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Write for Own Business Day - campaign archive

Own Business Day - campaign archive is read by shop owners, independent traders, founders and the people who work alongside them across Europe. They come here for practical accounts of running a business: what changed, what it cost, what worked and what did not. Many of our readers are too busy to read anything long that does not earn its place, so we look for contributions that speak plainly about the realities of small trade.

If you write for us, your piece sits in a permanent archive that people return to when they are weighing up a decision of their own. A good contribution gives our readers something they can act on, and it puts your name and your thinking in front of an audience that cares about the same things you do.

What we publish

• Retail: shopfront and online selling, stock, pricing, footfall, staffing, seasonal trade.
• Small business operations: tax, invoicing, insurance, suppliers, premises and the everyday admin that keeps a firm running.
• Entrepreneurship: starting up, taking on a first employee, growing without borrowing, or closing something that no longer works.
• European trade: selling across borders, customs, VAT rules, local regulation and what differs from one market to the next.
• Money and margins: cash flow, costs, funding and the numbers behind a small operation.
• First-hand accounts from owners and managers, including the mistakes and what they cost.

Guest posts and sponsored articles

We accept contributed editorial and sponsored placements. A guest post is written by you and edited by us; a sponsored post is paid for and published on the same terms. Both are permanent and indexed, and both stay in the archive once published. Editorial links in contributed pieces are dofollow. Sponsored posts are disclosed where the law or the platform requires it, and we mark them clearly for our readers.

Pricing is on request, since it depends on length, topic and placement. Our usual turnaround from accepted draft to publication is three to five working days. If you would rather submit an article that has already been written, send it in full and we will tell you quickly whether it fits.

Guidelines

• Original and unpublished elsewhere, including your own site and social accounts.
• 800 words or more. Longer is fine if the subject carries it.
• One or two relevant links at most, to sources that support the piece.
• No gambling, adult or pharmaceutical content, and nothing that misleads our readers.
• An author bio is optional. If you send one, keep it to two or three sentences.
• We edit for house style, clarity and length. We will not change your argument.

These are our contributor guidelines rather than a contract. If a piece sits outside them but is worth reading, we will say so and we will work out how to publish it.

How to pitch

Email guestpost@own-business-day.com with a subject line like "Guest post: how we cut stock waste in a small bakery". Include a short outline of what you plan to cover, roughly how long it will be, and a link to past work or a published piece of yours. You can also write to guestpost@own-business-day.com if you have a question before pitching. We read everything and reply to pitches we can use, usually within a few working days.

Send pitches, drafts and questions to guestpost@own-business-day.com.