Have Your Blog Featured on the Nightside Nexus!
The Nightside Nexus both features non-fiction blogs about the Vampyre Community & the experiences of those within as well as creative writing & visual art.
Nightside Nexus Blog Submission Guidelines
If you’d like to submit a blog to be featured on our website, please follow the following parameters:
- Submissions should be formatted in 12pt Times New Roman or Ariel font.
- Include the Title & the Genre or Category of your work, how you wish to be credited, and any links you want included in your credits in the email.
- 300 words for short essays, 500-800 words are optimum, 1500 words is the max. (room for flexibility here but try not to go too over – if you have longer work to present email us first!)
- You may include up to 10 pictures with your submission.
- Submissions can be sent as Google Docs links or Attachments: Word Documents or Libre Office Documents – sent to submissions@nightsidenexus.com
- Feel free to reach out to Madame Corvidae to let her know you sent a submission here
What to expect when you submit a Blog
- Even if you reach out directly to Madame Corvidae, submission review may take up to 4 weeks.
- Expect feedback and edit requests for spelling, punctuation, and/or clarity.
Please note: Nothing here or in our subsequent communications will constitute a promise of publication
Potential Blog Posting Topics:
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Your Awakening Story (a highly suggested first blog entry)
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Your experience(s) or impression(s) upon entering the vampyre community for the first time.
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A pet peeve about something within the Vampyre Community that you’d like to see changed and a proposal of how to change it.
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A word, phrase, or concept you’d like more people within the VC to understand or at least consider.
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The VC history of your organization or local area.
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Personal experiences with Vampyrism that are contrary to popular belief.
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How you came to learn about vampyric techniques.
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Your interpretation of specific VC traditions.
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Trial & error experiences, failed vampyric experiments, lessons learned along the way.
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How does being a Vampyre impact your day to day life?
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A specific VC event that really touched or moved you, and why it had that impact.
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A paranormal experience that you’d like to talk about.
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Energy work instruction (of almost any kind, bonus points for lesser known techniques)
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Vampyric Feeding techniques that aren’t tendrils.
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Vampyric Magick (from techniques to grimoire pages to philosophy – anything)
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Vampyre philosophy think pieces.
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Do you agree with any of the Vampyric Law systems that are out there? If not, what do you think they’re lacking? (you can pick one system to talk about or compare multiple)
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Should Vampyres even have “law systems”?
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Vampyre Survival Guide – What does a vampyre need to know to survive?
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In-depth introductions to your organization.
Things to consider when writing blogs for the Nightside Nexus
These are some tips and tricks I’ve learned about writing blogs that you may want to consider when you write!
Your Title
The title of your blog should be catchy and tell what the blog’s about. If the reader isn’t interested in what your title offers, they won’t read it. The best blog titles are 50-60 characters long, include primary keywords near the beginning of the title, and use “power words” to boost clicks & readers.
Reading Check Points
Using Headings, bold text, bullet points, or dividers to create separation between paragraphs makes your reading seem more easily digestible. 3-4 sentences per paragraph is the sweet spot. A neurodivergent reader will often see a continuous wall of plain text and be like “fuck that” but if you break it into chunks between headings, bold text subtitles, quote text, etc… it tricks people’s minds into not feeling so burdened by a wall of text.
“The Hook”
Much like video hooks, you want to try to have a compelling first paragraph that really sucks people into wanting to read more about your topic. However, don’t get stuck not making progress on your writing trying to figure this out. I often write whole blogs first and then figure out the intro/conclusion after.
“The Point”
Readers have short attention spans. After your hook, you want to try to get to “the point” of what you’re writing somewhat quickly too. Depending on what your topic is, you want to front load your blog with “the point” and dive into further explanations and background detail later on. If you front load your blog with too much background/backstory up front and don’t get to the point until much later, there’s a good chance that readers will get bored and skip finishing the rest of the blog. By the time folks get to the end of an article, reading fatigue sets in and they retain less and less information.
