British Mums Editorial Guidelines

British Mums is all about community. It’s the #1 stop for British mums who are living outside of the UK to meet like-minded expats, ask for advice and receive genuine recommendations. It’s a trusted group made up of individuals who share common interests.

British Mums is genuine, trusted and real. It’s a group of mums, ran by mums, for mums.

The British Mums tone is chatty and personable. It’s not too serious and often embraces its British heritage with witty and humourous comments. Personality flows into the writing as the author often gives their point of view as a side note to the copy, which is always centred on making life easier for our mums.

General guidelines

British Mums articles must offer advice, tips, or recommendations specifically related to the British Mums audience.

Articles should not promote business services or products. Various packages are available upon request for advertorial content.

Articles should be offered exclusively to British Mums.

British Mums reserves the right to edit content to suit the brand style and format.

British Mums does not offer remuneration for any content offered to the brand. Remuneration will only be considered when content is commissioned, and fees shall be agreed upon beforehand.

Article length should be between 350 and 700 words.

It is preferred that suitable stock images are provided to accompany articles. Images should be high resolution, in landscape format and of good quality.

Writing for the Web

All British Mums communication is read online, usually from a mobile device, so paragraphs should be short and key points highlighted early in the copy.

British Mums Style Guide

Please take note of the following examples in order to ensure your content matches the British Mums style guidelines.

LANGUAGE: British Mums use UK English and not American English.

BRITISH MUMS: When referencing British Mums as brand, both words are capitalised. If referencing actual British mums, then ‘mums’ is no longer capitalised.

DATE: The date is always written ‘day of the week’ ‘date’ ‘month’ ‘year’. For example, Tuesday 25^th February 2020. There are no additional commas. Use a hyphen when referencing a date range, for example Tuesday 18^th February – Tuesday 25^th February 2020.

TIME: The time is always written in 12hour clock with am and pm and a single dot after the hour to show additional minutes. For example, 7am, 10.30am, 12pm, 3.45pm, 11.15pm. Use a hyphen when referencing a time range, for example 9am – 5pm.

NUMBERS: Numbers one through to ten should be written in full and numbers from 11 onwards should be written numerically.

HEADINGS: All headings should be written completely in capitals and should be a maximum of 40 characters.

BULLET POINTS: Use bullet points where necessary to easily display information. Only the final bullet point should have a full stop.

AND vs &: Only use the & sign if you’re talking about two words that typically go together, for example Food & Beverage. Use ‘and’ everywhere else.

QUOTATIONS: Use double quotation marks when quoting someone, for example “It’s always sunny”. The punctuation should appear outside of the quotation marks.

ACRONYMS: Acronyms can be used freely if the abbreviation is well known. For example, the UAE. If the acronym is not widely known then it should be written in full the first time with the acronym following in brackets, for example, the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Once the abbreviation has been introduced, the acronym can be used in the rest of the copy.

PHONE NO: If used in a local piece, then phone numbers should be written with only the area code, for example, 04 XXX XXXX however if it’s a multi-destination article then the international dialling code should also be included, +971 (0)4 XXX XXXX.

SEO Key Words

To ensure SEO, then key words should be used in the content and then provided separately at the end of the article so that they can be tagged correctly when uploading onto the website.

Localisation

 British Mums is predominantly based in the Middle East and therefore it’s essential the tone and content is appropriate. This also refers to imagery and any links included in the content.

If you would like to write for British Mums we would love to hear from you. Please email us at blog@britishmums.com