types of content you could contribute to Love Snowdonia: photos, articles and videos – and you can send in as many as you like, from any or all categories. Let’s take a look at each of these content categories in turn.
Photos
You can have your very own gallery on Love Snowdonia (check out the example using my photos), where you can showcase photos you’ve taken of Snowdonia. Your gallery can contain as many photos as you like (within reason), plus a short paragraph about yourself (which can include a link to your website, using your preferred keywords as the anchor text). It’s worth bearing in mind that search engines very quickly pick up photos from websites, so make sure you include information about who to credit in the event that someone discovers your photos through a search engine and decides to use them elsewhere.
If you’d like your own gallery on Love Snowdonia, here’s what you need to do:
Resize your images to 600px wide and upload them to an online image hosting service where I can easily retrieve/download them (a service like Tinypic, for example).
Copy the URLs of the images and send them to me in an email. Include a paragraph about yourself, which should be no longer than 100 words. Make sure you say who is to be credited if a random visitor wants to reuse your image (if you don’t want your images reused, watermark them or don’t submit them). And make sure you indicate the URL of your website, and the anchor text that is associated with that URL. Here’s an example of how you could do this:
Joe Bloggs lives in Birmingham and visits Snowdonia every weekend. He’s a keen historian and a member of the National Trust. When Joe isn’t taking photos of Snowdonia’s historic houses, he can usually be found sat behind a desk managing his [[link: http://www.joebloggssausageemporium.co.uk]] gourmet sausages [[end of link]] factory.
Once I’ve received your email, I’ll create your gallery as soon as I can (but as I’m a one-gal band at the moment, please be patient). I’ll send you an email as soon as your gallery is live.
Videos
If you send in videos, they’ll appear as short articles in the people-powered magazine – so you’ll need to include a little bit of text (at least 200 words) to tell visitors about the video. This text could include where you were when you filmed the video; who was with you; the date you filmed it; what else you got up to that day; what you enjoyed about this activity; places or attractions or businesses you visited during your stay (you can include links to these businesses and attractions, as long as you don’t own them or work for them); and any other information you feel would be relevant. Try to make a short story or travel journal around your video, to ensure it’s interesting to anyone reading/watching.
Please do not self-promote in your article: you can do this in your ‘author biography’, which should follow the same format as the ‘Joe Bloggs’ example above. I’ll format your biography so that it looks smart and stands out – it’ll look something like this:
Joe Bloggs lives in Birmingham and visits Snowdonia every weekend. He’s a keen historian and a member of the National Trust. When Joe isn’t taking photos of Snowdonia’s historic houses, he can usually be found sat behind a desk managing his gourmet sausages factory.
To send in your video, first of all make sure it’s uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo or something similar. Copy and paste the link into an email and send it to me along with your video-article text and author’s biography. I’ll send you an email as soon as your video-article is live.
Articles
If you enjoy writing, you might like to send in some articles about Snowdonia (you can send in as many as you like – the more content the magazine has, the better it will be for visitors). You could write about any aspect of Snowdonia, as long as your article shows Snowdonia in a positive light (there are some other guidelines, which you should read before you send in your content). You could write articles about:
- Something you really love about Snowdonia, or about a particular part of Snowdonia, or the Snowdonia village you live in
- A list of your favourite things to do in Snowdonia (with details!)
- A ‘travel journal’-style piece about a day out (or a whole week’s holiday) you’ve enjoyed in Snowdonia
- A review of a restaurant, or an attraction, in Snowdonia
- A list of your favourite places to take photos in Snowdonia (with details!)
- A list of your favourite Snowdonia shops, and what you like about them
- and so on. I’m not going to be very strict about the length of your articles, other than that they should be at least 200 words long. If you want to link to the websites of some of the businesses or attractions listed in your article, that’s absolutely fine (after all, this is very useful to readers) – but again, please don’t write about your own business, and ensure you keep any self-promotion for the author’s biography as described above.
Type your article in MS Word, or Open Office, or Notepad, and ensure it’s laid out as follows:
- Title – make sure it’s reasonably descriptive of the article’s content
- Article summary/introduction/abstract – 2-3 sentences will be enough to give readers the gist of the article
- The article body – if you’re including links to attractions and businesses, include them in the article text next to the name of the business/attraction
- Your author biography, which should be up to 100 words and contain no more than two links to your business or social media profiles (use the example above as a guide)
- Links to any photos or videos you’d like us to include in the article (use a hosting service like Tinypic to upload your photos, and include the URLs and descriptions of the photos at the bottom of your article).
When you’re happy with your article and are ready for it to be uploaded, send it to me by email – I’ll let you know as soon as your article is live.
