Submission guidelines for Military Embedded Systems blogs

Other

August 05, 2019

**The blog must be original to our website, not republished from another media outlet.**

Note: Our audience consists primarily of ENGINEERS and SCIENTISTS. Use HIGHLY TECHNICAL and quantitative language and details.

• No sales pitches as readers are turned off by promotional-oriented blogs. Any blog that is a product pitch or a company promotion will be rejected. Refrain from mentioning your product and company name unless it is at the end of the blog and without marketing language, i.e. “world’s first,” “best,” etc. In addition omit any product status information. This type of language will be removed by the editor or sent back to the blogger for a re-write.
• Length: Blogs should be short and sweet, totaling just three or four paragraphs or longer in the form of a column. They need to be between 400 to 700 words.
• Have fun. Blogs do not have to be serious dissertations on electronic designs. They can cover current events, marketing challenges in the defense community, or just what one engineer would say to another over a cube wall.
• While blogs are not as in-depth as a full technical article, we do ask that it contain a military technology tie-in, preferably in the first paragraph. Remember the MES audience consists primarily of ENGINEERS and SCIENTISTS in the military electronics industry.
• Crosslinks: While we would prefer you keep product mentions and pitches out of the blog, we are open to linking a key phrase like “rugged computing” back to your website. In return we ask that you post a link on your website that links back to the blog on ours. In this way we trade crosslinks and help improve the SEO (search engine optimization) on both our websites.
• Submit the author’s headshot (head and shoulders), in a separate file from the blog; author photos should be 300 dpi, at least 150 KB in size, preferably with no background.

Important Note: The first version of your blog you submit to a Military Embedded Systems editor must be your “final” version, except for any final edits the editor might ask you to make. Please do not send in a blog draft to which you plan to do further edits on your side. The same thing goes for blogs undergoing internal review at your company – please wait to submit them to the editor until after you have all needed approvals, not before. Having your company and our editor working on two different versions at the same time is not efficient for anyone.

Recommendations for first time bloggers

Grab the reader: Begin the blog with a catchy, succinct one-paragraph lead. Make it fun – get the reader’s attention.

Problem/Solution: We recommend the Problem/Solution blog style for beginners: Solve a problem, then show a solution. Please interweave the problem/solution approach throughout the entire blog, rather than having two sections called “problem” and “solution.” State the problem (in the title and first paragraph), then wrap up with a conclusion paragraph.

Current event tie-in: Another idea is to take a current event and tie it into the military technology you have expertise in. For example, if the U.S. military increases its unmanned-aircraft activity in the Middle East, then the market will likely be demanding more embedded computing tech to process the info from the sensors on the drones.

Frequency: The more you blog, the more people will know about it. Do what you are comfortable with or consult with the editor on a recommended schedule.

Social Media: We recommend pushing your blogs out on social media, both to build your company brand and the brand of the individual blogger.