Guest Posts Do Not Equal Free Links, + How much to charge?

Or WHY YOU SHOULD BE CHARGING $30 EACH TIME SOMEONE ASKS FOR A LINK

Back in January of this year I wrote a post titled "Guest Posts, Free Links, and Why it is Bad for your Business".

In the post I explained the following key points in more detail:

• Guest posts should contain zero links.
• "Guest posts" that contain links are not "guest posts", they are advertising.
• Giving away free links = charity that is hurting your business.
• People should be paying for links, because links = advertising.

But I did not explain how much people should be charging for links when they accept a guest post.

The basic price = $30.

This is the minimum price you should be charging just for your time and effort of adding a guest post containing links to your website. You have to edit and format everything on the page, add images, add the link(s), and you deserve to be paid for your time, effort, and the value of the link advert.

If you are charging less than $30, then you are not getting paid enough for your time.

Plus guest posts are presumably permanent advertising. Until the website is eventually deleted, the advert will be there for years. So $30 is a bargain when you consider the duration it will be there.

The premium rate = $60.

This is when your website is more popular. You can demand the higher rate because of the following reasons:

1. Your website is more popular and therefore worth more to advertisers.
2. Your website is more exclusive. Less outgoing links means the few outgoing links there are are considered to be more valuable. (Thanks to Google's "less is more" algorithms.)
3. You might also simply want to discourage advertisers by charging a heftier price, this then enforces the notion of value and exclusivity - while allowing you to present a website less bogged down by copious amounts of advertising.

The expensive rate = $100

This is when your website is super popular. It is probably your full time job working on this website / the business you have associated with it. Like above you benefit from the following factors:

• Super Popular.
• Super Exclusive.
• Possible Brand Name Recognition.

The website in question probably also has a social media presence on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc - and therefore is worth more to advertisers if they can be promoted on those too.

The super expensive rate = $200 or more...

The sky is the limit when it comes to popularity. Some very expensive / super popular blogs might be charging $400 for a single blog post.

This is sometimes the result of being a niche topic, the pseudo-celebrity status of the writer of the website, or just the sheer ridiculous popularity of a particular website.

What about sponsored content?

Now not every website accepts guest posts. Some websites might prefer that they write / make their own content, but they are still accepting sponsors for said content.

An example of this is video blogger Hanna Hart - best known for her "My Drunk Kitchen" YouTube channel. In the video below she has a guest on her YouTube channel, Seth Rogen, who is promoting the animated film "Sausage Party".

At which point you have to wonder, how much was Hanna Hart paid to be sponsored by "Sausage Party"?  Good question.



Well...

Hanna's YouTube channel is insanely popular. Over 2.5 million subscribers.

She has hundreds of videos. So many I was unable to find an actual statistic.

And she has access to working with companies selling both food and alcohol, and evidently films about food or alcohol.

So clearly she can make lots of these videos for sponsored clients if she so wished, and presumably charging a lot for her services and time.