Thank you for your interest in our guest articles program. We are excited to help connect your valuable expertise to the wonderful people who use Debt Payoff Planner to improve their lives. This guide is intended to ensure that our guest post program creates value for our users, our partners, and advances our mission to help 10 million people become debt-free. Please ensure you read and understand the entirety of this guide before submitting your article for consideration.
About Debt Payoff Planner
The planning & tracking app for people who want to be debt-free
Helping people overcome the challenges of getting started on their journey, staying motivated during it, and accelerating their payoff as they go.
| Very popular 1M+ downloads | Highly rated 4.7 stars | Proven to work $1B+ paid off |
Start your journey – Quickly get a plan and feel better today
- Endlessly paying bills with no end in sight can leave you feeling frustrated, hopeless, and depressed.
- Having a step-by-step payment plan with a clear debt-free date puts you back in control and feeling motivated.
- Debt Payoff Planner makes it possible to achieve this transformation from frustrated to motivated in as little as 15 minutes by making it simple to enter your information and providing an easy to understand plan with a known payoff date.
Stay motivated – Beat payoff fatigue with micro-celebrations
- Your debt-free journey can be an emotional rollercoaster and staying on track requires more than just will power.
- Seeing the progress you’ve made, keeping the end in sight, and celebrating every step you take can supercharge your motivation.
- Debt Payoff Planner’s payment tracker unlocks your motivation superpower by keeping you aware of your debt-free date, progress made, and milestones achieved through fun and inspiring visualizations.
Accelerate your payoff – Resources to find the best approach for your situation
- Many tactics exist to reduce debt, cut expenses, or boost your income, but only a few may be right for your specific situation.
- A clear understanding of the pros and cons associated with these tactics can help ensure you make the best decisions for your situation.
- Debt Payoff Planner provides resources to make you aware of these opportunities along with a clear understanding of the tradeoffs so you can accelerate your payoff without harmful side-effects.
Debt Payoff Planner is free
A full featured version of Debt Payoff Planner is offered for free in order to help as many people as possible. We are able to offer this valuable app for free because many people choose to buy a pro version which has additional features that give an extra boost in motivation and plan optimization. The team behind Debt Payoff Planner is extremely grateful for the pro members that make it possible for us to offer a full featured version for free to those who aren’t able to support the app in this way.
About the Users We Serve
We recently conducted a survey of our users asking them if the following statements described their situation. This should give you some idea of their situations. In general, our users have debt, but are not always in dire straights. They are all interested in finding ways to stay motivated to continue their debt payoff journey and now that they are on a good path, they are looking for incremental ways to accelerate their payoff.
| Statement | % of respondents that agree this describes their situation |
| Before using Debt Payoff Planner I had no idea when I would be debt-free | 96% |
| Before using Debt Payoff Planner I felt hopeless and/or depressed about my debt | 84% |
| Debt Payoff Planner made it easy to determine my debt-free date | 88% |
| Knowing my debt-free date has been life changing and given me hope and determination | 92% |
| Without the step-by-step plan I would not know how to meet my debt-free date | 80% |
| Before having a step-by-step plan I would pay extra to various debts randomly | 88% |
| Having a step-by-step plan gives me confidence that I will meet my debt-free date | 96% |
| I regularly follow the step-by-step plan generated by Debt Payoff Planner | 92% |
| Following a step-by-step plan is accelerating my payoff | 96% |
| Before tracking my payments in Debt Payoff Planner I felt like I was not making any progress | 92% |
| Tracking my payments and seeing the progress I am making has given me life changing motivation to keep making my payments | 100% |
Our Offer to You as a Guest Author
- Posting your article on debtpayoffplanner.com
- Promoting your article in the Debt Payoff Planner mobile app
- We continuously promote the 5 most recent articles
- Once your article is no longer among the top 5 most recent, it will not be promoted in-app, but will still reside on our website
- You can include two “dofollow” links in the article
- One link to your company’s website in the author box
- One link at the end of the article to a specific resource you want our users to be aware of
- Your article can contain as many links as you like (within reason) to other guest articles you author and are hosted on Debt Payoff Planner
- If you no longer want your article on our site, we will remove your article at your request
We Reserve the Right to the Following
- Promote your article via any other channel we deem appropriate
- Promote other articles and resources alongside your article, however done in a way that does not suggest your endorsement in any way
- Convert text to links within your article that direct readers to other resources internal or external to our website
- Remove your article for any reason
- We will do a thorough review of the article before it is posted and do not expect the need to remove your article once it is approved and posted. However, we cannot guarantee that something changes in the future such that it will require removal.
