Contribute
How to contribute to Digital Tech Updates — the submission process, editorial standards, review stages and what happens after your article is published.
This page explains how contributing to Digital Tech Updates actually works, from first message to published URL. If you are looking for topic lists, those live on the category-specific pages linked from Write for Us. This page is about the process.
Who contributes here
Most of our contributors fall into one of four groups:
- Practitioners — engineers, marketers, accountants and founders writing about work they actually do
- Agency and in-house teams building author credibility for named specialists
- Freelance writers with genuine subject expertise, not general content writers
- Companies running disclosed sponsored placements
All four are welcome. The standards are the same for each, and the disclosure differs.
The five stages
Stage 1 — Pitch
Message us on WhatsApp or email with the subject line PITCH. Give us the headline you have in mind, three to five bullets on the substance, and a link to prior work.
What gets an immediate yes: a specific problem, a clear angle, and evidence you have solved it before. What gets an immediate no: “I’d like to write about digital marketing for your site.”
Stage 2 — Brief
When we approve a pitch we send back a short brief: target word count, the angle we want emphasised, two or three questions we want the article to answer, and any of our existing articles you should link to. Following the brief is the single biggest predictor of first-round acceptance.
Stage 3 — Draft
Send the draft as a Google Doc with comment access. Include your images as separate files, your author bio and your headshot in the same message. Drafts sent as PDFs or pasted into email body text slow everything down.
Stage 4 — Editorial review
An editor reads for accuracy, structure and clarity. Expect one of three outcomes:
- Accepted — we schedule it and send you the date
- Revise — comments on the doc, one round, usually about sourcing or a section that needs tightening
- Declined — with a reason. We do not decline silently once we have commissioned a piece
Stage 5 — Publication
We format, add images, set the featured image, write the meta description, add internal links and publish. You get the live URL. The article is promoted on our social channels and linked from related posts.
Editorial standards you are agreeing to
- Accuracy. Every factual claim must be checkable. If we cannot verify it, it comes out.
- Attribution. Statistics carry a source and a date. Quotes carry a name.
- Disclosure. If you have a commercial relationship with any tool you recommend, tell us. We will disclose it in the article, which is fine. Hiding it is not.
- No undisclosed client links. If a link belongs to a client rather than you, say so upfront.
- Human authorship. AI-assisted is fine. AI-generated is not.
What you get
- A permanent published URL with your byline
- An author page collecting everything you have written here
- A bio with one followed profile link
- Up to two contextual links in the body where they help the reader
- Promotion across our social channels
- Internal links from related articles, which is what actually drives long-term traffic to a guest post
What we ask in return
- Respond to editorial comments within five business days
- Do not republish the piece elsewhere, including on your own blog or Medium
- Share it once from your own accounts when it goes live
- Be reachable if a reader asks a technical question in the comments
Rights and ownership
You keep copyright in your work. You grant us a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free licence to publish, edit, format and distribute it, and to keep it online indefinitely. We do not claim exclusivity beyond the no-republishing condition above.
Paid and sponsored contributions
Some contributors want certainty rather than editorial selection — a confirmed date, a specific anchor, a campaign across several sites. That is a commercial arrangement and we are happy to quote for it.
Paid placements are published with a disclosure label and rel="sponsored" links. That is a requirement of Google’s spam policies, and the reason we hold to it is practical: publishers who sell undisclosed links tend to get deindexed eventually, and when that happens every link they sold stops carrying value. A disclosed link on an indexed site is worth more than a hidden link on a penalised one.
See Advertise for formats and how to get a quote.
If we decline
It is usually one of four reasons, and none of them are personal: we have covered the topic recently, the pitch was too general, the piece was clearly written to place a link, or the sourcing did not hold up. You are welcome to pitch again with a different angle.
Get started
WhatsApp: +91 9966610390
Email: admin@digitaltechupdates.com with the subject line PITCH