CIOPages

Paid guest contributions

The Executive Forum

The CIOPages Executive Forum is where senior technology leaders, including executives at technology vendors, write under their own byline. It sits apart from our editorial coverage, we edit every article, and every one is labeled a paid guest contribution.

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Our own editorial writing is in Insights.

What it costs Who we accept What we publish Guidelines How it's labeled How it works

Section 1

What membership costs, and what it buys

Membership is $499 a year. Each article is $249 if you write it, or $499 if we research and write it from your intake, up to 6 articles a year. Applying is free, and nothing is charged until an editor accepts you.

Every price, how to pay, and the refund terms are on the Executive Forum pricing page.

What membership gets you

  • Twelve months in the Forum, and up to 6 published articles
  • A real edit on every piece: structure, clarity, house style, and a check on every claim
  • Your byline, your current title, a 40-word bio and one link you choose
  • A second link to your own site, in the article itself
  • A permanent URL on ciopages.com. No paywall, no expiry
  • Your title and excerpt in the Insights index, labeled a paid guest contribution
  • A spot in The Throughline newsletter and on our LinkedIn and X channels
  • A print-quality PDF of each published piece
  • The reason when we say no, including which check decided it
  • The option to have us write a piece for you, for $499
  • Free pitching, as often as you like. The article fee applies once we accept a pitch

What it does not buy

  • Links that pass search ranking. Links in Forum articles carry rel="sponsored"
  • A place in a Buyer Guide, or any change in how we evaluate a vendor there
  • An upgrade to a Directory record, or a Spotlight slot
  • Editorial coverage of your product, now or later
  • Publication of any particular draft
  • Moving, softening or dropping the label
  • Any say in what our editors write about your company or your market

On traffic and leads

You are paying for a published byline, edited and labeled, on a site your buyers read. We don't promise or estimate leads or traffic.

  • 144 live Buyer Guides across enterprise technology categories
  • 1,700+ vendors in the Directory
  • 345 in-depth articles and 539 glossary definitions
  • An editorial policy, published in full

Section 2

Who we accept

We review every application before we charge for membership. Most declines happen here.

Who qualifies

  • Sitting or recent CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, CISOs, chief architects and equivalent senior operators
  • VPs and SVPs of engineering, infrastructure, data, security or enterprise architecture
  • Partners and principals at advisory firms, writing about an engagement they led
  • Founders and executives (VP and above) at technology vendors, writing about a problem their customers face, not about their product
  • Agencies and PR firms applying for a client, when the byline is an executive at that client
  • Authors who wrote the piece, or directed it closely enough to stand behind every claim in it

Businesses we don’t accept

  • Gambling, adult services, payday lending and debt relief
  • Crypto token promotion, trading signals and yield schemes
  • SEO link networks, review farms, essay mills and reputation management
  • Articles placed to rank a third party's website
  • Regulated medical, legal or financial advice we're not in a position to verify
  • Guest-post and link-placement businesses writing for themselves

What we check before charging

  • The company is real, currently operating, and has more than a landing page
  • Your title and tenure match the public record
  • No unresolved regulatory action, fraud finding or consumer-protection judgment we can find
  • You're reachable at a corporate address
  • The business isn't in a category we decline

Section 3

What we publish

These are the areas our readers come here for. We will consider a subject outside them, but it has a higher bar.

Enterprise Applications

ERP and CRM programs, platform consolidation, migrations, post-go-live stabilization

Cybersecurity & Identity

Identity programs, zero-trust rollouts, incident retrospectives, security operating models, board reporting

Data & Analytics

Data platform decisions, governance, quality debt, warehouse versus lakehouse

AI & Automation

Adoption programs, AI governance and policy, build versus buy, evaluation and guardrails

DevOps & Platform Engineering

Platform team formation, developer experience, pipeline consolidation, reliability practice

Foundational IT & Infrastructure

Cloud migration and repatriation, network and endpoint modernization, technical debt, data center exits

