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When Should I Be Paid For Publishing Guest Posts?

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This article addresses a question that is either on the mind (or will soon be on the mind of bloggers) who accept free guest posts on their Websites; when should you ask for something in return for publishing guest articles on your site? Following the decision to accept guest articles on this site, we have been inundated with requests for guest posting opportunities. However, like every thing else, hosting guest articles does not come without its drawbacks. As a result, I have highlighted the following points, based on our experience, to help you in making a decision on whether to charge for guest articles or not.

Article marketers pretend to be guest bloggers

When you observe that most requests for guest posts are from (paid) article marketers who pretend to be bloggers, it is probably time to ask for something in return. Many blogs, including this one, have tried to help other bloggers gain more exposure and popularity over the years. As a result, they often ask for would-be guest bloggers to register and submit guest posts online. Most times they do not ask for anything in return – a form of an unwritten bloggers code. However, as article marketing is fast becoming big business on the Internet, you find a lot of paid marketers pretending to be bloggers just to take advantage of these kind of opportunities mostly without the consent of the blog author.

Most contributors only submit one article

When most of your guest contributors are only interested in submitting one article, it is perhaps time to consider paid guest post publishing. Indeed, those who submit only one guest post are often found to be serial article marketers and time wasters who are only interested in getting as many backlinks as possible at any given time.

Authors don’t care about quality

There are two categories of guest authors who display this particular attribute. The time wasters who only ever submit one article and those who begin with good quality articles and gradually stop bothering. In either cases, the consequence can be grave as it tends to drive readers away and cheapens your site. Although there is a saying that “the best things in life are free” but some take it too far and totally disregard your good gesture by rewarding you with poorly spinned crap articles.

Editing articles and processing emails take all day

 Have you ever considered how many articles and emails a popular guest-post publishing site can receive in a day. At present, we have to process up to 50 unique emails a day and edit several articles per week and I can’t bare to think what the more popular blogs and websites are doing. In addition, most of these emails are from people inquiring about guest blogging despite the fact that we have many Web pages with that are already dedicated to answering those questions. When you find yourself spending several hours a day or week doing something other than writing and publishing articles, you should perhaps consider asking for something in return.

Reducing the number of article submissions

When you want to reduce the number of article submissions to manageable proportion, you might as well charge a small fee for guest publishing. This is because most time wasters are often run away when it is no longer free. Unfortunately, this might affect some genuine bloggers as well but in the long run you might be able to reach a compromise that will save you plenty of time and make everyone happy.

I’m quite sure there are other ways to know when it’s time to get paid for publishing guest articles other than those highlighted above. Feel free to share your experiences or opinions in the comment section below.

Considering the above, we are seriously looking at the possibility of introducing paid guest posts from August. We will publish further details in the News Flash! category in due course.

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14 Comments

14 Comments

  1. Pete

    July 17, 2013 at 3:04 am

    The real value is the links and extra exposure – worth a lot more than getting paid for guest posting.

    • Admin

      July 17, 2013 at 8:17 am

      That’s completely true for the blogger.

  2. Raj

    July 17, 2013 at 4:42 am

    Nice article Admin. I am agree with your point that most of the bloggers contribute only one article & that too for getting backlinks, this is the only benefit guest post author will get by his/her guest post. If you look at the other side, website owner gets one quality article for free, as website owners accepts only quality content for guest post in his/her blog. All the benefits including earnings by the guest post,exposure, quality post are reserved for the website owner then whats wrong in getting some quality backlinks in return for his/her hardwork?

    • Admin

      July 17, 2013 at 8:22 am

      Thanks Raj. I totally agree with your points and note that it is mutually beneficial to both parties. However, the problem occurs when article marketers who get paid to publish guest posts act under the guise of a genuine blogger (that simply wants some exposure and one or two backlinks) and submit articles that are laden with links just to take advantage of the publisher. Moving forward, there must be a way to reward genuine bloggers and separate them from ‘pretenders’ if a website decides to go in the way of paid guest posts.

      • raj

        August 9, 2013 at 11:41 am

        I am of the same feeling admin, genuine one should be rewarded, that is the main point, but it is quite difficult to distinguish them from others.

  3. Pramod

    July 17, 2013 at 11:46 am

    at the end you gave a very useful suggestion of charging a small fee to avoid time wasters..your suggestion is awesome as you earlier mentioned that you have to process at-least 50 posts a day …i know that out of all the post that you process ..only few of them have great content to match the quality of the blog.

    Regards,
    Pramod

  4. Allison

    July 18, 2013 at 8:05 am

    I found this to be a bit of an odd position because if you pay for a guest post, you are essentially paying for a backlink, which is a cardinal sin to Google. Pay for enough guest posts and you risk getting black listed. Make a bundle off of these guest posts and it seems like you don\’t get in any trouble at all, unless all of those backlinks lead to awful content, making you look like a link farm yourself. This ruins your reputation with the search engines and puts you at risk for getting black listed.You might be better off positioning it as a sponsored post, where you are getting paid to write it, collaborate with the other person, and to include certain links and/or a certain perspective. This way, compensation doesn\’t put anyone at risk for making Google angry. It also allows you to charge A LOT more, since they are paying for your time and skill as well as the exposure.It also means that guest posts are completely free, but you can cut things down by setting some guidelines i.e. topics, attaching a draft, word counts, offering specific article titles. If they don\’t meet the guidelines, then you don\’t have to bother with them at all.

    • Admin

      July 18, 2013 at 2:59 pm

      I know, it’s kind of a catch 22 situation. However, the difference perhaps is making sure not to sell backlinks by categorically stating the terms and conditions. Unfortunately, just doing that doesn’t appear to work as you still have to review several articles which show blatant disregard for those terms thereby wasting so much of your time.

  5. Rohit

    July 20, 2013 at 12:12 am

    nice article admin, and i really thankful of you that you haven’t charged me a bit for publishing 2 guest post in my favorite tech blog “Techsling”.

  6. Pawan

    July 22, 2013 at 9:45 pm

    Nice article, I too get many request guest posting for my blog and experience that many of them are just marketers and want to promote their links.

  7. himanshu

    August 4, 2013 at 9:05 am

    Most of the people who guest post is to increase the exposure of the blog and get some juicy links to your blog.

  8. Paul

    August 13, 2013 at 10:08 am

    It is very much a truth that guest posts these days are not taken as seriously as earlier. Guest posting is definitely one of the most effective ways of getting backlinks. It is sad that people have started to misuse it.

  9. alan

    September 6, 2013 at 8:48 pm

    Guest post writer should also be given proper credit for writing a quality article for the blog owner, & backlinks are the only thing he can get in return so it should not be a problem for host blogger as he got a quality article for free.

  10. Gautam

    February 18, 2014 at 9:26 am

    True thing is now I don’t accept Guest posts just because of this thing,they just come for backlinks and write one post and leave and it really hurts blog reputation and creating new profiles for everyone puts load on Database.

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