Tenets Of Good Resources

How to determine whether you’ve found a good resource for your original article proposal.

Read your resource. You won’t know if it’s useful otherwise.
Generate applicable H2s. Choose headings from your sources or invent your own, but you must provide us with the topics you want us to cover.
Explain what you need. The “Notes For Writers” section is where you should address any unusual requests or give us necessary details. “Special Notes” is for Juniper.

Good resources are long, thorough, researched and objective (meaning they are impartial and fact-based).

Examples:

A blog on an established website, usually written by a professional or veteran in the field. This post was useful for the article RV Travel With Kids. This post helped inform RV Travel With Cats … and it offers adorable pictures.
A technical article dedicated to the topic. Popular Mechanics and How-To wikis can be great resources, provided they’re thorough.
A site that has a strong focus on one topic, such as RiderPlanet USA, KOA Campgrounds or Discover Boating.
Primary sources, such as manufacturers’ websites. We writers often use these for the brands we write about most often, such as Sea-Doo, Airstream, Yamaha Boats and John Deere. Please don’t make these your only resource, since they don’t provide sufficient information to write an entire piece without another source.

Bad resources are subjective (meaning they are one person’s opinion), vague and lack research.

Examples:

Forums and aggregate sites like Reddit, MetaFilter or Facebook, because they’re subjective, brief and unresearched.
Review sites like Yelp and FourSquare for the same reasons as forums.
Any resource that’s less than 600 words. This is the minimum word count we have to hit, and it’s very hard to do that using a 200-word blurb.
Vague resources. We can’t invent information where none exists. If you don’t understand what you’re reading, then we won’t, either!
Unrelated resources. Anything that barely pertains to your topic or worse, is completely unrelated to it, is a waste of time for both of us.
Outdated websites. If your resource is a blog post from 2004 or a tech article from 1998, it’s going to be hopelessly out of date and useless to us. Check publication dates.