The Business media submission and Design Guide

Table of Contents

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

1. Grammar

In Business media, we ensure your piece complies with our internal style guide in terms of grammar and formatting. This allows us to have a uniform quality standard for every piece we publish.

We understand many of our authors are not English native speakers, and your article needn’t arrive in perfect English to be accepted, but there are two advantages to doing a basic grammar check yourself before submitting:

1. The less time we need to edit your article, the faster we can publish it.
2. The less time we need to edit articles overall, the more articles we can run in any given month — including yours.

There is no need to complicate this step. A free tool like Grammarly will do.

One more point, whether you write in British English or American English, we’ll retain the respective spellings throughout the piece, but try to be consistent in one or the other.

2. Formatting

Medium has published a great guide on how to format your title.

At Business media, the sequence of the three first element the reader sees when opening your article is this: (1) Title, (2) Subtitle, (3) Cover Image

Please keep them in the right order.

Title

Only the first line of the story is considered the title. Select the text and click the large “T” icon to format the title.

Capitalize your title, meaning minor words are typed in lower case with all major words being capitalized

Write quality headlines.

Eight out of ten people will read a headline, yet only 20% will read the rest. Why? Because almost all of them are either just so boring, way too formulaic, or stuffed with exact match keywords.

• Make your headline benefit-driven for your target audience
• Don’t confuse your readers
• Take advantage of the curious human mind

Here are some tips from Medium:

• Be specific. Don’t leave the reader to guess what your piece is about.
• Spark interest. Engage the reader’s interest by highlighting what’s unique about your piece.
• Be clear. Avoid confusing terms, general statements, or “insider” jargon.
• Be clean. Watch out for typos in your headlines and please don’t use profanity.
• Go for reads, not clicks. Steer clear of clickbait headlines — tropes like “one weird thing” or using “this/that” to get the reader to click. Make sure your story backs up the claim in the headline.
• Bigger is not better. Make sure the caps lock is off. No all-caps titles.

Here are a few great headline examples:

• How To Become Ridiculously Self-Aware In 20 Minutes
• How to Figure Out What the Hell You Want to Do With Your Life
• 9 Business Lessons I Learned Making $100,000 Online in the Past 3 Years
• My Powerful 1-Hour Routine for Quick Success on Medium
• Elon Musk Wants You To Merge With Your Technology

Here are a few not-so-great headlines:

• On Headlines
• Mom
• To Be a Perfect Person, Do This One Simple Thing

Subtitle

Writing directly below the title is considered the subtitle. Select the text and click the small “T” icon to format the subtitle.

For your subtitle, use normal sentence case: Only capitalize the first word and any proper nouns.

• Please do NOT include a link in the title and subtitle
• Please do NOT write your title and subtitle with all capital letters
• Submissions must have a clear and descriptive title and subtitle — they’re the first thing a user sees when viewing a story.
• Please use verbs in their direct form in titles, avoid present continuous where possible
• Please keep your title, subtitle, and cover image in the right order
• You can use Title Case Converter to adjust titles and subtitles

Note: Changing a title or subtitle in the content of an article does not ensure it updates the SEO title and description. Be sure to update in both places. This article helps clarify Medium’s SEO options and settings.

Cover images

In Business media, all stories have a cover image that follows the title and subtitle.

Images can help improve the readability of a story — especially feature images. They can make the story more inviting.

Always include a high-resolution image at the top of a story under your headline. This has the following benefits:

1. When people share your story on Facebook and Twitter, it will be more prominent in news feeds, making people more likely to click on it.
2. It will look better in Medium’s own news feeds.
3. Humans are visual creatures and click on images.

Medium offers four different image widths. Note that these will all look the same on mobile.

3. What to Avoid

We prefer to focus on more evergreen advice.

Social entrepreneurship, innovation management, corporate social responsibility, creativity habits, design thinking methods, tools. We know these things exist. We know there’s a way to succeed with them. We want to. We just don’t know “how”.

