The Money Salad Submission Guidelines

How to become a writer for The Money Salad: Grammar & Formatting, stories we’re looking for, and stories we’ll most likely reject.

The Money Salad is a brand new publication dedicated to money. We’ll bring you content on anything from how to save more money, build up your passive income, or simply squeeze the most out of every cent.

In this guide, we’ll go step-by-step through everything we’re looking at when deciding if a story is a great fit for The Money Salad or not.

We’ll cover grammar, formatting, What stories we’re looking for, and some tips & tricks to improve your writing.

*There might come changes to our guidelines in the future, but we’ll let you know*

Table of Contents

1. Grammar
2. Format your stories
3. What to Avoid
4. What to Submit
5. Profile and CTAs
6. How to Submit
7. Curation
8. FAQs

1. Grammar

The Money Salad editorial team goes through all submissions ensuring that they meet our quality on grammar and format. This allows us to have a standard formatting practice on all content presented to our readers.

We’re not your 5th grade English class. We understand that English is the secondary language for many of our authors. Articles provided should meet certain standards, but does not need to be written in perfect English. There are two things we expect before you submit a story.

1. Run a basic grammar check. Stories submitted full of simple spelling and grammar mistakes only show our editors that you didn’t bother reading through it again, so why should they.
2. The less time spent editing your article, the faster it will be published. Following the steps in this guide will make a smooth process submitting and editing your stories.

There is no such thing as the perfect article, don’t get stuck on minor changes. Tools such as Grammarly will do the job fine.

We do not differentiate between British english and American english, we accept both and will not change the spelling from one to another. We do ask that you keep the article consistently with one or the other, and do not mix them.

2. Format your stories

Medium has provided a great guide on how to format your articles, and The Money Salad follow this setup. Please see the article for further details here.

You can find further information on using the Medium editor to customize your title and subtitle here.

The Medium editor offers a wide selection of tools to improve your story, but to avoid getting too technical we’ve linked a pretty good selection of articles here.

3. What to Avoid

We focus on evergreen advice.

We look for stories that provide value for our readers today but also tomorrow. By Evergreen advice we aim at informative articles offering people seeking to improve their situation clear tips and tricks that is not related to single events or outdated.

We’re not looking for stardard “how to” articles that don’t add any value for the reader. “How to get rich? — spend less” style articles won’t be accepted into The Money Salad. Don’t get us wrong, we love “How To” articles if they can add some value, but make sure they offer something to the reader that makes change possible.

The story should include detailed instructions on how readers can implement the ideas the story provide into their own lives.

Please provide a specific, tangible example of a business or individual who did implement this step and did it well (or badly), and thus serves as instruction on what to do (or what not to).

We know providing these is hard, but that’s exactly what makes them valuable. Crafting good instructions takes work because you either have to test the advice, find someone who did, or do a lot of research.

If you do this work, however, we’re much more likely to accept your article.

4. What to Submit

As long as the story can provide informative reading to our audience within the area of topics we cover there’s no limits on what you can write about.

We enjoy personal stories that our readers can learn something from. Maybe you had a rough start in the market, Found a smart way to save some more money, have some tips and tricks on how to start your own business? Personal stories contain hard earned experience that readers can draw on, so don’t be afraid to get down and personal with your stories.

The most important is that there is a lesson to be learned in the story. A little bragging about your achievements are fine, but at least explain how you got there in the process.

Topics to write about

• Investing
• Startup business
• Entreprenurship
• Business
• Smart money
• Growth stories
• Internet business
• Innovative thinking
• Money, Finance
• Sustainability Business
• Circular economy
• Tips and tricks on saving
• Setting up your own business
• Starting an online business
• Your own financial journey
• Financial independence
• Passive income
• Financial guides
• Credit Cards
• Loyalty programs

As long as your stories can provide informative reading to our audience related to personal finance, growth and money we’ll happily promote it.

Types of stories to write

1. The case study. First-person experiences of a event or story you took part in.
2. The breakdown. The breakdown is a comparison of good and bad with a topic. Examples perfect for this would be loyalty programs, cards or saving solutions offering pros and cons to see the whole picture.
3. The analysis. A in-depth analysis of a financial topic, aspect or story. This is the informative dive into a topic that provides a long but informative read for the audience.
4. How-to tutorials in detailed steps: A real result with detailed, clear to follow instructions.

