Publishing Rules
(please read carefully before publishing your first article)
Thank you so much for your interest in publishing your articles on The Open Mic, friend. We are always looking for great writers and contributors.
The main mission of our community is to share knowledge, best practices and promote the image of our profession.
Our audience is growing and evolving over time and now it consists mainly of freelance professionals (translators, interpreters, localization experts, etc), as well as potential clients and people who’re looking for professional translators.
As of January 2017 the number of monthly site visitors is around 6,000 people. You can actually view our site stats in real time on this page (you’ll need to have a Google account to get access).
The Open Mic is very popular in USA, Italy, UK and Spain.
The driving force of The Open Mic’s success and popularity is articles published by the amazing members of our community.
Every single translator registered on The Open Mic can submit their articles and we do our best to review and publish them and even offer free promotion to all articles by actively sharing them on social media and with our mailing list.
Since we have a large reader base who have very high expectations when it comes to the quality of our content, we’d like to establish a few ground rules to make the reading experience enjoyable for all members of our community.
Please read these rules very carefully. If your article violates any of those rules it may be rejected and it won’t be published on The Open Mic.
Publishing Rules
- Do not publish an article to actively promote your brand, company or services. It’s ok to mention your company very briefly, however stories with excessive self-promotion won’ be published. We also can’t publish articles that promote your book, software and any other digital or physical goods and/or services. If you want to feature your product on our platform, get in touch with us to work out a paid promotion.
- We do not publish articles written by translation agencies for the purpose of promoting the services of these agencies. No posts promising cheap, fast, reliable translation services etc. will be published on The Open Mic. We’re here to promote the work of our fellow translators and peers and won’t tolerate content that puts quick self-promotion first over the quality and usefulness of content.
- Focus on the value and serve the audience. Ask yourself these questions: is this article for translators or translation buyers? What value does it provide to the target audience?
- Do not plagiarize. Do not steal ideas of other people. Your article has to offer a unique point of view.
- Write like a human. Although Google loves content, we write articles that were intended for humans, not robots. Feel free to share your personal views, add a dash of humor here and there, use images and cat gifs, embed videos, music tracks and tweets.
- Do not publish SEO-focused articles. We love SEO, but we don’t like black-hat tricks. We won’t publish articles that are stuffed with keywords instead of telling an interesting story or offering an unbiased opinion.
- Do not post links to fraudulent sites.
- Your article should be at least 500 words long. If it’s too short you could try posting on our forum instead.
- You can republish articles from your personal blog and even add a canonical URL, but be sure to post the full copy of your article. You cannot publish a short summary with a link to your original article. All articles from your blog should be republished in full and include all the images and other media that you used in the original article.
- Make sure your Open Mic profile is 100% complete before publishing your articles. People might want to view your profile or send you a message after they read your article, so make sure your profile is complete and don’t forget to upload your profile picture.
- Do not publish articles to post jobs. You can use our directory or job posting feature for that.
- Proofread your articles. If English is not your native language, we recommend working with a proofreader. If you don’t have one, we highly recommend Jesse.
- You can publish your article in your native language only if it’s accompanied by a professional translation into English.
Republishing from Your Personal Blog
We also accept blog posts that were originally published on your personal blog. This kind of content syndication is great for your blog’s SEO because we don’t cannibalize on your SEO rankings and allow you to add a canonical URL that links back to you original blog.
You can even automate the entire process of republishing by connecting your blog’s RSS to your Open Mic account through Zapier. You can learn more about it in this video:
Final Notes
Once you submit your article for review our team of moderators will review and publish it on The Open Mic. Once your article is published, we’ll send you a message on The Open Mic. Please note that we reserve the right to refuse publishing at our own discretion and without any explanation.
If for some reason your article hasn’t been published and it’s been more than 24 hours feel free to send us a message by opening a support ticket.