IT Management & Governance

Operating models, portfolio governance, service management, reorganizations

Architecture & Governance

Enterprise and business architecture, capability modeling, standards, architecture review boards

Technology Cost & FinOps

Cloud cost programs, license renegotiation, showback and chargeback, measured savings

Sourcing & Vendor Management

Selection processes, contract negotiation, managed-service transitions, vendor exits

The Organizational Side

Team design, technical talent, succession, working with the board

Industry Solutions

Sector programs in financial services, healthcare, insurance and manufacturing

Section 4

Editorial guidelines

This is what we edit every draft against, paid or not.

Say what you think, early

Your point of view belongs in the first 150 words, and it isn't the same thing as your topic. "Most platform teams fail because they're funded as projects" is a point of view. "Platform engineering is an important trend" is a topic, and we don't publish topics.

750 to 1,200 words

Under 600 words there's rarely room for evidence. Over 1,500 it's usually two articles.

Be specific

Give us a number, a date, a decision, a constraint, something that didn't work. The most common reason we send a draft back is that anyone could have written it without doing the work.

No selling, no claims you can't back up

Mention your company where the story needs it. Don't keep coming back to it. Same with big claims: if you use a number, tell us where it came from.

First person, where you were accountable

Write about what you owned. "We moved 40 services and stalled on the last six" works. "Organizations should consider a phased approach" doesn't.

Evidence we can check

Standards bodies, vendor documentation, regulations, published research. If a number comes from your own environment, say so and give us the denominator.

Name vendors fairly, or not at all

Name products, including competitors, where the story needs them. Just don't end up recommending your own.

Original and unpublished

Not on your blog, not on LinkedIn, not syndicated anywhere else. We check. You can republish it 30 days after we run it, with a link back to us.

Written by a person

Using AI to help you draft is fine. Sending us something it wrote start to finish isn't. You need to be able to stand behind every claim in a conversation.

Do

  • Pitch first: a three-sentence thesis and four or five bullets, not a finished draft
  • Lead with the decision you got wrong before the one you got right
  • Give real numbers with the denominator, or say plainly that you can't
  • Name the constraint that made the obvious answer impossible
  • Link to primary sources: standards, documentation, filings, research
  • Keep the bio to 40 words and pick the one link that matters
  • Put your second link where it helps the reader, not wherever it fits
  • Tell us if any part of the piece touches a commercial relationship you have

Don’t

  • Don't send a draft your agency wrote and your executive hasn't seen
  • Don't build to a conclusion that's your own product
  • Don't pad it with market-size paragraphs and predictions
  • Don't ask us to move, soften or drop the label
  • Don't ask for more than two links to your own site: one in the bio, one in the body
  • Don't send us anything already published, in whole or in part
  • Don't send a second draft while the first one is still in review

Section 5

How we label a Forum article

How it looks on the page

Paid Guest Contribution · CIOPages Executive Forum (Learn more)

Making AI Transformations Yield ROI

By A. N. Executive · Chief Technology Officer, Example Industries

Where the label appears

  • The Paid Guest Contribution label sits at the top of the article, above the byline
  • The same label appears on the article's card anywhere it's listed
  • Forum pieces are grouped in their own section, away from our editorial coverage
  • It's in the page's structured data, so search engines and aggregators see it too
  • The wording is ours, and it's the same on every Forum piece
  • It stays there for the life of the article

Section 6

How it works

01

Apply

Nothing charged

Tell us your role, your organization, what you'd write about, and anything you've published before. No draft needed. We save your payment details and charge nothing yet.

02

We check

3 business days

We check the company, your title and tenure, and the category. If an application doesn't pass, we tell you which check it missed.

03

Decision

$499 on acceptance

If we accept you, we collect the membership fee and send you a welcome email with the editorial bar and how to pitch. If we decline, nothing is charged.

