Shared Interest Blog publishes considered, accessible writing produced openly with AI assistance and directed by a human editorial team. Our ten writers each cover a defined subject area, and the editorial team selects what we cover, develops briefs, and reviews every draft before publication. (You can read more about how we work on our About page.)
We accept a small number of paid guest contributions each month. We are selective, and most submissions we receive are rejected, usually because they were written for a search engine rather than a reader. This page tells you exactly what we require and what it costs.
What It Costs
| You write it | We write it | |
|---|---|---|
| Fee | US$50 | US$200 |
| You supply | A finished draft | A brief, your key points, and your link |
| We supply | Editorial review and editing | Research, drafting, editing, and images |
| Included | One permanent contextual link, your byline | One permanent contextual link, your byline |
| Turnaround | 5 business days to a decision | 10 business days to a published piece |
Both tiers include one contextual link to a single domain of your choosing, placed where it genuinely belongs in the piece, plus your name and a one-line author credit. Contributions publish under your own name, on a contributor byline that is clearly distinct from our ten staff writers.
Nothing is charged until we have read your work and accepted it. We invoice on acceptance and publish once payment clears. If we decline your piece, you owe us nothing.
What We Publish
Contributions must fit one of our ten subject areas: business and economics; technology and digital trends; travel and adventure; personal finance; health and wellness; food and recipes; current events and social issues; lifestyle and personal development; arts and culture; and home, garden, and DIY.
They must also be relevant to an Australian readership. This does not mean the subject has to be Australian, but a piece that could have been written for any audience anywhere is not a piece we can publish. If your draft mentions no Australian context, cost, regulation, season, or reader circumstance anywhere in it, it is not ready for us.
Requirements
Length and substance
Minimum 1,200 words. Our standard articles run 1,200 to 1,800 words, and anything materially shorter reads as a wrapper around a link rather than an article. Length should follow the content. We do not want padding, and we will reject a 1,400 word piece that had 600 words of substance in it.
Originality
The piece must be original, unpublished, and exclusive to us. Do not submit anything that is live elsewhere, syndicated, spun from an existing article, or queued for submission to another site. We check.
Accuracy
Every factual claim must be verifiable. Every statistic must be attributed to a real source. Every external citation must be a live URL that genuinely supports the claim being made.
Fabricated sources are the single most common reason we reject otherwise competent drafts. A citation that looks plausible but resolves to a 404, or to a page that does not contain the claim, will end the submission. We verify citations on every piece we publish.
Compliance
We do not publish personal advice of any kind. Content may explain how something works; it may not tell an individual reader what to do about their money, their health, or their legal position. This rule binds our own writers and it binds contributors equally.
Personal finance content must stay on the general information side of the ASIC distinction between general and personal financial advice. Health content is general information only and must follow safe messaging guidelines on mental health, suicide, self-harm, and eating disorders. Anything naming a living person must be defensible under Australian defamation law.
House style
These are not preferences. They are site-wide rules, and a draft that ignores them creates editing work we have not been paid for.
- Australian English. Colour, organise, realise, centre, defence. Use -ise endings, not -ize.
- No em dashes. Anywhere, ever. Use commas, semicolons, full stops, or parentheses instead. This is our most frequently breached rule and the fastest way to signal you have not read this page.
- Oxford comma, used consistently.
- Metric measurements. Australian dollars unless context requires disambiguation.
- Dates as DD Month YYYY in body text.
- Numbers: spell out one through nine, numerals for 10 and above.
- Headings: Title Case for H2, sentence case for H3 and below. Headings should be specific and useful, not clever.
On AI assistance
We do not ask whether you used AI to write your draft, and we do not prohibit it. It would be a strange rule for us, given that our own ten writers are AI personas working under human editorial direction.
What we require is that the piece is accurate, original, genuinely useful, and written in a voice that belongs to a person rather than to a template. Those qualities are achievable with AI assistance and missable without it. We judge the result, not the method.
The practical consequence is that the failure modes of unedited AI drafting are exactly what gets rejected here: invented citations, confident claims that are not true, generic filler that says nothing specific, and prose that reads as though no one chose the words. If you use AI, edit it properly before sending it to us.
Link Policy
One link, to one root domain, per contribution.
- It must be contextually relevant to the piece and placed where a reader would actually want it.
- Anchor text must be branded or natural. Your company name, your publication name, or a descriptive phrase that reads as English. We do not publish exact-match commercial anchor text, because it reads as advertising to a human and degrades the article.
- The destination must be a real business or publication with a functioning site.
- We do not link to sites that themselves sell links, run private blog networks, or exist primarily to host paid placements.
We may move the link to a more sensible position during editing. We will not remove it.
Published contributions carry a visible “Paid contribution” label. This is not negotiable. Readers are entitled to know when a piece was paid for, and we are not prepared to present commercial content as ordinary editorial.
What We Do Not Accept
We decline the following regardless of fee, and we do not make exceptions: gambling and casino; adult content; CBD, pharmaceuticals, and supplements; forex, crypto trading, and investment signals; payday and short-term lending; essay writing and academic services; replica or counterfeit goods; surveillance and phone monitoring tools; and any site whose business is selling links or placements.
We also decline press releases, company announcements, product launches, thinly disguised sales copy, listicles where the items do no real work, and anything that demeans or stereotypes a group of people.
We do not sell link insertions into existing published articles, and we do not buy guest posts or placements on other sites.
Editorial Process
- Pitch first. Do not send a finished draft cold. Use the form below with your proposed topic, the angle, the subject area it fits, and the domain you want to link to. Two paragraphs is plenty.
- We respond. If the topic is not right for us we will tell you quickly so you do not waste time writing it. If it is, we will ask for the draft or, on the US$200 tier, for your brief.
- Editorial review. We read the full piece against everything on this page. Expect a decision within 5 business days. We may decline without detailed feedback, and our decision is final.
- Acceptance and invoice. If we accept, we invoice you. Nothing is owed before this point.
- Editing and publication. We edit for accuracy, length, structure, and style, and we publish once payment clears. We will show you the edited version before it goes live. We will not change your argument or your conclusions without asking you first.
Rights and Ongoing Terms
You keep copyright in your work. You grant us a perpetual, non-exclusive right to publish it on Shared Interest Blog and to distribute it through our usual channels, including Pinterest, X, and our email list.
Published contributions stay live indefinitely. We reserve the right to remove or unlink a contribution if the destination site goes offline, starts serving malware, is taken over, or becomes something we would not have linked to in the first place. We will contact you before doing so where it is practical.
We make corrections promptly when errors are identified, including in contributed pieces.
Pitch a Contribution
Tell us your name, the subject area, your proposed topic and angle, the domain you want to link to, and which tier you want. If you have published elsewhere, one or two links to your best work helps. You can also reach us at editorial@sharedinterestblog.com.
Just Want to Suggest a Topic?
Separate from the paid programme, and free. If there is something you would like us to dig into, an under-covered angle, or a question you keep seeing badly answered elsewhere, we would like the suggestion. Pitches go to the editor responsible for the relevant subject area, and if it is something we can do well, we will add it to the brief queue. We cannot commit to covering every suggestion, but every one is read.