Guest Article Submission Guidelines

Jack Gray, Roof Online Editor • Last updated June 13, 2024

Demonstrate Your Expertise by Writing an Article

Roof Online publishes guest articles.

Thousands of visitors a day come to Roof Online looking for reliable roofing information, so writing an article for our website is a good way to show off your expertise and let people know who you are (professionally, that is).

Experts Only, Please

Visitors to our website are looking for accurate, expert information about practically any kind of roofing topic you can imagine.

Our audience includes homeowners, building owners, property managers, roofing contractors, and building envelope consultants.

If you are professionally or academically involved in roofing (or any other field related to the building envelope) as a contractor, consultant, manufacturer, researcher, or academic, we’d love to help you showcase your knowledge while you help our readers at the same time.

Increase Traffic to your Website

All published articles will include the author’s name, position, and company or organization, with a link to the author’s website inviting readers to visit. A short author’s bio and author’s picture will be displayed at the end of the article if you send them to us (please do!).

Remember, if you write a helpful article, people will want to visit your website to see what else you can help them with.

What We Are Looking For

We are looking for original articles that do not appear anywhere else on the internet (duplicate content makes a website look bad to internet search engines).

Any building envelope topic is acceptable, no matter how general or how specific.

Practical guides and how-to articles, maintenance tips, general introductions to particular materials, components, and tools, explanations of codes and standards, tricks of the trade, and so on, and so on. We’d really like to cover everything.

If you’d like to write an article but you aren’t sure what to write about, just contact us and ask for suggestions. We’d be happy to help you figure out a topic.

Articles should be at least 1,200 words long.

Very long submissions such as research papers may be published in their entirety as an on-page pdf document.

Articles should be heavy on facts and light on opinion, and should not show bias in favor of a particular company.

When discussing materials, services, products, etc., please refer to them generically rather than by a brand or company name so your article doesn’t read like an advertisement.

There will be a link to your company page. If you provide good information, people will visit.

Use of AI Writing Tools

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT are not roofing experts. We’ve reviewed the roofing information produced by various AI models on a variety of roofing topics and we can say with confidence that AI models don’t really know what they’re talking about when it comes to roofing.

Roofing articles written with AI consistently repeat common misconceptions and mistakes, and contain inappropriate generalizations, vague and unhelpful statements, and assertions of fact which are flat out wrong.

We check all submitted articles with an AI detector, and if they appear to be mostly written by an AI, we can’t consider the article to have been written by an expert, we can’t trust the information, and we won’t publish it.

We do not want any AI-generated articles.

Photographs

Please include original photographs that illustrate what you are discussing in your article.

In fact, even if you aren’t going to write an article, you can send us good roofing pictures.

If you have a good, original picture that you think would go well with an existing article that doesn’t seem to have enough pictures in it, we can add your picture to our article and give you credit for it with a link back to your website. (Check with us before sending any pictures.)

How to Submit an Article

Before writing an article, contact us here, with “Article Idea” in the subject line, and briefly describe the topic you’d like to write about. Also provide your name, your company or organization name, and your position or title.

Articles should be submitted as Microsoft Word documents.

Terms of Publication

We reserve the right to reject any article ideas or content submitted for publication on the Roof Online website. We are not obligated to publish your content, regardless of any other statements made on the Roof Online website.

We will proofread all articles that we accept and make edits as we see fit before publication. If we edit your article before publication, you will be asked to approve the final version before we publish it.

We also reserve the right to edit and make changes to the content that we accept as we see fit, both before and after publication. We will not submit edits made after publication to you for approval.

We reserve the right to remove your content from our website at any time, and we provide no guarantee that your content will remain published indefinitely.

If you want us to remove your published content, please make this request by email or by using the contact form on our website.

Copyright

Copyright: If you wrote it, you generally own the copyright to it. If we publish it, you will retain the rights to it.

We will remove any article from our site at the author’s request.

Roof Online offers no legal advice regarding copyright. You are responsible for knowing the copyright status of any article you submit.

The United States Copyright Office has plenty of resources if you’d like to know more about copyright.

What We Don’t Want

Besides AI-generated articles, we are also not interested in product reviews, top ten lists, or anything that won’t be useful or valid this time next year.

We will not publish any articles written by anyone who is not involved with the building envelope in a professional or academic capacity.

Please don’t ask us to publish your article on internet marketing tips for roofers. Please don’t offer to write an article if you don’t have practical experience (actually installing, producing, inspecting, specifying, testing, researching, teaching, etc.) in the subject area.

We want our readers to feel confident that the information on Roof Online has been provided by people who really do know what they’re talking about.