Thank you for your interest in contributing to the Un-Self-Help Blog.

Our mission is simple: learn to be better humans and increase the total tonnage of happiness in the world.

If you are psyched about contributing to our blog, we are psyched to have you. Just make sure that you keep in mind our guiding principles. There are millions of self-help books and blogs and we want to make sure that our posts:

1. Provide evidence-based information that has been researched and tested and deliver it in an easy-to-understand way.
2. Make it fun and easy for readers to take meaningful action.
3. Take the self out of self-help and consider how to incorporate other people into the equation.

Oh ya, there’s one more core principle.

Bonus Core Principle

I was psyched to hear a Google employee give a keynote speech at an internet conference a few years ago. You probably already know that Google hires smart people. Really, really smart people.

The advice that this brilliant, analytical, and thoroughly researched Googler gave me changed Noomii forever.

“The trick to being massively successful on the Internet,” he said, “is to not suck.”

So this super-smart, multi-Ph.D. Google guy’s advice is: “don’t suck”. Come on, really?

He showed examples of companies who made big and obvious blunders with their marketing and advertising and it was clear that in every case, the error was not related to lack of intelligence. The error was due to a lack of caring.

The person or team responsible for the marketing was clearly just going through the motions. They weren’t thinking about the customers.

They just didn’t care.

Here’s Your Chance to Show You Care

If you are going to contribute to our blog, we need you to give a hoot.

We need you to care about who will read your article and how they will use it.

We need you to genuinely want to help other people, otherwise stop reading and go watch TV.

What To Do First? Pitch us Your Title.

Before you invest a bunch of time and energy on writing your article, start by pitching us one or more article titles. When you come up with a really great title, the article will practically write itself.

To ensure that we give you a resounding YES to your suggested title, do two things:

1. Get familiar of the challenges that our customers are dealing with on a daily basis and investigate ways to solve them,
2. Go to Jon Morrow’s blog and download his 52 Headline Hacks downloadable PDF. It’s awesome and will give you plenty of excellent ideas!

Go ahead, pitch us an article! Fill in the form at the end of this page.

Now that You have a Killer Title, What Next?

Deliver great content.

We won’t publish all the articles that come our way – even if the title is super awesome. In addition to following our core principles, ensure that you do the following:

• Write as much as you need to: We don’t have a minimum or maximum length. What’s more important is that your article says everything it needs to say … and nothing more.
• Check your spelling and grammar: We may edit your content to make the messaging better but we don’t want to fix stoopid speeling arrows and unnecessary mistakes you’re grammar to.
• Write for the web not your thesis: Okay, fine. Despite the previous point, you can use questionable grammar that might make your Grandma Prude (I mean Gertrude) cringe, such as short one-word sentences and even shorter paragraphs. Colloquial language works too, eh.
• Use bullet points and lists: Like this one. Attention span. Gnat. No read. Scan.
• Include photos and illustrations: Creative commons is our friend. If you are as talented with a camera, sketch pad, or illustrator as you are with a word processor, then you have my undying praise.
• Reference the research: If books, research papers or other websites influenced your work, please reference them. Give credit to those who worked hard to provide you with quality information. And just like your mama told you, don’t steal.
• Be you: Let your voice and personality come through.