Would you like to write a blog for Influence?

Want to reach fellow PR professionals by writing a blog for Influence but not sure where to start? Here's how…

Influence magazine is always looking for insightful and authoritative blogs on issues affecting the PR industry. These blogs can help raise the profile of yourself and your business, provide a platform for you to talk about an industry topic you feel passionate about or establish your name among CIPR’s 11,000 members.

Here’s our top tips on submitting a successful blog and how to make your content stand out.

Finding a subject

Can’t think of what to write? Here’s some ideas:

• Many of our blogs are pegged around a timely news story. If there’s a PR news story that has recently piqued your interest, or even a more general social or political story/event that you feel may have implications for the PR industry/professionals, then this could be the ‘angle’ your blog needs.

• An industry trend you may have observed.

• A wider business trend you have observed that you can give the comms point of view.

• A ‘how to’ piece or listicle sharing advice and tips for other PRs/comms professionals.

• Ask around your colleagues, clients, customers or other PRs if they have any comms questions they’d like answered/topics they’d like covered.

• What are you personally passionate about in the PR industry? If you choose to write about something you love (or even despise), this passion will come across in your writing.

Try not to make the subject of your blog too general; instead try deep-diving into a particular strand of this topic.

Remember: blogs are thought leadership, not an advert for your PR firm

What we want: The main guideline for an Influence blog is that it should be thought leadership relevant to the PR industry.

What we don’t want: A vehicle for self-promotion. We often get blogs which promote an agency, client or a service which reads like a sales pitch. It is sadly only interesting to the person who penned it (and their firm) and won’t pass our editorial filters.

Ask yourself: would other PRs be interested in this?

All blogs should offer real value to Influence’s readership of senior PRs/comms professionals.

Whatever topic you choose, approach it through a PR lens. Sense-check your idea to check whether it’s relevant to the PR industry.

Get personal

Influence blogs are usually written in the first-person (where the blog is written from your point of view using pronoun “I”).

Blogs written in the first-person narrative are more accessible for the reader, as they allow for a personal touch to seep through the writing.

Some tips on writing in the first-person:

• Reveal interesting information about yourself. Do you have any personal anecdotes you can share?
• Use emotive language. How do you feel about this topic?
• Using the stories of other people (with their permission of course) can help too.

Encourage debate

Be brave. Write a blog you feel could inspire debate and get people talking.

However, you don’t want your blog to read like one long rant! Instead, ensure you include a counterview to your own, such as a quote you’ve come across recently. This will help level out your argument and make it seem more balanced.

The format

Influence blogs tend to run in one of two formats:

• Running copy (a straightforward blog post that isn’t broken down into sections).

• Listicles (Seven Ways To… / Nine Things You Need to Know About…). Previous examples include:

5 ways parenting and PR skills are intrinsically linked; Calling all PRs: 7 things this editor wants you to know; and 12 tips for a long-lasting PR career.

If you’re writing a running-copy piece of thought leadership, sitting down and being faced with a blank Word document/Google Doc can be daunting.

City AM editor Andy Silvester recently gave some great advice on structuring an op-ed (prose of thought leadership) in a recent issue of Influence:

"The key to writing op-eds is to think about the way Hollywood makes movies. Just in the same way every Oscar-winning film starts and ends with an equilibrium (with some big disruption in the middle), every op-ed should follow a basic structure:
1) Here’s what’s happening right now;
2) Here’s why it’s a problem;
3) Here’s how we’re trying to fix it."

Other writing tips

• Avoid cliches and PR jargon.
• Read what you’ve written aloud when you’ve finished. Does it read how you would talk?
• Try to include recent media news stories or research on your topic within your blog. A quick search on Google News or on Influence beforehand should reveal the latest coverage related to your subject.

The word length

The ideal length of an Influence blog should be around 800 words.

Don’t defame!

Every article that appears in Influence and on our website needs to be factually correct. Please don’t libel or defame other people!

Any claims, statistics or reports should be substantiated within the copy, with a link to the verified source. (However, we don’t allow tracked links.)

Also, if you’re including quotes from other people, reproduce them verbatim (as they’re written) rather than tampering with them/adding new words of your own.

How the editing process works

The CIPR/Influence reserves the right to edit and reject any blogs. We also may ask you to make some changes too.

Ready to blog?

We’d love to hear your blog ideas, so email us a paragraph outlining your proposed blog – you might find it helpful to include a few short bullet points to explain the structure. A member of the Influence team will be in touch to find out more and hopefully give it the go ahead.

Photos

When you submitted your blog, you want to include a photo of yourself to accompany the piece, then please send it across as a hi-res Jpeg and not embedded into a Word or Google Doc.