5. Profile and CTAs

Submissions must comply with Medium’s Rules, Ad-Free Policy, Content Guidelines, and Curation Guidelines. Stories violating Medium’s rules will be reported.

Now that all the formalities are settled the hardets part remain. Write quality content that give the readers innovative and informative reading.

Your Medium profile

Here are some tips for the ideal profile. Include your full name, some relevant information about yourself, a clear picture of your face, and a link to anything you might want to promote to your readers, like your website, a book, or one of your social media channels.

Self-promotion and calls-to-action (CTAs)

We publish stories, not ads. Our mission is to publish quality content benefiting the reader. We will not accept stories that sole purpose is to promote a product or affiliate link.

Writers may promote their book, blog, service, tool, or other product with a short text link at the bottom of the story, clearly marked with AD or AFFILIATE.

All articles in The Money Salad are part of the Medium Partner Program. The article is the product. People are paying $5/month to read articles inside Medium’s paywall. They clicked your title to read your story, not being pitched a product.

• Don’t include any affiliate links in the story without proper disclosing. If your story contain affiliate links make sure they follow Medium Rules found here. Any undisclosed or improper affiliate links will be removed and the story might be rejected.
• Per Medium’s best practices: “Avoid CTAs. Readers tell us that they find repeated calls to action — to sign up for a newsletter, to clap — annoying.”
• It’s fine to use your previous work as references if relevant to the story. Include links where they fit into the story, but avoid spamming links to previous stories or blogs for the sake of traffic. Links not relevant to the story will be removed during editing.

6. How to Submit

1. Open the story you want to submit. Click the three-dot button at the top, then Edit story to enter the edit mode.
2. In the edit mode, click the three-dot button in the top-right corner of the page to open your story settings.
3. Select Add to the publication from the dropdown list.
4. Choose the publication you intend to submit to and click Save.

Note: To confirm that a story has been submitted to a publication, the writer must ensure that when in edit mode, the top-left corner of the story says “Submitted draft” or “Submitted story,” If the top-left corner says “Not yet submitted”, then the post is not yet submitted to the publication. In that case, the writer must first click the “Ready to submit?” button, followed by “Submit to publication.”

How to become a writer

If you want to be a writer for The Money Salad, please leave a comment below “I want to be added as a writer”.

We prefer articles to be submitted as drafts, but we do accept already published articles too.

We only publish 1 story per author each day. You’re free to submit several stories, but these will be added to the queue and published at a later point.

If a story is not approved for publishing by our editors, We’ll leave a private note explaining why. If you agree with our accessment you’re free to rework the article, and submit it again. Please do not simply resubmit the story without doing the changes, required.

We reserve the right to make small changes to your article without notifying you. These changes can be adjusting titles, subtitles, tags and the removal of undisclosed affiliate links.

7. Curation

What does it mean to be curated? When a story is curated, it becomes eligible to be distributed to readers across Medium surfaces — on the homepage, on-topic pages, in Medium app, in Medium’s Daily Digest newsletter, and in other emails — and shared via Medium’s recommendation system.

According to Medium, these are the 5 of the most common problems for curation:

1. Non-quality headlines — not specific, not clear, not clean
2. Asking for claps
3. Not having rights to use the image
4. Medium rules violations
5. Request for donation

To learn more about curation, you can check Medium’s article about curation.

8. Frequently Asked Questions

My article has been curated by Medium. Can I add it to The Money Salad too?

Yes you can! Curation by Medium means that they will use their website, newsletter etc to promote your article. You’ll still be allowed to publish it to publications too, without affecting the curation in anyway.

Can I add my article to two publications?

Medium doesn’t allow publication of a story on multiple publications unfortunately. So if you have a quality store published elsewhere, we wouldn’t be able to publish it no matter how hard we try. You’re free to publish it on your personal blog outside of Medium though.

Are you going to put my article behind a paywall?

The simple answer is yes. The Money Salad only accept stories that is published behind the paywall. You’re free to choose if you want to be part of the Medium Partner Program or not, but this is a requirement to get your articles published in The Money Salad.

How come my story didn’t get curated?

Medium has its own team of curators going through all articles published within the topics. It is this team that decide what to promote further and not, Medum has created a great guide you can find HERE that elaborate further on this.