The first thing you must accept when it comes to guest posting is each site owner has their own idea of how much a guest post on their site worth. Some would charge reasonably, some would set waay too much for their site worth, some would adopt I-don’t-care attitude (I know it’s not worth that much, but if you want it this is my price), some have different priorities and will accept it for free.
(Made Up) Rules
As the person who simply want the link, I made a few rules that I think would do for now:
Pay for Link
Yes, you’ll have to pay for link to get significant progress, otherwise the acceptance rate will be too low that it might not worth the time spent reaching out. If you think about it, the site owner has almost no benefit from accepting your guest post so a monetary one is a clear benefit for them.
Quality? Unless it’s a really amazing content (which would not worth the time for a single guest post anyway), they can create any content you created themselves, especially if they already have regular author(s).
Measure worth by DA/DR
DA/DR so far are similar, usually if one site has high DA it will have high DR as well so just pick one. I use DR. The concept is simple: the higher the DR, the higher their worth (in monetary value)
The value will be different for different niche so you need to find information/make a few deals to find what the average is. Then you can decide whether to take or decline when site owners state their price.
Traffic
Site traffic shouldn’t have any influence in how much link juice a backlink gives to your site. I might be wrong on this, but for the moment I’m operating under this assumption. This means I will still pay more to get backlink from a DR 50 site with 200k visitors compared to a DR 30 site with 3 million visitors.
Keep in mind that link farm sites are ABLE TO HAVE HIGH DR. I don’t know for sure how they generate backlinks to their sites but some of them have DR 30-50. I know this because I used to buy link from link sellers in Fiver.
The easiest way to identify these websites is to check their traffic. Visible red flags are: very low traffic despite their high DR (average in thousands), volatile jump and dive in traffic as if they have certain keywords up in SERP then got kicked out, sites cover things directed for US/EU countries but most visitors come from India/Pakistan.
These are not surefire way to identify a link farm site, but if you stumbled upon these kind of sites when looking for guest post, just skip them to be safe.
Focus on the benefit you seek
You’re reaching out for dofollow contextual backlink, so focus on that and don’t let site owners distract you.
Some owners will try to convince you that it’s an honor to be featured in their site, it will be read by millions of people, that all you need is a link in your author bio.
A site owner once tried to sell it to me ‘look at this guy, he made 100+ articles in my site and gain 100000+ views!’. I see the articles, there were absolutely no link back to the guy’s site within the article body and it baffles me. Yes, it generated 100000+ views for the owner’s site, but what’s in it for the writer?
Link in bio is usually your site so you cant change anchor text and link to different page. Even if you can, link in author bio is not valued as good as a contextual link by Google. So what is the expected advantage? People click on the link?
How many people read and article, scroll to the bottom of the page, read the author bio, then click the link? I certainly don’t. Most people won’t even read the entire article, they just skim to the part that they’re interested on, read it, then get out.
Unless you’re a new writer trying to make a name for yourself, I see no point in doing this. Even if that is the case, you just write a few articles and move on, there’s no need to create 100+ articles for free. That’s just crazy.
Even crazier story: a site owner once ask $700 up front. In exchange he will provide me author access for me to create content for his site every month, no contextual link allowed, only 1 link in author bio. It’s like telling me to pay him to work for him. Genius.
Some Examples on My Niche
These are different amount that some site owners ask for a guest post. There is no market standard and each owner is free to decide how much their site worth so none of these are outrageous, you just need to set your own standard on which to take and which to skip.
- DR 19: $75
- DR 33: $350, only last 1 year
- DR 71: $500
- DR 73: $550
- DR 50: $600
- DR 42: $250
- DR 33: $200
- DR 53: $200
- DR 33: $55
- DR 45: $100
- DR 36: $200