Why Sites Charge For Publishing Content And What Fees Should You Expect

Guest posting has immense potential for marketers, businesses, and content creators who want to enhance the effectiveness of their digital marketing efforts. They can increase their reach and promote companies, websites, and other online entities with the power of collaborative content.

Overall, guest blogging is a win-win situation – you get to share your expertise and opinions with the wider audience of an established website and the publishing sites get fresh content to appease their readers. Repeatedly doing this can set you up as an industry expert and bring in some valuable referral traffic.

However, it is not all sunshine and rainbows. Link building agencies and businesses that do a lot of blogger outreach have surely noticed that an increasing number of sites now have “administrative fees” they charge for publishing your content.

Let’s take a look at what that is and what kind of fees you should expect to see.

Reasons Why Sites Charge For Posting Guest Content

Let's understand why guest posting services charge for publishing your content.

Here are some reasons why websites and digital publishing platforms charge for publishing your content on their site.

1) Managing Guest Contributions Takes Time

These sites usually have precise content guidelines that are communicated to the contributors beforehand. If your content doesn't seem up to par with what they typically publish, they may even ask you to revise it.

However, usually, when a guest post is submitted, the editor of the publishing platform often edits it to make it more suitable for their audiences and to ensure that the piece abides by their content rules.

They'll make sure that it is formatted correctly, has all the right links in place and accompanied by relevant images.

Just like anyone else, the people managing these websites expect to get paid for their work. Hence, they charge for publishing guest pieces.

2) They Give You Access To Their Audience

Gathering readership for a blog is a slow process – it takes a lot of effort to build domain authority, traffic, and loyal readership. So, why would they let a blogger take advantage of all that prestige by allowing them to publish for free? Well, we can think of a few reasons, but more on that laer.


These blogs and channels give you access to their audience, their customer base, and give you a certain dose of credibility. They have gathered the prospects you're looking for and they offer you the opportunity to tap into those markets – all for a price, of course.

3) You Get Some Valuable Links

Getting your content published on valuable third-party sites will get you the high-quality backlinks you need to ensure the success of your website. That is, if you satisfy a few conditions:
  • Site has a good domain authority (domain rating if you’re using Ahrefs)
  • The site gets decent organic traffic so there's a chance you earn some referral traffic
  • The website you’re publishing guest content on is relevant (in your industry)
At the end of the day, bloggers and site owners recognize the value of links and this is a simple way to maximize the value they get out of letting you publish content on their blog.

4) To Monetize Their Site

The simple fact is that publishing guest posts is one of the effective ways of making money off an established domain. Their audience and domain authority contributes a great deal of traffic to landing pages they link to, and again, they know the value of that.

In other words, they're looking for returns on investment they have made in building and running such platforms – and guest posting is a reliable revenue stream for these websites.

Google's Take On Guest Posting Practices

For a while now, guest posting was used as a tool to increase domain authority and ranking by getting as many backlinks as possible. And Google understands that webmasters often use it as a backhanded tactic to get backlinks.

The search engine giant doesn't appreciate guest bloggers and publishing platforms that only aim to influence their rankings in the search results. In 2017, Google issued a reminder to warn website owners not to publish content on their sites for the sole purpose of creating inbound links.

Otherwise, the company doesn't mind guest posts or even syndicated posts in general. It's just wary of the spammy link-stuffing practices that go on with the content. Not so long ago, they have also announced a few changes to Google's link attributes and how they might look at nofollow links. Google introduced a new way to categorize links in order to make sure their purpose is clear.

These new link attributes, along with nofollow, are summarized below:

rel=“sponsored”: Use the sponsored tag to identify links on your site that were created as part of advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements.

rel=“ugc”: UGC stands for User Generated Content, and the UGC attribute value is recommended for links on content that users produce, such as comments and forum posts.

rel=“nofollow”: Use this attribute for cases where you want to link to a page but don’t want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page.

The fact of the matter is that Google values user experience and transparency, and as long as your posts don't spam or try to gain higher rankings by going against Google's guidelines, you are safe from the penalties.

That being said, some people have noticed an increasing number of outbound link penalties with the reason states as, and we paraphrasing here, allowing spammy content on your website with a purpose of boosting authority of other pages. You can read more about this in this article from SearchEngineJournal.

With that under our belt, let's move on to our research and cost analysis of sponsored blog posts.

Breakdown Of Charges For Sponsored Posting

How much do you have to pay to get your guest post published on a well-reputed site? Well, the cost of sponsored blog posts differs from website to website. There are various factors that go into deciding the value of a guest blog – from their reach to their domain authority, as well as what field are you looking to amass exposure in?

Sometimes, bloggers will throw a random price just to test how high they can charge. If they ask for an unusually high fee for their authority, you can probably negotiate the price down.

If you want more exact stats, we have good news for you! To discover the price of sponsored posts for SEO the team at Point Visible conducted a study which is based 229 websites and blogs.

Check out the infographic below to see how was the research conducted, as well as detailed cost breakdowns by site authority and across 10 popular niches.

If you interested in sponsorship on Digital Information World head to this page for more details on how to get involved!

What’s The Price Of Sponsored Posts For SEO? [229 Website Study]

Key Takeaways from visual:

  • Websites with domain authority between 51 to 60, on average charge around $300 for sponsored posts.
  • The average fees editors seek for sponsored posts in outdoors niche is around $245 having an average domain authority of 40.
  • Blogs and websites that fall in Business niche seem to have the most cost-effective offers.

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