If you can tell us how that’s fantastic. Please do it.

We don’t want generic steps and tips the reader can’t copy such as “define your target audience, be authentic, use data, set a goal, and so on.”

Please provide detailed instructions the reader can follow to implement this step in their own work and business.

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

The easiest way to develop a great gut feeling for what you should submit to Business media is to read a lot. It might sound obvious, but a lot of our submissions show people don’t do it.

Here’s an excerpt from the broad range of topics we cover and always love to see more on.

Topics to write about

• Entrepreneurship case studies
• Startup engagement
• Corporate entrepreneurship
• Business model
• Business model innovation
• Growth stories
• Intrapreneurship
• Innovation
• Open innovation
• Sustainability
• Circular economy
• Design thinking
• Creativity
• Design thinking applications and tools

As long as your story is related to entrepreneurship, innovation creativity, sustainability, and design thinking, there are no boundaries on what you can cover.

Types of stories to write

1. The case study. This is usually a complete, first-person account of an experience or event you were a part of.
2. The breakdown. This type of post covers a resource, ad, or campaign element by element, either chronologically or sequentially. By dissect what’s good and bad about each one, the reader can then piece together a similar result themselves.
3. The analysis. A deep dive into selected, relevant parts of an innovation, design thinking, sustainability effort, sometimes through the lens of a certain framework. This could be heavily backed with data or more story-driven.
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.

Once you’ve done the hard part — writing something that matters — all you have to do is format your work and submit it to Business media . Here are some final things to look at before doing so.

Your Medium 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)

Submissions must not be spammy. We do not publish stories whose sole intent is to sell or promote a book, blog, service, tool, or anything we deem to be a product.

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

All articles in Business media are part of the Medium Partner Program. The article is the product. People are paying $5/month to read articles inside Medium’s paywall. That means they’re not here to go elsewhere, and they don’t want to wade through a thinly disguised pitch fest in exchange for some potentially valuable information. Hence, our promotion policies are strict.

• Don’t include any affiliate links to books, courses, or anything else you or someone else is selling.
• 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 is okay to reference your other work in your article where relevant, but if we see excessive link-spamming to your blog or other articles, we’ll tone down the number of links in your piece.

6. How to Submit

Add a story to a publication

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.
5. If you are the owner or editor of the publication, then your story will be immediately added to the publication. Readers can view your story in the publication. If you are a writer for the publication, then your story will be immediately submitted to the publication editors for review. The editors of that publication will have a chance to review your draft. Readers will not see your story in the publication until it is reviewed and added to the publication.

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 Business media, please leave a comment below “I want to be a writer”.

We both accept drafts and already published articles.

We publish a maximum of 1 story per day per writer. Please do not spam us with submissions. Send one submission per day.

If a submission is not yet ready for publication, we’ll leave a private note explaining why. In some cases, submissions can be reworked and resubmitted. Do not resubmit stories without correcting the indicated issues.

We reserve the right to make minor changes to your submission without notice. Possible changes include rewriting a title or subtitle, reformatting section headings and paragraphs, and removing undisclosed affiliate links. We make these minor changes in lieu of rejecting a submission.

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 featured by Medium. Can I add it to Business media as well?

Absolutely yes. When you add your story to a publication, you are adding a whole new audience to it (that publication’s followers). Your story will still be promoted by Medium on its homepage and topic pages, in addition to the publication and the publication’s social channels.

Can I add my article to two publications?

Medium only allows articles to be published to one publication at a time. If your article has been published with a different publication, we are not allowed to request it to Business media.

Are you going to put my article behind a paywall?

Medium has recently launched a Partner Program that authors can join if they are interested in earning money from their content. Ultimately, this decision is made by you, the author, and we are not allowed to change your settings.

My story was not curated. Why is that?

Curation depends on Medium’s curators. To increase your chances to get curated you can visit this link.