- Remove links and / or change dofollow links to nofollow links for any reason
- Again, we do not anticipate a need to do this, but still reserve the right to do so
- We have had a case where we had to remove links that pointed users to a website that had been compromised and represented a security risk to our users. We will continue to prioritize the security of our users in such cases.
- Require acceptance to your affiliate program and the use of our affiliate link within your article if you are representing a product or service that offers an affiliate program and your article is about those products or services.
Content Requirements
1. Providing value to the reader is priority #1
As a mission based company, Debt Payoff Planner prioritizes creating value for our users and audience members ahead of the value we or our partners extract in the process. As such, priority #1 for any guest article must be to create value for the reader. Articles that prioritize keyword value ahead of content value will not be accepted. We believe that truly valuable content that the reader will want to share is the best way to create value for all parties involved.
Do not create articles that are aimed at ranking for keywords. Doing so will miss the point of the article. Because the traffic for this article will come from users of our app, there is no need to try to gain the attention of web bots. Your only aim should be to provide value to the reader.
2. Make your content something people want to share
High value content will give you the most mileage, but don’t forget to incorporate tried and true methods that get people sharing. A decent resource that highlights some of these methods can be found here: https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2019/05/triggers-share-content/
3. Target our app users, not our website visitors
Your article will be posted on the Debt Payoff Planner website, which is publicly available. However, most interactions with your article will not come from someone doing a search on the web for the topic you are writing about. The majority of interactions with your article will be the result of a Debt Payoff Planner app user seeing it in our resources area within the app. This means that your best chance for engagement will come from understanding and targeting the needs of our app users.
Example topic areas that are good for our app users
How to stay motivated during the long journey to become debt-free
- Accountability tips and tricks
- Celebrating progress
- Rewarding progress
- Avoiding common pitfalls
How to accelerate debt payoff
- Expense hacking
- Income boosting
- Debt restructuring
How to tackle other personal finance challenges once debt payoff is well in hand
- Ideas for repairing credit
- Where/when to start with investing
Overview articles on multiple topics that help people choose between options are good. A deep dive article on a specific topic is equally valuable. But it’s probably best to pick one or the other and not try to do too much in a single article.
4. Use your voice, but be consistent with our brand
Our brand focuses on the user and their need for help with becoming debt-free. We do not intermingle that with any other agenda. Therefore, the article should stay on point, avoid divisive topics, and be consistent with our brand voice which includes being:
- Positive & encouraging
- Compassionate & caring
- Trustworthy & honest
- Fun (in a clean way) & celebratory
5. Avoid the following
- Subject matter that is religious, political, or sexual in nature
- Offensive language of any kind
- Anything that could be construed as non-inclusive
- Being overly critical of other products or services
6. Content must be completely original
Use a plagiarism checker like https://www.duplichecker.com/ to ensure your content is unique. Plagiarized content has no place on Debt Payoff Planner. Additionally, recycled content that is duplicated elsewhere is prohibited.
7. Topic must be unique for Debt Payoff Planner
Please review the existing articles we have here: http://18.232.57.210/articles/
Your article should not duplicate a topic already covered. If you find something similar, consider broadening or narrowing the scope in order to make it unique.
Example Guest Articles on Debt Payoff Planner
Here are two example guest articles that were previously accepted and can be used to see how the above guidelines are applied in practice:
Deliverables
Please send the following material to articles@debtpayoffplanner.com. We will review your submission and either accept it, or request changes that are necessary before we can accept it. Once it is accepted, we will transform these materials into its final form on the website. Once it is posted, we will notify you. If there are any errors or updates you require, just let us know. Once you are satisfied, we encourage you to let your communities know about the availability of your content.
- Article text
- Headline: up to 10 words
- Body: up to 3000 words
- Provided as a Google docs or Microsoft word file
- Minimal formatting
- Use default theme
- Use only default heading and body text styles
- Numbered and bulleted lists are okay
- Section headings should start with H1, with child heading progressing as H2, H3, and so on
- H1 and H2 heading text should use APA style title case
- Can contain one link to your site or resource at the end of the article
- Feature image
- Provide a URL to the image you would like featured alongside your article
- Must be free, properly licensed, and royalty free
- Use unsplash.com or equivalent royalty free image website
- Provide any attribution requirements
- Author box
- Headshot – at least 256 x 256 or higher resolution image
- Author Name
- Title and company
- Company url
- How to contact – email and social media handles you want to share
- 80 – 100 word snippet about you, your company, and/or services offered
Before you begin
Before you spend any time writing your article, please contact us at articles@debtpayoffplanner.com to pre-approve your article idea. Please submit the proposed title of your article, a very brief abstract, and a bit about yourself and the company you represent. Getting pre-approval will help ensure that time spent writing the article will result in acceptance of it in our guest post program.