04

Pitch an article

$249 on acceptance

Send us a three-sentence thesis and four or five bullets. We come back with a yes, a redirect, or a no. Pitching is free and unlimited. We charge the article fee when we accept a pitch.

05

Write it, or have us write it

$249 yours, $499 ours

You draft it, or you fill out the intake and we write it from what you give us. Either way it's your byline, and you sign off on the final text.

06

Edit

1–2 weeks

We edit for structure, clarity and house style, and we check every claim. Anything substantive comes back to you. Nothing publishes that you haven't seen in final form.

07

Publish

3–4 weeks, pitch to live

Permanent URL, label in place, listed in the Insights index, and included in our newsletter and social channels.

If you'd rather we wrote it — $499 an article

Fill out the intake, give us 30 to 45 minutes on a call, and we'll research and write the piece from what you tell us. You review it, ask for changes, and sign off before it publishes. The views in it are yours, and the byline says so. If the intake has no decision, no constraint and no numbers in it, we'll tell you and refund the fee.

What the intake asks

  1. Your main point in one sentence: what should someone take away that they didn't know before?
  2. The work behind it: what you were accountable for, over what period, at what scale.
  3. The constraint that made the obvious answer impossible — budget, regulation, legacy estate, politics, timing.
  4. Numbers we can use, with the denominator for each, and whether any need anonymizing.
  5. What went wrong, or what you'd do differently.
  6. Systems, vendors and standards involved, plus any we must not name.
  7. Who the piece is for: which role, what kind of organization, facing what decision.
  8. Anything legally sensitive: customer names, unannounced products, matters in progress.
  9. Your bio in 40 words, and the one link you want it to carry.

Paying, refunds and rights are on the Executive Forum pricing page.

Already a member? Pitch an article. It’s free, there’s no limit on it, and we only charge when we accept one.

Section 7

Questions members ask

When am I charged?

We save your payment details when you apply and charge the membership fee only if we accept you. We charge the article fee when we accept a pitch. A pitch we turn down costs nothing.

Can an agency or PR firm apply for a client?

Yes. The byline must be an executive at the client, and the views must be theirs. The agency can manage the process and help draft. Our editor talks to the named author before anything runs.

Is there a package with a Buyer Guide placement?

Yes. The Spotlight + Executive Forum bundle is $1,499 once: a Spotlight card on one guide, membership, and 4 articles we write, over 12 months. Order it at https://www.ciopages.com/spotlight/pricing#bundle.

Why are the links marked sponsored if I'm paying?

Search engines ask publishers to mark paid links, so links in Forum articles carry rel="sponsored". Your bio link is visible and clickable like any other link.

Can I have a piece taken down later?

A published article keeps its URL. We'll correct a factual error and note the correction, and we're happy to talk about an update if your circumstances change. We don't remove pieces on request.

What if you turn down everything I pitch?

Pitching is free. The article fee is charged only when we accept a pitch, so a pitch we decline costs nothing.

Do I have to commit to 6 articles?

No. The membership fee covers the review and your membership for the year. After that you pay for each accepted article, and plenty of members publish one or two.

What's the difference between the two article prices?

$249 is for a piece you write and we edit. $499 is for one we research and write from your intake and a short call, which you then review and sign off. Same editorial bar either way, and it's your byline in both.

Do you edit heavily?

We edit for structure, clarity and house style, and we check every claim. Your position stays yours. If a draft still isn't working after two substantial passes, we'll tell you.

At a vendor? See the Spotlight + Forum bundle

A Spotlight card on one Buyer Guide, membership, and articles we write, for one price. Neither one changes what our guides say about a vendor.

The CIOPages Executive Forum (PDF)

Everything on this page in one document, for a colleague or whoever signs off on it. If the PDF and this page disagree, this page is right.

Download PDF

Apply for membership

No draft needed. We save your payment details when you apply and charge only if an editor accepts you.

Start an application

Terms current as of September 2026. See our Editorial Policy and what the label means.