Firstly for those readers that do not really know what a sponsored blog is:
“A sponsored post, also known as a promoted post, is a post to any community-driven notification-oriented website which is explicitly sponsored as an advertisement by a particular company in order to draw a large amount of popularity through user promotion and moderation to the most active or most viewed page on the website.” Wikipedia
The popularity of sponsored posts has grown over 2017/18 and is likely to increase further in 2019 and beyond as strict GDPR rules were enforced by the European Union reducing subs/email lists etc.
A very common question for those people new to sponsored blogs is what to charge for them. We should at this stage break the subject down a little so to understand better the work behind sponsored blogging:
- Size of your website audience / web traffic. You can be asked to place sponsored blogs on your website or even on your social media pages and a good way to know how much to charge is to refer to the size of your audience and how target that audience is (coverage they provide to the client). If your presence online is strong, ie your website has a good domain rating, then you can charge higher over if you only have a handful of visitors.
- Who are you dealing with. Some companies who approach you are simply smaller / part time businesses and they are simply looking in most cases for any and every website to host their own / their clients content whereas there will be other more established agencies who will already know the size of your audiences and have identified you as a good match.
- What are you being asked to do? Here is the time element and how much to charge ie you may simply be asked to add a blog to your website already written for you (simply a cut and paste job) or you maybe get asked to add a link to a blog already on your website. Then again you maybe asked to write content from scratch, review an item in full to include photography or schedule in social media updates over a period of a month.
So how much do you charge?
It will be very much dependent on the size of your audiences of course, but let us take an example that your website generates around 20,000 – 50,000 monthly visitors and is backed up by a strong social media following of 50,000 – Your website is themed and your audiences mostly target to that theme:
As a standard you should look to charge:
- £35 – £50 per adding a pre-written sponsored blog post.
- £25 for link insertions.
- £75 an hour for blog writing service.
- £20 per social media post to 50,000 followers.
- Permanent links on home page of website £350 annually.
The above is a guideline and there is no real sponsored blogging price guideline. You will find that some agencies will gladly accept your fees and others will try and haggle to a much lower price – You will also sometimes be approached with prices above your standard costs!