Blog Length
People don’t like to read. It sucks. It’s dumb. But it’s the unfortunate reality. We do have some long as fuck deep dive articles on our site. I’m not shy about my walls of text, but I also know my massive articles don’t get read all the way through more often than not. From what I understand 500-800, up to 1000 words is the sweet spot. I go well over that regularly, but it’s not a bad practice to take a look at your blog if it’s a lot longer and see if it’s possible to break it into multiple posts. Linking from one post to another post in a series is a good way to get people navigating through more of the site, so sometimes it’s helpful to break things into a 2-3 part series if it’s long enough.
Blog Cover Images
1920 width x 1080 height is the default blog image size that I typically use for all blog images. I usually resize things in canva… and if anyone needs help with that I can help. Although in reality, it doesn’t matter what size the image actually is. However, if you have a large/tall image as the cover image, it does appear massive when you see the blog on desktop. Most people are viewing the blogs on mobile though so it’s not the biggest deal.
Search Engine Optimization Considerations
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of enhancing your website or social media content so that it appears closer to the top of unpaid results on search engines like Google. The goal is to drive organic traffic by making your content more visible, relevant, and authoritative. Being SEO conscious consists of many factors and one category of considerations includes how you write your blog content.
When it comes to SEO considerations, you want to try to insert searchable words and key phrases into your article, especially at key points. Key points in your title, your URL, and in your H1 Headings are most important. But ensuring various keywords and phrases show up throughout your writing also helps. Think about what people would google to find your article, all the combinations of what could be googled, and try to insert them into your post. You want to ensure they’re inserted into your post at a rate that doesn’t seem overdone, the less human your writing sounds, the worse it will rank.
So for example, if I was writing a blog about a Hekate spell.
SEO Title: A Guide to Safely Calling upon the Magick of the Vampyre Current
Non-SEO Title: Working with Vampyre Magick
Notes: the title is engaging, implying there’s unsafe or scandalous ways to engage entices people to read it. The title is short to avoid being truncated on mobile devices
SEO Title: Spellwork Tutorial & Materials List for Hekate Enodia Blockbuster Ritual
Non SEO Title: Hekate Spell Instructions
Notes: Notice how the SEO titles has the works Spellwork & Ritual in it, speak on exactly what kind of spell it is, and promises a tutorial and materials list.
Notice how both titles say “Spellwork Tutorial, A Guide to” – If the blog title is able to tell the reader what kind of material it is, do that. “The Best of “x”, A guide to, a tutorial on, a treatise, a recipe, an expose, learn to do x, things of that nature are helpful in helping people understand what they’re about to read.
Another trick that works for both Blog titles & Social Media posts is saying “You” in the first couple words. “How you can achieve, The best things you should explore, A tutorial on how you can, 10 things you should or shouldn’t try, 3 things you need to do x. Speaking directly and with power to your reader boosts click-through to your post.
Headings
When you use Heading 1, Heading 2, or Heading 3 (H1, H2, H3) – Search engines pick up on that. So you want your H1 heading to have the most important search keywords in it whenever possible. Search engines pick headings up in order of importance, h1 being most important and it ranks down based on the numbers. It’s wise to only use one h1 heading, then use h2 & h3 for further organization of subjects.
Blog Writing Considerations
As an ADHD writer, one of the biggest things I’ve learned about writing is to not overthink any of the details we just went over first. When you’re feeling inspired to write, start writing in that moment and don’t stop until you feel like stopping. I dive right into explaining whatever I’m thinking about without worrying about a title, an introduction, or making it make sense right away. Infodump first, deal with formatting after.
You can edit your text to make it prettier later. You can break things into nice paragraphs, come up with a catchy title later, etc. Don’t stifle your creativity by focusing too much on the technical box that makes it able to be seen.
Personally, I have a file folder in my google drive called “auto-writing” where I open a doc and spill out whatever is on my mind. I often do that after wanting to go on a tangent on Facebook that ends up being a little too long for a comment in a FB group. I’ll copy what I have, paste it into an empty doc, and continue to write the response I was crafting. I highly recommend trying this out.
At the end of the day, none of these are hard rules.
Except our submission parameters
You can ignore all of it, use headings for just aesthetic reasons, fuck a checkpoint if you don’t want to consider that, but these are the things I’ve picked up that boost readership and the ability for people to find your blogs, so I thought I’d share.
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