Authors Guidelines

This page is created to help our new authors get started with contributing to the growth of this tech blog. As a multi-niche tech and tutorial blog; focusing on quality over quantity is something we’ve always admired and maintained till date.

The set of tips and guidelines contained herein will help you understand the structure of our blog, the philosophy, the contents, hierarchy, and taxonomy.

The Rules

To maintain relevancy, good contents, and quality, the set of rules below must be studied comprehensively and adhered to by all authors, contributors and freelancers working with/for 3rd Planet Techies.

1.    No Plagiarism

We own and maintain an active premium account for checking stolen post, contents and codes. We expect you to write only original articles without copying them from somewhere.

Shun all form of contents duplication including re-writing the same content for your blog or another website after a month or two.

  • Do not submit articles written for 3rd Planet Techies to other blogs as a guest post.
  • Do not re-write the articles with another title either for publishing on your blog or someone Else’s own.
  • Do not recycle contents from your blog to publish here in different titles as that will reduce our content’s quality

2.  Respect Intellectual Properties

Giving credence to the intellectual properties of others should be another vital part to consider when contributing to or working with 3rd Planet Techies.

Your news sources, image sources, codes source and sundry must be referenced in your articles whenever third party ones are being used.

3.  We Shun External Links

Linking is a vital part of blogging but could be dangerous when done the wrong way, at 3rd Planet Techies; all form of external link is prohibited irrespective of “nofollow” or “dofollow”.

News sources could easily be printed in form of text link (e.g. CNN, reuters.com, mashable etc.), same goes for download links to games, applications, software and eBooks.

Only 3rd Planet Techies in-house moderators are allowed to link to external websites.

4.  We Love Internal Links

When creating articles, it is wise to browse around to see if such topic or similar has been created in the past , you can link to our previous articles in your post if they are somehow related or similar.

5.  Good Word Count

This is a tech blog and not a content dump, as an author contributing for 3rd Planet techies, you are expected to make only unique contents even when they are researched or sourced from somewhere.

Your post should be coherent, straight to the point and at least 350 words. Videos and infographics are the only exception to this rule.

News and PR articles shouldn’t be written verbatim, only real words are expected to be in quotes, other part of the news items must be well explained and in unique words.

Sources must be referenced either within post body or at the very end of your post.

6. Featured Images

As a matter of tradition, all post must have at least a featured image. When there’s no real image for that very content, free  image directories such as flickr.com must be used to source for appropriate images.

Your featured image should be of good quality and very much related to the post.

7. Write for Humans

White spaces is very important for human readers, the same goes for paragraphing, punctuation and proper formatting. We allow only a maximum of three (3) lines for a single paragraph.

Give a line break immediately after the first period (full stop “.”) as seen in this page. Do not make your paragraph longer than 3 lines (2 lines is better while 3 lines is not frowned at by us).

Make your tutorials vast in description and simple for even a novice to comprehend.

The Structure

In addiction to the rules above, authors are expected to fully understand the site’s structure so as to be in line with the other authors and  moderators.

Our site uses “category” and “tags” to group articles.

Category:

When creating a post, you are required to pick a category that best suits the content, we advice you go with only one category and few tags.

Select “child category” without the “parent” when their two falls within same topic. (eg. top 10 games for iPhone will fall under “mobile computing” and “iPhone” category …… select “iPhone” instead of “mobile computing”).

Tags:

Tags could be anything that best suit a post, always select from the list of available tags. Create a new tag only when you are sure of writing more articles on the same.

This is to avoid having tags with only one post in them. The following tags (“editorial” “featured” and “giveaways” ) is reserved to our in-house moderators only.

You can study more on our site’s structure and taxonomy patterns by going through our Navigation Page.