Our platform serves chief information security officers (CISOs) and other cyber security leaders at mid-size and large organizations in the Netherlands.

Please note that the following contains a lot of do’s and don’ts – please do not be put off by them, we always look forward to receiving interesting content from individual cybersecurity specialists and security providers. Adhering to these guidelines will help you get your content accepted faster and without hassles.

Target group

Please keep our audience in mind when writing your contribution. Ensure your text matches content and language with decision-makers at the C-level, who do not necessarily have a heavy technical background.

Are you writing on behalf of a vendor? It is good to remember that from the perspective of a decision-maker, the vendor usually plays a supporting role. A provider that positions itself at the forefront will cause annoyance rather than stir interest. When you focus on the challenges of our target group, your story will be read by more people.

A paid post may not have direct commercial intentions. If you want to propagate a purely commercial message, an advertorial is an appropriate medium.

When the editors believe that an article is very current, relevant, and neutral, we may publish it without the “Partner” label. It will then become part of the editorial content (indicating author information including company/organization, weblink, and LinkedIn profile).

Publications on this platform are exclusively in English. We however accept articles in other languages and can have them translated, for which we charge market rates.

Conditions

By submitting an article to the editors for publication, you agree to the following:

• the author retains full copyright to the work.
• publication does not violate a duty of confidentiality.

Content

We would like to see the following in submitted content:

• Opinion-oriented pieces.
• An approach or point of view should be central to your piece, not a product, company, or stakeholder.
• A story with a logical structure (from a gripping introduction to a conclusion).
• Predominantly in the narrative form. Please keep bullet lists (like these) limited.

Partners, please note that we’d rather not receive the following from you:

• Stories in interview format with someone from your organization or even yourself (you could do this in the advertorial format, but this is rather unusual).
• An interview with a customer on a business case written by somebody from your organization. Instead, the interview should be conducted by a professional third party.

Editorial matters

You can specify the subject in consultation with the editors (using a synopsis).

For an online article, our rule of thumb is 900 words (just under 2 A4s). For a blog or column, 500 words is sufficient.

There are no hard deadlines. However, we look for the best publication moment, taking into account previously published articles by the same author or partner.

Changes and corrections

We reserve the right to reject articles or request a revised version, and to make changes that we may or may not communicate depending on the importance of these changes.

For example: if we think substantive changes are necessary, or delete complete sentences or rewrite them completely, we always submit the revised text for approval before we proceed to publication.

If we simplify sentences to make them easier to read or make changes to punctuation, capitalization, or spelling, we will not notify you. We might change headings as well, all without further notice.

Style

Use a neutral writing style, preferably written in the third person (singular or plural). The exception here is a personal piece that we can publish as a blog.

As far as possible, avoid the passive voice and avoid wordy sentence structures. This makes a text more accessible and concise.

Avoid academic formulations, such as references to the article itself, such as in the following sentence:

In this article, three common approaches to this problem will be discussed.

An active voice and less formal writing make this sentence easier to read:

Below we discuss three common approaches to this problem.

Headings, intro, paragraphs

We are happy to receive a headline, but the editors decide. Provide a short, catchy headline that contains as many of the keywords you use in the intro as possible. Please leave company or product names out, and don’t use capital letters except for the first word and names.

Keep the intro ultra-short and to the point so that readers immediately see what your story is about. Incorporate three or four keywords in the first sentence, if possible. An intro is ideally no longer than 50 words – like this paragraph. We add the excess to the body text.

On-screen, readers are more likely to skip large chunks of text. Therefore, keep paragraphs short. This comes down to a maximum of 5 lines (about 65 words); about half of what is usual for printed texts. You can add some subheadings, based on your keywords, for readability and SEO, but please don’t overdo it. Not every paragraph needs a subheading. Don’t write whole sentences for subheadings, three to six words usually do the trick. Do not use capital letters except for the first word and names.

Byline

We state the author’s name at the top of the page.

With partner-branded content, we can list the partner organization as ‘author’ at the top of the article, while at the bottom we include the author’s information (name, job title, and company/organization).

We like to make an exception for very well-written articles: we place them preferably directly under the name of the author, with the author’s information clearly showing the function and company/organization at the bottom. In all cases, the name of the partner organization is included as a tag for findability.

Please note that we cannot publish an article that has not been written by the editorial team while mentioning (anyone on) the editorial team unless there are several authors. In that case, we will briefly mention these in the intro and more extensively at the bottom of the piece (job title and organization and possibly links to LinkedIn).

Footnotes and links

We do not post footnotes. Please use external links instead, but don’t overdo it. Links to content-relevant parts on a website of your organization are fine (such as a blog post, report, or white paper, but preferably not a general page). Try to balance these with links to third parties, this is beneficial for the SEO.

Text boxes

Indicate any text boxes using <textbox>…</textbox>. These texts should be no more than a fifth of the total word count.

Format

Only use plain text with at most some words in italics where this makes sense, avoid underlined or bold text and ALL CAPS (in headings for example). You can use the MS Word format, but please keep the formatting to a minimum as we will need to strip most styles before pasting it in the CMS.

Images

We require a royalty-free image with a minimum width of 1080 x 608 pixels. If necessary, include the name of the photographer or creator at the end of the file name. The editors check the quality of this material. We cannot guarantee its publication.

Please note that we do not publish photos of authors, infographics, or logos as the main image for an article.

For the author’s or organization’s profile, we need either a profile picture of the author or a square company logo respectively, at 200 x 200 pixels.

Common missteps

We often receive drafts that need quite a bit of work. Try to avoid the following:

• A long introduction instead of a catchy intro.
• The first sentences consist of clichés. Come straight to the point instead and offer more context later on if necessary.
• An overly formal or academic style; this usually needs a lot of rework.
• A conclusion is missing. A conclusion with the core message or opinion is often sufficient.

Four things that save us a lot of work:

1. Use capital letters only for proper names and never for nouns (agile, cloud, big data, smart city, smart factory, scrum, et cetera).
2. Spell out numbers under 10, and use digits for numbers that are 10 and above.
3. Write currency names in lowercase (euros, dollars). Do not use currency signs.
4. Write ‘percent’ and do not use a %-sign except for percentages in parentheses.