Want to write for Control Your Cash? Think before asking

The 2nd-best guest post we’ve ever received

Do you take guest posts?

Yes, with reservations. We’ve taken one guest post in the history of the site, largely because few people know how to write. We’ve received plenty of submissions, and shot all but that one post down. If you want to share whatever you’re offering with our readers, here are some informal guidelines:

  • Proper spelling and punctuation. We shouldn’t have to mention this, but sweet Christ if we get one more submission that looks like it was written by an ESL student we’re going to blow up the internets;
  • A different angle. “Checking your Sunday flyer for valuable back-to-school coupons is a great way to save money” wastes our time, yours and everyone else’s;
  • Some research, or at least an appreciation of the real world. Weeks ago we read a post written by a fellow personal finance blogger. She suggested that people who plan to tailgate at football games should save money by buying the decorations for their tailgate party at a discount store.
    Decorations? For tailgating? Yes, because drinking beer in the parking lot at Lambeau Field just wouldn’t be the same without bunting and streamers to give it that festive kick.

Her post wasn’t intended for human brains to digest, it was written for web crawlers. So more pairs of vacuous eyes could read the ads on the page. We believe content is everything here at Control Your Cash. Original, worthwhile content. To help people learn how to – that’s right, control their cash. If you’re dying to post comments sharing your stories about getting your toddler to eat discount baby food, knock yourself out. You just can’t do it here. There are plenty of sites where you can.

  • No shilling a product that we wouldn’t endorse. Seeing as you don’t know what we’d endorse, ask. Or, don’t ask and just assume we will endorse it, and we’ll run your post, but we reserve the right to add commentary about why your product sucks.
  • 800-900 words. If it goes longer, there needs to be a reason. “I could have cut 300 words but didn’t feel like self-editing” isn’t a reason.

And we hate extraneous words. We should probably have listed that first: get to the freaking point of whatever you’re writing about.
That’s about it. Include whatever images you want, and if you want to add HTML tags, that’d make our lives easier but it’s not vital. Our email addresses and Twitter accounts are on the site somewhere.