I have been contacted by a company looking to place a sponsored article on my Blog as well as a site wide text advert. I am happy to provide these for them but have no idea how much providing this service to them would be worth? The company owns a number of fairly well known gambling sites offering online bingo, poker and casino games so I'm sure they are not short of a few pennies! Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
I would have to say that it depends on the kind of traffic that you are getting. I wouldn't want to overcharge them, only for them to find out that they have little clickthru's on your site. Maybe you could help by telling us the PR, traffic stats, things which will aid us in gauging a good price
Well that's the strange thing, I started this blog just a couple of weeks ago! I have no PR yet and have had around 140 visitors, traffic is steadily climbing and I am ranking well for the keywords I have targeted but I doubt I'll drive much traffic their way. I have no idea how they found my blog or why they think it will be of value, the only connection I can see is that my blog is about Flash game design/development and their games are made with Flash.
Maybe you should inquire with them where it is that they found you through. Because that can only help you out in the end.
What I know is that such businesses pay well. You'd better be charging high ($500 or even more) since they are the one who asked for it.
Thanks Kidsko, yes I will be asking them how they found my blog as this is of great interest to me. Omarabid, $500 would be great but after digging around a bit I now suspect that this company isn't actually the owner of the sites that they implied they were but instead an affiliate of that company looking to place affiliate links/ads. Perry I am an honest person but their expected ROI is of no concern to me. As they approached me with this offer I feel that the onus is on them to do the research, ask the right questions and figure out if it's a worthwhile investment. If they want my opinion about any potential flaws in their marketing strategy then they can pay me as a consultant!
It depends on how picky you want to be, what the purpose of your site is and whether selling links is worth the extra revenue vs. the risk of being penalised for doing so. Many link buyers tend to pay according to the PR of the site, so in this regard I wouldn't expect much if you have a PR0 site. Having said that, I have a PR3 site and I set my own prices and they are considerably more than what people would pay on this forum or for a PR3 site. To me, having too many paid links is just not worth the risk of being penalised, so in my case I'm happy to put people off with a high price tag.
Thanks simpseo, the blog actually started as part of my final major project for my degree. I graduate next month with a BA (hons) in computer game design and I specialise in designing and developing flash games but I also have a strong interest in SEO and internet marketing so the blog was created to document my degree progress and also practice SEO. Now the blog is doing well for its targeted keywords so after I graduate I am looking to provide tutorials on creating flash games and hope to drive some traffic to carefully selected affiliates through product reviews relating to flash/photoshop training resources (books, dvds etc). I also hope it will bring in some freelance work offers by acting as an online portfolio and allowing me to connect and network with other developers and designers. I am not looking to fill the site with advertising and paid links but I am still interested in finding ways to monetise the site. They want a 6 month placement for the text ad, I was going to charge $5 a month for the ad and $10 for the blog post so a total of $40... does this sound fair to you?
For the sake of a few dollars, I wouldn't bother with it, to be honest. $5 is too cheap even for a newly created site. I say this because you are looking to showcase your site and potentially gain a lot more from it than just a few dollars. What I would personally do if I wanted to take up this offer is give them a blog post and offer to link to the blog post from the home page for a set period of time. Offer an in-content link on the blog post and tell them that you'll write an article about it (so you can charge them for that as well). Make the article sound natural, like you came across a few good gambling sites and noticed site x which was unique in some way. I'd charge them $10 to write the article and $10 a month to link to the article from the home page. In this way there is less risk that the link looks like a paid link (search engines have a problem with this) and you don't have a text link from your home page going straight out to a gambling site. I have a site with a PR3 home page - I charge a minimum of £25 for a blog post but more if I write the article. Personally I'm very picky about the sites I link out to and my prices are deliberately expensive. So that's the way I play it, but then again I never intended to profit from paid links so I don't rely on the revenue from that site to get by.