What do you community people think about guest posting? Is it a viable strategy, and should I give it a go? I've been receiving a lot of requests lately, and I'm curious about your experiences.
Can you share some guidelines for accepting guest posts on your site? What criteria do you use to decide if a post is a good fit? Additionally, does guest posting genuinely boost traffic and engagement for your site? If so, what kind of increase have you seen?
Another aspect I'm curious about is pricing. How do you determine the cost for guest posting based on the site's Domain Authority (DA)? Do you have a standard rate, or does it vary depending on the DA and the quality of the content?
I'm eager to hear your insights and any tips you might have for managing guest posts effectively. Your feedback will be invaluable in helping me decide whether to pursue this strategy. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Thanks/
Hey Mike,
From your post, it sounds as though you're saying people are asking you to guest post on YOUR site?
Is that correct?
If that is the case then you need to decide on the merits of doing this.
Firstly, when it comes to people posting content on your site, the main benefits to you are you can earn money on a per post basis and you get free content for your website.
The disadvantages are, you have no idea what the quality of that content is going to be like, so you may have to disapprove after you've received payment so you'll need to refund.
Additionally, the reason people are asking you is because they want a backlink from you, Google's "official" guidelines state that guest posts should be marked as "sponsored", which in turn renders the backlink "no follow", and the people who are requesting guest post for backlinks on your site won't want that, they will want the link to be "do follow".
In other words, you have a decision to make about accepting payment and then going against Google's official guidelines (just so you know, there are Billions of guest posts online that go AGAINST Google's guidelines, so the "moral" decision is simply down to you, I'm not the "honesty police", hahaha!! if the deal seemed "good", I'd do it).
Realistically, one payment and one article aren't going to change your income and change your rankings dramatically, so one guest post is just that, a one-time payment from someone and one additional article,
So, for it to be a "business model", you'd need to have lots of these requests, but be prepared for lots of "admin hassles", potential refunds of money, and all the links pointing from your guest post to their websites to either be "no follow" (which the people requesting definitely don't want) or to break Google's "official" guidelines (again, billions of posts are doing this without any problems... FOR NOW!!).
As for what to charge, well, I can get a guest post on somewhere like Forbes or New York Times for about $2,000-$3,000.
I'm guessing you're not at that level.
There are plenty of websites offering guest post opportunities for $500-$1,000 per post, usually, they have DR/DA metrics of 80-90.
There are guest post opportunities on DA/DR60s for about $250, and you can even get some offers at around $75-$100.
Based on that information, unless you have a DA/DR50+ website you're going to be "officially" asking for a lot less, but there are some website owners, who perhaps have a DA/DR30 website and say their charge is $500 (they're just aking up a price and hoping for the best), and they're hope is if one person pays I've just made a quick $500, and often 1 or 2 people do pay that amount.
However, the one's who do pay that amount won't be very savvy marketers, so essentially you're taking advantage of their ignorance.
A savvy marketer would have done their "homework" on you first, they would've checked your websites traffic numbers, especially your traffic graph to see any wild decreases in traffic (they know that your website has been "hit" during an algorithm update), they will have checked your sitemap, looked through a few of your articles for their ranking positions for your chosen keywords (all done with about 3 clicks of ahrefs/semrush), they would check your domain authority, and again looked at a long-term graph to ensure there weren't any sudden spikes (you have manipulated your domain authority).
Only once a savvy marketer has done all of the above would they contact you (most have a standard outreach email that they send to everyone, just change the names, etc.), and obviously they would only ever contact you if you "passed" all the above checks and had a decent domain authority/rating.
However, the vast majority, of emails received are from people who aren't that great at marketing, they've just heard "backlinks" will "help with rankings" and that "guest posts are a great way to get backlinks", so they blast an email to about 10,000 website owners, knowing the majority won't answer, but if they get 10 website owners to reply per 10,000 email blast they will feel this is "success".
No doubt, you will then get a terrible article to add to your website, hahahaha!!
Realistically, to be accepting guest posts on your website, you want there to be a decent amount of requests, e.g. 30-50 requests per month (so even charging $75-$100 you're making a nice amount every month), but also don't forget this is content that is going on YOUR SITE, so you want that content to be RELEVANT to your website, to be of decent quality, and you don't want the content to be spammy, illegal, etc.
You have to ask yourself what (real) benefit someone would get from placing a guest post on your website.
As an example, let's say your website is 7 months old and has about 150 articles on it.
It's a great start, but this is NOT a good website to be writing a guest post on, simply because it's still very new, it doesn't have much content on it, it won't have got much domain authority, so it's not worth my while.
So, as an example, if your website is at this stage and you are receiving requests then the people requesting dont know anything about online marketing, they're just doing what some spammy SEO guide or course told them to do.
Your choice is you can ignore them or take advantage of their naivety (hahahaha!! let's not to ourselves, people do it).
So, it really depends on how authoritative your website is, as to whether the people requesting to post on your website know what they're doing.
As an example, if your website is DA/DR40 and about 3 years old, never been hit in an algorithm update, traffic steadily rising, lots of articles ranking positions 1-10, healthy backlink profile with lots of variety, steady increase in DA/DR, and if you were in a "slightly" relevant niche to me, I'd be willing to give you $100 to post on your website.
