How Much Should I Pay For A Guest Post?

Guest posting is the ‘in’ thing right now. Business owners, digital agencies, and even website owners are all looking to gain high-quality guest posts on authority websites. The problem with this, however, is that many high authority websites tend to charge a lot of money to publish guest posts on their site.

While it’s not wrong to charge people to publish guest posts on a website, I mean it does take time to upload and modify the blog post for SEO purposes, it’s more about the question many people are asking:

“How much should I pay for a guest post?”

This is where the lines start to get fuzzy when guest posting. But worry not this guide will give you a rundown of what you should be paying for guest contributions, well around that, based on our own internal study of guest post orders and years of operation in this industry. So where should we start?

Metrics.

How Much Should You Pay For A Guest Post Based On Metrics? 

The number one reason people have a high publishing fee in guest posts is because of the metrics their websites have and how important those metrics are to them. So, let’s break it down into the top metrics most people look at when paying for a guest post. They’re broken down into four different types:

• DA
• DR
• TF
• Traffic

Don’t Over Pay Fees For A Blog Post

DA or Domain Authority  

Domain authority is the authority or power a website has in its ranking. This metric was developed by MOZ and rises and falls based on different SEO factors. The overall number can help guest posters how well the website will rank in Google or other search pages.

Domain Authority is calculated out of a score of 100. Obviously the closer to 100 the score is the better a site will perform in search engines. This score is affected by 40 different signals which can include but isn’t limited to, trust scores, spam scores, age of the site, link data, traffic numbers and size of the site.

So how does domain authority relate when you’re using this metric when guest posting? When guest posting using the DA metric, it’s important to find sites which have a higher DA rating than 20. If you’re looking to gradually build your ranking slowly through a number of guest posts you can start within the DA 20-30+ range.

If you’re looking to really help push your ranking efforts in a short amount of time, then work on DA 40-50+. However, this normally comes with a decent price tag attached that publishers charge. So how much should you pay for a DA range?

Let’s break down the charges below based on DA against the amount of Traffic.

This is based on what publishers have been charging and what clients have been paying across the years for sites.

DA	Traffic	Publishing Fee
20+	1,000 – 3999	$30 – $60
20+	4,000 – 9,999	$40-1000
30+	10,000-99,999	$80-$150
40+	100,000 – 499,999	$130-$300
40+	500,000	$800 – $15,000

 

DR or Domain Rating 

Domain Rating is a website metric which was developed by Ahrefs. This metric is designed to show guest posters the strength of a website’s total backlink profile. This is determined by quality and size. The Domain Rating is measured on a scale-out of 100. The higher the number the better.

So how is domain rating calculated? While complex, it’s easy to understand in simple terms. Here’s how it’s done:

• Ahrefs look at unique domains which have a dofollow link pointing to the target website.
• They then take into account the DR value of the overall linking domain as well as how many of those domains are linked to other unique domains.
• They then work on applying math and coding to determine the score of a website.

So what does this mean?

• If you’re linking to a website via a no-follow link, it’s not going to increase DR rating.
• If a linking website increases their DR via backlinks any site they link to will also be affected in a positive way as long as dofollow links are used.

With this in mind, it’s also important to understand when guest blogging you also need to watch out for spammy sites with average DR rating, but you can’t use DR rating alone. Instead, you need to also look at the referring domains to help work out the worth of a website.

For example, if you have a site that’s DR 8 and it has a lot of referring domains, it’s most likely spammed and should be avoided. On the contrary, though if you have a site that’s DR 8 and it has a low number of referring domains it’s most likely a newer site which hasn’t required enough backlinks to become popular enough for a higher DR ranking.

So how does this affect how much you pay?

Let’s take a look at the price in regards to DR and Traffic combined. Remember too, some publishers also charge more for number of words depending on the website.

DR	Traffic	Publishing Fee
20+	1,000 – 3999	$30 – $60
20+	4,000 – 9,999	$40-1000
30+	10,000-99,999	$80-$150
40+	100,000 – 499,999	$130-$300
40+	500,000	$800 – $15,000

 

So what about Trust Flow?

TF or Trust Flow

Trust Flow is a metric which was developed by Majestic to measure how trustworthy a website or page is based on those that link to it. It works by measuring the quality of backlinks pointing to a website. Trust flow is measured out of a scale of 100. The higher the Trust Flow score the better.

Generally, Trust Flow works in combination with Citation Flow. Citation Flow is almost always higher than Trust Flow. If Trust Flow is high, this means the site has good quality backlinks pointing to it. When Citation Flow and Trust Flow are even or close, it means the site has a good range of high-quality content on it with clean backlinks.

When working off Trust Flow metrics for your guest posts, you can start with TF 10+ and work upwards. If you can gain websites with TF 25+ it can really help with your rankings in regards to the trust of a website. So how much should you pay for Trust Flow?

Here’s a guide based on Trust Flow and traffic numbers

TF	Traffic	Publishing Fee
0-10+	Under 500	$0-20
10+	Under 1000	$10-50
15+	1,000 – 3999	$30 – $60
15+	4,000 – 9,999	$40-1000
20+	10,000-99,999	$80-$150
20+	100,000 – 499,999	$130-$300
25+	500,000	$800 – $15,000

 

Traffic 

Traffic, the ultimate metric that many people work on. When combined with other metrics, a website’s organic traffic number is one that shouldn’t be ignored. Why? Because it shows guest bloggers how popular a website is and how many people visit it.

Website traffic is a good metric to work on when looking to find sites to guest post on because of the following reasons:

• It helps to boost your SEO efforts.
• It helps to send referral traffic back to your website.
• It helps to improve your brand name in front of new visitors.
• It helps to make an impact against your competition.

When looking to guest post on high traffic websites, it’s important to remember that real people are viewing that site so you need to make sure content is perfect. So how much should you pay for high traffic websites?

Traffic	Publishing Fee
Under 500	$0-20
Under 1000	$10-50
1,000 – 3999	$30 – $60
4,000 – 9,999	$40-1000
10,000-99,999	$80-$150
100,000 – 499,999	$130-$300
500,000	$800 – $15,000

So How Much For A Guest Blog?

So how much should you pay for a guest post? Overall writing guest posts can be affordable if you find and negotiate with the right site on the price. As you can see above, this is a range we work with here at NO BS when clients use us for guest posting service. Sometimes you’ll find some website owners won’t budge on price, in cases like this, you’ll then need to work out whether it’s worth the money your spending based on the metrics you’re after.