We welcome guest blog posts from partner agencies and individual contributors in the TYPO3 community who seek to share insights and best practices that promote the optimal use of TYPO3. These guidelines serve as a framework to ensure that blog posts remain aligned with our messaging strategy, core communication themes, and audience profiles, remaining insightful and educational. 

TYPO3’s active community is at the heart of the project. The community’s expertise on a range of topics offers readers valuable insights into how to use TYPO3 in the most effective way possible. 

The collaborative nature of open source projects also means that publishing a guest blog post is a means to deliver insightful content to other members of the community who seek knowledge and inspiration from their peers. 

TYPO3 blog posts are tailored to generate organic traffic, and often serve as the starting point of a customer journey to find a suitable agency for their TYPO3 project. Blog posts mean more visibility for the agency/individual who submits it, along with increased credibility as they will be speaking from a point of expertise and authority. 

To submit a proposal, please follow the following steps.

• Step 1: Develop a strong concept: Topics should seek to be insightful, informative, and generate value for our audience
• Step 2: Review the Content Guidelines to ensure you adopt the correct tone of voice and writing style (you’re likely at this step now)
• Step 3: Read recent blog posts to get an idea of the types of content we publish
• Step 4: Contact our Comms or Partner Success team. We’ll review your proposal and look to incorporate it into our publication calendar 

Contact our team here: Link

When creating content for the TYPO3.com blog, it’s important to consider the audience personas that the GmbH seeks to engage. Working with audience personas allows us to tailor content more effectively to needs and pain points, addressing them in a way that delivers value. 

To structure our content, we’ve created the following audience personas.

Content published on TYPO3.com typically targets a few different audiences. Some of the most important ones include:

• TYPO3 Vendors (agencies): Provide them with useful content that they can share with customers or within their agencies.
• TYPO3 Editors: They seek information to improve their experience working with TYPO3. Our blog posts should offer best practices and guides for how to make the most out of their experience. Learning resources are key for this group. 
• Decision makers at potential customer organizations: They need information to help them qualify TYPO3. Facts and figures, clear-cut information on our CMS to help them make the best decisions.

Always remember, the agency you represent shouldn’t be the central focus of your blog post. It should be the reader and the value they get from reading the blog post. 

Of course, we still want to collect stories about all the great work our agency partners are doing. For that, please contact the Partner Management team about submitting a case study. If you wish to publish community/developer-centric content, please submit your proposal to the T3A Content Team to be published on typo3.org.

Having defined our target audiences, we aim to shape content on the blog around a few core messaging themes that align with the aforementioned challenges and pain points. These themes are the following: 

• Theme I: TYPO3 Offers Robust Connectivity
  
  Example: TYPO3 meets Elasticsearch: Boost Performance and Accuracy of your Search Function for a First-Class User Experience (LINK)
   
• Theme II: TYPO3 is a Reliable CMS (Qualifying TYPO3 for Decision Makers)
  
  Example: TYPO3 Installation and Core Web Vitals: The Secret to a High-Performing CMS (LINK)
   
• Theme III: TYPO3 is Modern and Accessible
  
  Example: Top New Features in TYPO3 v13 (LINK)
   
• Theme IV: Open Source for Good 
  
  Example: Report on TYPO3 Based Government Websites in Rwanda (LINK)

On the blog, we seek to maintain a writing style that’s professional but approachable. Since the content on the blog is read by a broad scope of audiences, we avoid content that’s either too technical and code heavy or that’s overly casual. 

A few general guidelines for navigating our tone of voice and effectively conveying a message to our audience include: 

• Focus on impact: The “what” is less important than the “why”. While it might be important to use a series of technical terms, or write about an impressive new code, as we’re geared to a primarily commercial audience, make sure that the bulk of the content focuses on why any new code, feature, etc. is important and the impact it can have for the reader. 
   
• Remember the target audience and their challenges and pain points when you write. 
   
• Don’t use emojis or excessive exclamation marks (!!).
   
• If it’s a longer blog post (+1,200 words), try to include illustrations when possible, to break the blocks of text into more easily digestible segments.
   
• Make sure to explain technical terms and write out the full form of abbreviations when first mentioning them. You can use the abbreviations only throughout the rest of the post.

As with our tone of voice, we also have some general guidelines we follow that pertain to the structure of our blog posts. These relate both to the body content of each post, as well as to the headlines and subheadings. Some of the most important ones include: 

• Prioritize SEO-friendly titles and headlines. Make sure the titles and headings are descriptive and clearly convey what the article is about or what will follow in the body of each new section. This makes the content more likely to appear in organic searches, and more easy to find within an article’s body. Here are some examples:  
  • “The Top 5 New Features in TYPO3 v13”
  • “How to Perform a CMS Migration from WordPress to TYPO3”
  • “A Guide to Choosing the Right CMS for Public Sector Organizations”
  • “Core SEO Features to Look for in a CMS”
     
• Avoid overly long headlines. Try to keep a headline to a maximum of 12 words
   
• Connect headlines and titles to pain points and challenges your target audience faces. This increases the likelihood that the post will be read.
   
• Don’t talk down competitors. In the spirit of open source, we aim to offer comparisons that are largely objective. While it’s fine to discuss positives and negatives of different CMS’s, it’s important to do so in a balanced manner.

When delivering a guest blog post that features a specific case, it’s important to make sure the piece doesn’t read like a case study. What do we mean by that? 

Whereas case studies put the agency and their client front and center in the story, oftentimes with their technical expertise and robust service offering being the focal point of the piece, blog posts focus on the feature that was used, the process that took place, and the value provided to the customer or user.

This difference in approach is illustrated in case study vs. blog headlines. Below are two headlines, the first from a case study and the second from a guest blog post. Both from the same agency. 

In the latter example, even though the guest blog features an agency’s story, that story is used only as a means to highlight best practices in winning sales, and isn’t a focal point of the story itself. 

In blog posts, it’s best to avoid discussing the collaboration process with the customer, background information on them, etc. unless those are directly related to the topic of the post. Focus on impact, outcomes, and best practices.

When using media assets in a blog post, including photos, videos, or audio samples, please ensure that the rights to use said media content have been passed on to TYPO3 GmbH and that all media is accompanied by corresponding captions (when applicable).

If you have any questions or special requests with regards to how media assets should be applied to the blog post, please contact us.