Pros and Cons for Paying for Guest Posts?

[SparkplugDigital]

While searching for outreach targets I came across a site that charges $100 to post your infographic with a review. I think this is similar to someone that says "Sure, I'll publish your guest post. First, please send me $100."

I'm curious what others think about the practice of paying for guest posts? (It seems like it could easily be lumped in with paid links from Google's point of view).

[myclicks-163603]

I think that such a practice can be quite good if you do it well and if you have a good product or site to be reviewed. You don't even need such platforms to do that. We call it Blogger outreach campaign:

1. Simply shortlist a few hundreds (or even less) of good blogs in the industry and market you want to focus on.

2. Think of a what offer you can give to them. Money most probably won't work. You can incentivise them with an affiliate offer or something really touchy and personal. Put that in your email to them or on their contact us forms or call them.

You will see that most of  the guys will reply and will be happy to cooperate. This works much better than any platform if you are going for the quality links not for the quantity.

[activitysuper]

Are you guest blogging for the audience or for SEO purposes (backlinks)?

If it's for the audience (lets say they got 10,000 plus one buddies, 20,000 fb friends and 40,000 twitter followers) your link in the guest post goes to your website where a massive resource on the subject is available, signup boxes and all that stuff.

If it is to this level then a 'few' paid guest posts are fine, especially if the blogs main income is not the money coming in for charging for guest posts.

For example if smashing magazine charged for guest posts (maybe the cost of admin, half hour reading it formatting it, reading it again putting it up etc) there is a cost there for the time on smashing magazines part.

I think the paid stuff is when you do it in bulk, $5 for a link and you buy 100 of them.

[LeeAnn30]

if its cnn then its worth it if you get my drift.

[EGOL]

I could see paying to guest blog on the right site as being more effective than starting your own under certain circumstances.

If you have a "message to get out" then this is the fastest way to gain an audience.  You picked the correct words.... "on the right site".

And, the workers at that site will have to handle your content, place it on a page, link it into their internal navigation and then pay the bandwidth and storage fees.  There is no guarantee that they will get any return so they charge you up front.

[mikescotty]

Would you pay to post good content on a site relevant to your audience that has good domain authority to boot? Depends on the site and depends on the content.

We don't charge our guest bloggers (yochicago.com), but we vet them pretty heavily - they need to contribute something to our audience.  But we do blog on behalf of sponsors - and since we're doing the writing - it's always relevant (to some degree at least).  Our readers comment on our (clearly identified) sponsored content's relevance occasionally, but generally understand that someone has to pay the bills.  It's a pretty effective means of advertising / editorial / authority-building in one.

I could see paying to guest blog on the right site as being more effective than starting your own under certain circumstances.

[dpdeleon1]

Sounds like a paid link to me also. If you can somehow ascertain that this is not some spammy site I suppose you may want to do the math and figure on cost / benefit. If you're doing your own writing etc. I would just as well post to other sites that are free - but that's me. I'm sure you'll get many opinions and I'd be interested in hearing from those that would pay to post.