Please stop writing for fintech websites no one visits

Let me guess. Someone in marketing reached out this week with a “great opportunity”. You’ve been invited to write a guest post.

You know the type: a site with a name like Digital Transactions Review or eMoney Insight – just credible enough to fool your boss, just empty enough to publish anything.

“It’s a great chance to position us as thought leaders”, they said.

Here’s what they didn’t say: you’re about to write 900 words of AI-paraphrased filler, dump it on a trade site nobody reads, and call it strategy.

This isn’t a guest column in the Financial Times.

It’s a content farm, and it survives by selling you the illusion of importance.

The scam you’re paying for

Let’s be honest. These sites exist for two reasons:

1. To host press releases about minor funding rounds.
2. To sell guest post slots to companies like yours.

The content itself? Disposable. Repetitive. Unread.

There are no actual “readers” – just interns scraping phrases for slide decks, and ghostwriters searching for tone cues. You’re shouting into a padded room where the only echo is your competitor’s head of sales doing the same thing.

And yet you celebrate it on LinkedIn like you won a Pulitzer.

“Proud to have contributed this important piece on digital transformation…”

Mate. It’s 5 ways to pick a payment provider on a site that’s basically a holding pen for sponsored fluff.

Nobody believes it. Nobody shares it. Nobody bookmarks it ‘for later.’

It’s the digital equivalent of handing out branded pens at a trade show.

Your content is facing the wrong way

Here’s the bigger problem. Even if someone did read your piece – they’re not your buyer. They’re not your user. They’re not even interested.

Because your content isn’t written for them. It’s written for your CMO’s OKRs.

It’s performative output, not genuine communication.

You’re writing advice for people who already sell what you sell. You’re explaining onboarding to other onboarding teams. You’re defining SCA for the fifteenth time to people who’ve worked in payments since Monzo was a Trello board.

It’s all inward-facing. It’s marketing that markets to marketing.

There’s no prestige in a fake audience

At some point, someone in your company convinced you that having your byline on “an industry-leading site” conferred credibility.

That’s how these platforms make money. They sell that belief.

But you know who doesn’t care?

Your customers.

They’d rather hear you explain something clearly in a Slack thread, or speak like a real person on a podcast about what went wrong last quarter.

Nobody’s out here saying:

I was unsure about this vendor – then I read their piece on Digital Resilience in Payments and signed immediately.

That has never happened. In the history of fintech. Ever.

What to do instead

You want visibility? Try this:

• say something real on your own site
• publish something unpolished but true on LinkedIn
• record a 3-minute teardown of a failed integration and post it with no intro
• write something so clear and specific it couldn’t possibly have come from a ghostwriter
• stop writing headlines that only make sense to people already in the room.

Want to be useful? Write for the buyer who’s two steps behind you, not the peer who’s already faking it.

Closing plea (and threat)

This industry is full of smart people saying nothing.

Not because they don’t have stories – but because they’re stuck in the optics loop.

They think being seen to say something is the same as saying something useful.

It isn’t.

So next time someone sends you a link and says,

“Hey, we’ve secured a guest spot on this Tier-1 trade site.”

Try replying with:

“Cool. Who actually reads it?”

And if the answer is “decision-makers in the space”, ask them to name three. Then think about whether any of them likely clicked on your last piece.

No? Right.

Then stop writing for ghosts.