Submit a guest post

Are you a researcher, a clinician, or an entrepreneur in the productivity, creativity, or mental health space? Read on if you’re interested in contributing an article to Ness Labs.

How to get your first article published on Ness Labs

We receive dozens of emails every week asking whether it’s possible to publish a guest post on Ness Labs. Almost invariably, the answer is no. Guest posts are often promotional, badly written, and of low value to the reader.

Our goal is to help our readers achieve more without sacrificing their mental health. If you think you can contribute a guest post that aligns with our mission, we would love to hear from you.

Generally speaking, here are our four selection criteria:

  • You’re an expert in your field, whether you’re an academic, an entrepreneur, a clinician, or someone who cares a lot about a relevant topic and has demonstrated it. It doesn’t matter if your expertise was attained in a formal environment or if you’re independently trained, but you need to know what you’re talking about. It means PR agents writing for a client are a big no-no for us.
  • Your guest post is about one of the topics our readers care about, such as mindful productivity, creativity, better thinking, decision making, learning, habit building, or mental health at work.
  • Your advice is based on evidence rather than just your personal opinion. We require all articles to link back to the research they refer to so our readers can dig deeper if they wish to.
  • The content is not overtly promotional. If your guest post is accepted, we will add a blurb at the bottom that features a short biography and links to your website and social media profiles, but do not submit a pitch if the whole content is focused on a specific product or designed to generate backlinks for a specific webpage.

In summary, we only accept high quality content from people who know their stuff. If you have valuable ideas to share with our audience and want to build your brand by being featured on Ness Labs, that’s great. If you want to generate backlinks to your website or if you are an agent doing link building for a client, please do not submit a pitch.

How to pitch your guest post

The first step is to have an idea that’s aligned with the kind of topics we like to explore at Ness Labs. Ideas around productivity, creativity, decision-making, learning, and better thinking are always welcome. If you’re not a regular Ness Labs reader, check out the kind of articles we publish here.

When you have an idea, just follow the following steps:

  1. Write (1) a draft title for your article; (2) a short abstract (200 words maximum) giving an overview of the concept you will explore and its significance; (3) a short biography.
  2. Send your draft title, abstract, and biography to us via the contact form (you can also upload these to a document in Google Docs or Dropbox and paste the link in the form).
  3. We will come back to you with an answer, which may be either: “this sounds like a perfect fit, let’s do it” / “this sounds great, we just have a few questions” / “this is not a good fit, please feel free to submit to other publishers or to post it on your own website”
  4. Once we are all happy, we will publish your article on Ness Labs, promote it in the newsletter that goes out to 40,000 curious minds, and share the link on Twitter to our 15,000 @ness_labs followers.

That’s it! The process is simple enough, but please make sure you fit our selection criteria before pitching a guest post.