Posted on Mar 18, 2015

How To Pitch Lifestyle Stories To BuzzFeed

UPDATE: We're no longer accepting freelance pitches for these topics.

BuzzFeed Staff

Aug. 19, 2016, at 16:07 PM

Unfortunately, we're no longer accepting freelance pitches for these topics. Thank you for your interest!

We're the lifestyle and service wing of BuzzFeed, which means we're interested in helping you live a better, more fun/beautiful/healthy/productive/interesting life. And we cover lots of topics. So many topics! Stuff like:

STYLE: clothing, hair, makeup, personal style, shopping, body image

FOOD: cooking, eating, drinking, restaurants, recipes

DIY: tech & products, decorating, design, organization, crafting, cleaning, gifts

PARENTING: parenting at all ages, stuff parents need, stuff kids like

TRAVEL: where to go, how to get there, what to do there

HEALTH: general health, love & sex, nutrition & healthy eating, fitness & exercise, mental health, happiness

AND: pets, weddings, career & relationship advice, cars, personal finance, general life skills & a lot more!

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That means lists and written articles that offer interesting, reliable, and helpful information on a lifestyle topic that's often misunderstood or that doesn't get discussed enough. These stories should be engaging and easy to understand, but never condescending.

The topic could be anything people might be interested in doing better and knowing more about, from drinking whiskey to traveling in Thailand to picking the right credit card or birth control. You should either be qualified to write on the topic with authority, or lay out a plan to do research and interview experts who are.

Here are a few examples of stories like this that have worked well in the past:

• How To Hack Your Own Poop

• 29 Things Everyone With A Vagina Should Definitely Know

• 25 Facts About BDSM That You Won't Learn In "Fifty Shades Of Grey"

• The Only 7 Things You Need To Know About Oysters

• 26 Life-Changing Things You Need To Know About Costco

Lauren Zaser / buzzfeed.com

A how-to guide should apply your creativity and expertise to explaining, clearly and with an entertaining voice, exactly how to do or make something. It should be achievable and smart, giving readers a "why didn't I think of that!?" moment, or showing them something so appealing they'll want to try it right away. For example:

• 5 Ways To Transform A Plain Black Sweatshirt

• How To Make The Easiest, Most Delicious Chocolate Lava Cakes

• Here's What You Should Do Instead Of Making New Year's Resolutions

• How To Have An Amazing Christmas For Under $100

• How To Make Easy, Cozy Coq Au Vin

Keep in mind that an article like this will work best when you can provide your own step-by-step photos, drawings, or graphics to illustrate your explanation, and the images will need to be excellent. However, if you have a brilliant, ambitious project you'd like to tackle but not the resources to illustrate it, let us know what you have in mind and we may be able to work together to make it happen.

This could be a story where you're using yourself as a guinea pig to test advice or a lifestyle regime, or your description of a crazy event or place our readers would be interested in. Either way, it should raise discussion about issues and realities people might not be aware of. For example:

• One Model Tried On 10 Different Pairs Of Size 16 Jeans And This Is What They Looked Like

• What Happened When I Lived According To The Pinterest Popular Page

• You Haven't Lived Until You've Seen The Outfits At Philadelphia's Wing Bowl

• Strange Things You Learn When You Don’t Wear A Bra For A Week

• I Tried To Make Cheetos And Discovered That It’s Actually Impossible