Expat360 is built on two kinds of knowledge. One is researched — what a residency visa requires, what a hospital charges, what the electricity tariff does to your bill in August. The other cannot be researched at all. It is what you learn by living somewhere: the restaurant with no sign, the neighborhood that changed, the bureaucratic step everyone gets wrong. We can do the first kind ourselves. The second is why we need you.
Who we are looking for
You do not need to be a professional writer. You need to have lived somewhere long enough to know what a visitor misses, and to be willing to say what you actually think.
| Role | What it involves |
|---|---|
| Experience writer | One-off pieces about what actually happened — the move, the first year, the thing nobody warned you about. No commitment beyond the piece. |
| City columnist | A regular column on your city — nightlife, food, neighborhoods, the arts. You own the beat and the byline. |
| Events contributor | What is coming up in your city, who would love it, who would not, and honest write-ups of what you attended. |
| Practical contributor | You went through the residency process, opened the bank account, imported the dog, argued with the utility company. Tell us exactly how it went. |
| Local correspondent | You spot when something changes — a rule, a price, a closure — and tell us, so the reference pages stay true. |
If your city is not covered yet, tell us anyway. Where we go next is shaped partly by who turns up.
How we write here
Four rules cover almost everything.
1. Say who would hate it
This is the house rule and it applies to every format. A recommendation with no downside is an advertisement. A city profile with no trade-off is a brochure. Whatever you are writing about — a bar, a beach, a neighborhood, a whole country — tell the reader who it is wrong for. It is the single thing that makes the rest of the piece believable.
2. Show your working
Where a fact can be checked, cite where it came from — the government page, the hospital’s own site, the operator’s published fares. Where it cannot, say so plainly: no hospital here publishes prices; this is what I was quoted in March. Readers trust “I do not know” far more than they trust false confidence, and every reference page on this site carries the date it was last checked for the same reason.
3. For a discovery, the finding is the story
A list of favorite restaurants is not interesting. How you found a place nobody knows about is. If you are writing about something off the map, give us four things: how you found it, why it is not known, what it is actually like, and who would hate it. The first of those is the part nobody else on earth can write.
4. Write like you are telling a friend
Specific beats general every time. “Cochinita is a morning food here and the good places have sold out by two” tells a reader more than a paragraph about culinary traditions. Concrete detail is what makes someone recognize a place they have never been.
What we protect
Publishing a secret changes it. That is not a reason to publish nothing — it is a reason to think before you do.
Write about it when the place would welcome more customers and can absorb it. A small restaurant, a struggling music venue, a guide trying to build a business — these people will thank you, and sending them readers is one of the better things this site can do.
Think harder when the place is somebody’s home rather than a business, when it only works because it is small, when the community has no say in becoming a destination, or when a hundred foreigners arriving would damage the thing you loved about it. Sometimes the right piece describes the feeling without printing the address. Sometimes the right answer is to ask the owner — small businesses will tell you straight, and it is a good conversation to have anyway.
We would rather be the site that locals are glad exists than the one that ruins the places it loves.
Disclosure
If you were given a free meal, a discounted stay, a complimentary ticket or a press trip, say so in the piece. Not in a footnote — in the text, where the reader will see it. You can still write honestly about something you were given; you cannot do it without telling people.
If you have a financial interest in what you are writing about — you own it, work there, or take a commission — you cannot write about it here. Recommend it to us instead and someone else will take a look.
Advertisers do not get editorial coverage, do not see pieces before publication, and cannot request changes. That applies to contributors as much as it applies to us.
What you earn
The straight answer is nothing at first, and we would rather say that plainly than imply otherwise.
Expat360 pays contributors out of advertising, and advertising follows readers. Until your work has an audience there is no revenue to share, so you begin unpaid — writing for the byline, the profile, and the reach of a site people arrive at while making real decisions.
That changes as your readership builds. Once your work draws an audience of its own it attracts advertisers, and a contributor dashboard will show you what your writing earned and what you are owed — actual figures, rather than our word for it.
If you need paid work today, this is not that. If you want to build a readership that pays later while being read now, it might be.
How it works
- Pitch first. A couple of lines about the idea saves you writing something we already have coming.
- We set you up with an account and a profile page — your photo, your bio, where you live, and everything you have written.
- You write and submit. Everything is read before it publishes. We edit for clarity and check anything factual; we do not flatten your voice.
- Your byline stays yours, linked to your profile, on the piece permanently.
- Length is whatever the piece needs. A good 400 words beats a padded 1,200.
Get in touch
Tell us where you live, how long you have been there, and what you would like to write about. If you already have something written, send it.
Applying puts you on the contributors list, which is a separate email from the reader newsletter. It is where we say what we are commissioning next — a city we are about to build, a season or an event worth writing around — so you hear about the brief before it is filled.