As for you posting a guest post on someone else's website, it's more or less the same as above and you doing all these checks in THEIR website.
Plus, something else about guest posting on someone else's website, the DA/DR can have less impact depending on how many articles on that website.
Basically, we guest post (which is a form of parasite SEO by the way, which I wrote about earlier, but done for backlinks as opposed to ranking in Google) to get backlinks from a high authority domain.
BUT
These backlinks will dilute, i.e. become less effective depending on how many articles and outgoing links there are on that website.
The domain authority is "spread" across all the articles on the website.
So, if there are two websites with a DA of 70...
the first website has 200,000 articles
the second website has 30 articles
Getting a link from the SECOND website would be so much better because the DA70 authority is spread between FEWER articles and fewer links.
As you can see, there's a LOT more to guest posting and backlinks than initially meets the eye.
This is just a snippet of the things you need to know before even attempting it (whether on your website or on someone else's website)
What do you community people think about guest posting? Is it a viable strategy, and should I give it a go? I've been receiving a lot of requests lately, and I'm curious about your experiences.
Can you share some guidelines for accepting guest posts on your site? What criteria do you use to decide if a post is a good fit? Additionally, does guest posting genuinely boost traffic and engagement for your site? If so, what kind of increase have you seen?
Another aspect I'm curious about is pricing. How do you determine the cost for guest posting based on the site's Domain Authority (DA)? Do you have a standard rate, or does it vary depending on the DA and the quality of the content?
I'm eager to hear your insights and any tips you might have for managing guest posts effectively. Your feedback will be invaluable in helping me decide whether to pursue this strategy. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Thanks/
Ok.
Sir,
Thanks for your feedback; you're spot on. I'm definitely going to take these into account. If I could get $200 or 400 for each post, that would be fantastic. Let's also assist them with some backlinks to boost their SEO.
By the way, it's like these people are agency I received a message this morning that makes me think so. Here's a part of it:
"Hello Mike,We want to partner with you as a reseller or agency.Please provide the list of your own websites with reseller prices (not retail direct buyer prices).As we are an agency, we need to provide the best competitive pricing to our client base even after adding our profit margin.I expect the agency discounted pricing as a special deal; that way, we can increase order volume and bring more business.Looking forward to hearing from you.
If you have any questions, please reach out to us via Live Chat - we're happy to help!Regards"
@mikerrsq With agencies you will always earn less money than people coming directly to you.
If you think about it, the agency is almost doing affiliate marketing!
They ask you your price, you give them a price, they then increase that price by 20-30%, and the additional amount is their commission, so they want to get a price from you as cheap as possible (which they have mentioned in their email).
Plus, you've mentioned, "$200-$400".
Just from my experience, if I was paying that amount (let's say $300), I would expect your website to pass the following metrics:
A Domain authority.Domain Rating of at least 60, i.e. DA60
You can check your DA here - https://moz.com/domain-analysis
I would then put your domain name through ahrefs and I would check your traffic stats for the last 24 months.
I would want your current traffic levels to be at least 80,000 visitors per month and I want to see that your traffic has consistently increased over the past 24 months (no huge spikes or dips in traffic).
I would then check your last 24 months of DA to ensure this has slowly and consistently increased.
I would then check your backlink profile to ensure that you don't have a large amount of spammy and irrelevant backlinks.
Only if you pass ALL OF THE ABOVE would I be willing to pay you $300 for a backlink from a guest post.
Can you satisfy all of the above metrics?
Personally, the above email says to me they are looking to get as cheap a deal from you as possible, e.g. they want to pay you about $25 per guest post with backlinks, they will charge their clients around $75 (they have made too many comments about "low pricing" for my liking, which in turn tells me, they don't really care about their clients, they aren't a professional agency, they just sell backlinks and look to make profit... that's just the feeling I get from reading their email)
@partha I just put my website into Moz.com for fun and my DA is 1 🤣 🤣
2 linking root domains, 32 ranking keywords and 15% spam score so maybe have a bit of work to do yet 😆 😆 😆
What do you community people think about guest posting? Is it a viable strategy, and should I give it a go? I've been receiving a lot of requests lately, and I'm curious about your experiences.
Can you share some guidelines for accepting guest posts on your site? What criteria do you use to decide if a post is a good fit? Additionally, does guest posting genuinely boost traffic and engagement for your site? If so, what kind of increase have you seen?
Another aspect I'm curious about is pricing. How do you determine the cost for guest posting based on the site's Domain Authority (DA)? Do you have a standard rate, or does it vary depending on the DA and the quality of the content?
I'm eager to hear your insights and any tips you might have for managing guest posts effectively. Your feedback will be invaluable in helping me decide whether to pursue this strategy. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Thanks/
To be straight to the point: I never accept guest posts, because frankly, people just don't know my niche at all. And even though , let's assume that they will do their research thoroughly (and that would be needed!), there's probably not something that I have already blogged about, unless they would actually assemble a miniature kit and review that,or create their own miniature with pictures and vids 🙂
Also, linking to another website would need to be a 100% relevant. The offers I had to link to casino sites and such, jaiks!
Lizzy
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