Guides

Answers to the questions that come before buying

Straight answers to the questions that come up before you are ready to buy anything — what things cost, what works, and what the research actually says. Every figure is sourced.

How much should an agency charge clients for link building?Most agencies resell a link at roughly double what it costs them, and price by the link or by a monthly package rather than by the hour. As a floor, work out your wholesale cost first: on our list today the median guest post costs $140 to $225 depending on DR band. Across the wider market, BuzzStream puts the average at $295 bought direct from a site and $461 through a vendor. Charge enough above your cost to cover the placements that fail, the replacements you owe, and the reporting.11 minute read · 6 sources
How do you check a guest post site is worth buying from?Check whether real people read the site, not just what its DR says. Compare organic traffic against domain rating, look at whether that traffic has collapsed since a core update, read what else the site links out to, and confirm it publishes on your client's subject with a real editor behind it. A high DR next to almost no traffic is the most common warning sign. On our own list, 25 of the 202 sites at DR 50 or above get under 1,000 organic visits a month.10 minute read · 4 sources
What should a guest post outreach email actually say?Say who you are, name something specific you actually read on their site, propose one concrete piece with a working title, and stop. Under 120 words. The template matters far less than most posts about templates admit: measured campaigns put highly tailored pitches near 19% reply rate and barely-personalised ones at 3% to 5%. That is the same email with different amounts of reading behind it.9 minute read · 3 sources
Do backlinks get you cited by ChatGPT and other AI answers?Only indirectly, and less than most people building links assume. Large language models have no link graph inside them, so there is no PageRank-style calculation happening when an answer is assembled. Links matter at the retrieval step, because the search index an assistant pulls live results from still ranks pages partly on links. But the strongest measured predictor of being cited is how often a brand is mentioned across authoritative sources — roughly three times stronger a correlation than backlinks.7 minute read · 4 sources

What you can expect from these

A straight answer in the first paragraph, so you can stop reading there if that is all you needed. Every figure is attributed, and where the published research disagrees with itself — which it often does — you get the range rather than whichever number happens to suit us.

You will also find, in each one, the situations where buying links from us is the wrong move. Those are there because they are true, and because you would find out eventually anyway.

Or skip the reading

The marketplace lists every publisher with its price and the vetting it passed. Nothing is behind a form.

Browse the marketplace