Submission Guidelines
Why we exist & what we yearn to publish, plus best practices.
Look at the cover image by Matheus above and imagine: What could stir up such genuine laughter among friends or colleagues? For us here at Real SaaS Content, we believe it’s original stories, and that’s what we are about.
We love and yearn to publish electrifying stories of how SaaS founders, executives/employees, or consultants overcame challenges or carried out experiments aimed at driving SaaS business growth. Both the ones that succeeded in igniting the expected growth and those that failed, Real SaaS Content yearns to publish these!
Our ultimate goal is getting Real SaaS Content to become a repository of the most-intriguing original stories of igniting growth in SaaS companies — something our publication founder, Victor Eduoh, couldn’t find when he searched for one in March 2020.
Before now, you could only find such stories as case studies by visiting and digging deep into various SaaS blogs or communities scattered on the web. But, not anymore.
We want people, like you, to come here, as the most reliable place to find a story peculiar to their situation on their way to overcoming, mirroring, and applying how someone else overcame a challenge in their own quest to ignite SaaS growth.
That’s why we call it Real SaaS Content — stories to ignite real growth.
It Must Be a Story
There’s enough advice by “gurus” and “experts” on the web. We didn’t start Real SaaS Content to rehearse them. Thus, each submission MUST be a story, no matter how brief, detailing, or showing how you or someone in the SaaS industry did something aimed at achieving something. Seriously, we don’t care if you were successful or not, we care more about the story, showing how you succeeded or failed. We publish stories from 1,000–3,500 words.
Entertain, Educate, & Inspire
Each story should align with an important topic relevant to growing SaaS: Content marketing, analytics, SEO, growth marketing, sales cadence, cold outreach, email marketing, customer experience, pricing strategy, or overarching business strategy. Stories we love most seek to entertain, educate, inspire, and spark conversations among readers.
Grammar, Styling, & Others
We want stories that have been carefully structured and edited for grammar, readability, spelling, and cohesiveness. You can get help on these by using services like Hemingway App, Grammarly, Pro Writing Aid, or from friends who can provide you with critical feedback. Please, do these before submitting your story, as it helps us facilitate the process of getting your story published.
All stories submitted to RSC should have a featured image above or below the title. You can find good stock photos on Unsplash, Pexels, or Twenty20. Bonus points if you include beautiful, rich media such as data, GIFs, video, or charts in your story to drive home your points more. However, only images owned by you or those with a cited source should be included in your stories. We reserve the right to remove inappropriate pictures from your submissions and replace them with those our editors pick.
Ensure to use Medium’s formatting features, including headers, quotes, italics, bullets, and others, etc., as they make your stories easier to read and comprehendible.
Other Things to Keep in Mind
Only Submit Unpublished Drafts
To give the stories we publish on RSC the most exposure, we only accept unpublished drafts (i.e., we don’t consider published stories). We do this because Medium’s algorithm prioritizes fresh stories. Also, the RSC homepage is sorted by date of when a story was published (not when we accepted it into the publication). Thus, stories published long before submitting to RSC will perform poorly regarding exposure on the Medium platform, and we don’t want that.
Stories published outside of Medium on your external website or company blogs are welcome as unpublished drafts, but those previously published on Medium are not.
We Reserve the Right to Edit Your Story
The RSC team of editors can edit the content of your story to eliminate grammatical errors. As well, they can add images, logos, ads, bylines, ads, videos, etc. to your story. If you remove content added by one of our editors after your story is published on RSC, your story will be removed entirely from RSC, and you will lose your slot as one of our contributors.
We Want You (& Your Story) for the Long-Term
Once we’ve published your story on RSC, we demand that it only remain in our publication. We will not accept stories from those who publish with RSC and then go on to publish the same stories elsewhere on Medium.
Please, keep your author bylines between 1–2 sentences long and feel free to include 1–2 links in it. We don’t accept anything longer than that (including excessive promotional links in your stories, author photos, newsletter forms, etc.).
Affiliate disclosures
All product endorsements and affiliate links in your stories must be disclosed in an obvious and unavoidable way. It is against the law not to disclose affiliate links.
You can place disclosures within Medium’s code block formatting below your story’s featured image and above the main content. Create a code block by starting a new paragraph with `”(three backticks).
Response Time
We’re quick to respond — and we try to respond to all submissions, but it varies between 24–72 hours. If you don’t hear back about your submission within this time, kindly assume it won’t be published.
To have our team consider your story, please fill out this form. If your story aligns with RSC’s themes and goals, we’ll be in touch soon.
