How to Byline Your Way to Better Opportunities

In honor of Axial BD Week, we are focusing content this week on each of the five pillars of business development. Today’s focus is Marketing: Brand Presence and Reputation.

Marketing your firm is the first step in ensuring you are discoverable online by relevant parties. Managing your digital presence and perception can be critical in standing out from the competition and securing new mandates or opportunities.

While optimizing your website is a necessary part of marketing, today’s article will focus on content creation. By writing articles for your deal professional peers and for the business owner community, you can establish yourself as a thought leader in your respective industries, and differentiate yourself.

To help get you started, here is a list of online publications that accept contributed pieces from mid-market deal professionals.

Forum – Forum is focused on producing thoughtful and relevant articles for both mid-market professionals and transaction-ready business owner. Most of our content is written by professionals and offers educational and best practices pieces. If you are interested in applying to become a contributor, feel free to reach out to [email protected].

Entrepreneur – Chock-full of ‘how-to’ guides and best practices, Entrepreneur provides content for business owners of all stages to help grow their company. Topics range from building a business model and developing a marketing strategy to revamping your sales team or preparing an exit strategy. As its name suggests, this publication is ideal for engaging with entrepreneurs and small business owners. Here is how you become a contributor.

Inc. – Inc. is focused on providing trends, ideas, and best practices for business success. They even have sections like “Selling a Business” and “Exit Strategies” dedicated to helping business owners prepare for the sale. Check out those sections and see if there is any other information you can offer in a byline that would be helpful to business owners and generate you some positive branding in the process. To apply to become a contributor, send an email to [email protected].

Forbes – Forbes is one of the most prolific publications for the general business community and has a very robust contributor program. Becoming a regular contributor to the site can generate a lot of buzz and positive association for your brand.  However, it may be difficult to realize leads from the site given its huge and disparate audience. While you might receive tens of thousands of reads on an article, it is unclear how many of them are exit-ready business owners. Here are the steps to becoming a contributor.

Harvard Business Review – One of the most respected business publications around, Harvard Business Review writes on business strategy, innovation, leadership, and culture. Depending on your area of focus, you can choose to pen a more specific article and focus on trends in a given industry or a given region. Here are HBR’s contributor guidelines.

Divestopedia – Focused on providing content for exiting mid-market business owners, Divestopedia regularly accepts contributed content. Key themes include: Pre-Sale, Maximize Value, Valuation, Sale Process, and Post-Sale. Review Divestopedia’s submission criteria here.

PeHUB – peHUB is one of the best sources for real time deal news. Since they are a news publication, however, they take guest submissions from deal professionals only occasionally. However, if you are seeing a major trend in the deal sourcing or capital raising world, it might be worthwhile to consider this as a publication option. Check out their Vox Populi section to get a better sense.

Seeking Alpha – Although Seeking Alpha is more focused on the public markets, it still has a robust audience interested in M&A and the private capital markets. This is a great site if you have commentary to share on general economic trends (like the overall state of the economy, inflation, activity by the Federal Reserve, etc.). Here is how to become a Seeking Alpha contributor.

Your Own – While these sites have existing contributor programs and existing distribution lists, you should always consider starting your own blog. It can either be on your company’s website or you can set up a unique domain (like Mason Myers or John Slater). Although this will be a much larger and longer initiative, you will receive 100 percent of the branding and marketing. If you’d like advice on how to set up your own blog, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected]

Note: Publication on these sites are never guaranteed and each has strict guidelines. Be sure to review each of the submission guidelines carefully and to copy edit each article — you don’t want to lose your opportunity because of a silly mistake.