Guest post or paid placement? Say which
Most sites in this niche blur the two deliberately. We separate them in the first email, because they follow different rules and produce different pages.
An unpaid guest post is an editorial contribution: we accept it on merit, edit it like our own work, and its links are normal editorial links. A paid placement is an advertisement: it carries a visible sponsored label and rel="sponsored" on every link pointing to the advertiser.
Both are welcome. What is not on offer is the middle option that a lot of outreach email is quietly asking for, a paid link inside a piece presented as editorial.
That is the arrangement Google's link spam guidance targets, and it is the one thing here that no budget changes. If a placement is what you want, the rates and formats are on the advertise page.
What we do with your draft
We edit properly, which is more intervention than most contributors expect. Claims get checked against a source, and an unsourced statistic is cut rather than softened.
Titles and headings are rewritten to match how people actually search for the topic. Padding goes.
If two paragraphs say the same thing, one of them will not survive.
None of that changes your argument. It changes how findable it is, and whether a reader gets to the useful part before they leave. If a draft comes back looking heavily marked up, that is the piece being taken seriously.
Why the standard is this specific
This site is built on a narrow promise: real methods, honest numbers, no hype. That promise is checkable, which is the point of writing it down.
Our methodology page lists the four claims we never make anywhere, and the how we make money covers how anything commercial is labelled. A contribution that would force us to break either document cannot run, regardless of who wrote it.
To see the voice before you pitch, the SideIncomeHQ homepage is the fastest sample.
