Guest post guidelines

$300 USD ex-GST. A full article published on the Clean Commit blog under your byline, with up to two dofollow links to your domain. You pay nothing unless we accept.

Most guest post pitches we receive are the same recycled article with a different brand pasted in. We're not publishing those at any price. What we will publish is writing that our readers (ecommerce founders, Shopify teams, CRO people) would genuinely stop and read. If you can write that, this is a straightforward deal.

What a Clean Commit article looks like

Go read a couple of posts on the blog before you write anything. The pattern you'll see:

• 2,000+ words. Our published posts run 2,000 to 4,000. If your draft is 800 words of padding, it's not close.
• Structured properly. Clear H2 sections, H3s underneath where needed, headings that say something ("The deadline does the work", not "Benefits of Urgency").
• First person is welcome. Real experience beats summarised best practice every time. Numbers, screenshots, things that went wrong — that's the good stuff.
• An FAQ section at the end if the topic suits one.
• Images throughout. More on that below.

The AI policy

Using AI to help you write is fine. We do too. What matters is the result: if the article reads naturally, it's welcome; if it's clunky, generic AI output, it gets rejected. Submitting something AI wrote end to end almost always lands in the second bucket, and we'll catch it — every submission gets scored for AI-generated content before a human ever reads it.

The difference is simple: AI can help you structure, tighten and polish an article built on things you actually know. It can't fake having run the experiment, seen the data, or made the mistake. Write from experience, use whatever tools you like to make it read well.

The promotion policy

You can mention your brand or product in context. You cannot sell it. The test is whether the mention survives being read by someone who doesn't care about your company.

Fine:

"We tested this on our own checkout at Acme and the two-step version lifted completion by 9% over four weeks. Here's the setup we used."

The brand is there, the reader learned something, nobody got pitched.

Not fine:

"That's why leading brands choose Acme, the #1 checkout platform for growing stores. Start your free 14-day trial today."

That's an ad. It doesn't matter how good the surrounding article is; this sentence gets the whole thing rejected.

If your product genuinely is the example (you're describing your own data or your own build), that's fine — describe it the way you'd describe a competitor's tool doing the same job.

Links

• Up to two dofollow links to your domain. Place them where they make sense in the content, with natural anchor text.
• As many supporting links as the article needs — sources, studies, tools you reference. These are all tagged nofollow.
• Don't worry about internal links. We don't expect you to link to other Clean Commit articles — we'll edit your post and insert those ourselves.
• Don't stack links to other clients or "partners" into the article. We'll strip them, and if the article was obviously written to carry them we'll reject the whole piece.

Images

Articles without images don't get published, so plan for:

• A feature image (we'll format it for the blog).
• Inline images through the body — screenshots, charts, diagrams. Our posts typically carry several. Screenshots of real data and real interfaces beat stock photos every time; honestly, just don't send stock photos.
• You must own or have rights to every image you send.

How to submit: write the article in a Google Doc with the images embedded where they belong, set sharing to "anyone with the link", and submit that link in the form. We'll extract the images and place them in the published post where you put them in the doc. The first image also becomes the feature image and stays in the article body. We import the DOCX version to preserve embedded images; please send the shared Google Doc link rather than an HTML export.

What happens after you submit

1. We review the draft — automated checks first (AI score, relevance, link profile), then a human reads it.
2. If we accept, pay by card via Stripe Checkout or choose a Stripe invoice on the request form. Prices are ex-GST. Stripe Tax adds 10% GST for Australian customers; overseas customers pay no GST. Our ABN appears on the Stripe invoice. Payment is due within seven days; we don't work with PayPal right now.
3. We edit lightly (clarity and house style, never meaning), load it into the blog with your images, and publish under your byline.
4. You get the live URL by email once it's up.

We keep editorial control: headlines may get reworked, filler gets cut, and anything that drifts into selling gets rewritten or removed. If an edit would change what you're saying, we'll check with you first.