My wife has contributed posts on and off in the past and has been threatening to do so a little more frequently (a joke, dear). She’s even been talking about possibly starting her own blog. For those reading this blog from Hmm and not in an RSS reader, her posts now have a light pink background, just FYI. Yeah, that’s seriously cliched but I wanted her posts to stand out from others on the website. We might change colors for other authors too. Actually we did this a long time ago when Logspirit used to submit content. Yeah, the color thing might be lame, but visually it’s a quick, easy way to tell who wrote what. Of course we’re open to other reader suggestions?

Surprisingly, some people do not read the bylines.

Also wanted to remind readers that anybody can register, login and submit stories/articles/content to makeyougohmm. We haven’t really promoted this feature that much to readers, but it has actually been an available option for awhile.

I haven’t pushed this that much for two reasons: one, I’ve been working here and there on improving our Official Editorial Guidelines and two, because we aren’t paying for submissions. More on that last part in a minute.

NOTE: All reader submitted posts remain in draft until they are approved or rejected. If they are rejected the word: “rejected” will be added to the working title, and possibly some text to the beginning of the submission about why it was rejected. Readers are welcome to remove the “rejected” notice, rework and resubmit.

Official Hmm Editorial Guildelines:
1) please submit original content only. You can reword/rework/massage something you’ve put on your own blog or published elsewhere, but please no crossposting. A monkey can crosspost or reblog or setup a script to submit. Readers enjoy and respect original content and so do we.
2) copyright of the submited post remains the author. We aren’t paying for this, so we can’t expect to shackle what’s done with it beyond makeyougohmm.com. However, any abuse of the delete function (as in deleting prior published stories) will result in all future submissions being rejected.
3) you may update prior published posts to correct errors and/or add additional information, but please make it clear what is being edited by using strikethru on the original text and adding the word “update” and date/time so readers know what was updated and when. It is important being accurate and making corrections but not altering originally published content with no explanation. Your credibility — and ours — suffers from this activity. Please keep this in mind.
3) use blockquote or double quotes for any third party quoted content.
4) quoted content must contain less words than your editorial and must be linked (attribution is very important), see #1.
5) please disclaim any conflicts of interest in your post. For example, if you are writing about how great Microsoft is and you work for Microsoft, then be sure to mention that.
6) affiliate links are OK as long as you put the following: “(affiliate)” (without the quotes) immediately following the link.
7) link-only submissions will be treated as a lead or something for us to review, they will not be published under the author byline as is unless the link is just amazing and speaks for itself (extremely rare). Hmm isn’t a linkblog, though we do have a linkdump category where links with a descriptive sentence or two are sometimes appropriate.
hotlink images, video, podcasts, etc from your server during the submission process. If we accept your content, we’ll copy the content over to the site and serve it from here so you don’t accrue any bandwidth charges.
9) All editorial decisions remain KMR Enterprises (that’s us) meaning we can modify words, add links, accept, reject and/or edit any submission for any reason.
10) there is no payment for any blog entries submitted at this time, though KMR Enterprises reserves the right to start paying for published submissions at some later, undefined date.

Before anybody flames us for not paying, please understand that we are not fishing for more content here, this blog does just fine the way it currently operates. Ad income and subscribers have been increasing almost every month. Actually, we want to have a way for interested readers and/or other bloggers to be able to submit content here if they want to do so, nothing more, nothing less. If you think this deal which basically boils down to exposure only sucks, then please do not submit. There is no secret, sinister agenda to rape writers and if you doubt I’m passionate about writers not being abused then read this.

My take is, has been, and likely will continue to be: if you want to be paid to blog, then start your own blog and work it. If you aren’t good at self-promotion, your options are learn about the business, join a blog network and focus only on writing, or join a blog network and focus on writing and learning about the business. Initially you’ll make more money blogging for a network but if you do things right and catch a break in a niche that you are a passionate about then you’ll make much more money working for yourself. It’s a now or later (maybe) proposition. No guarantees working for yourself. I love working for myself, even though the boss is a bastard.

Finally, the last time I mentioned this a few people wrote in that they were worried that accepting submissions from others would mean less content by me. That the overall content quality would change and they might need to unsubscribe. Really, that’s flattering, thank you, but I’m still going to contribute as much as I always have here and maybe even more (if that’s possible). Also, we still have editorial control, this isn’t becoming some unmonitored wiki.

If you look on the home page of the website in parenthesis you’ll see the numbers of posts each month were added has been more this past year than it ever has and 99% of the total 662,370 words in 2,657 posts have come from yours truly. The numbers speak clearly: I’m not going anywhere. And because we aren’t paying for submissions I suspect we’ll receive about the same amount of submissions that we received the last time this was mentioned (zero), although a few folks did register so maybe they are meticulously crafting their submissions. Also, this site has lots of different RSS feeds (by category, by keyword search, etc) and we wouldn’t be opposed to offering a feed by author as well.

With all this said, it seems rather arrogant of me to assume that I’m the only one that can come up with things that … make you go hmm, so that’s the primary reason this submission process exists. I hope we will receive some submissions with this request but if not, well, then that’s cool too.

Whatever you decide to do heretofore, thank you for stopping by and reading.

• How to contribute to MakeYouGoHmm [site news]
• About MakeYouGoHmm and authors
• Answering the 10 conflict of interest questions
• Easily link from your website to the Zune Marketplace with Zune links
• High profile blogging opportunities
• [site news] Your thoughts on writing a good editorial policy?