Sponsored blog posts are posts you are paid by advertisers to publish on your blog. Blog posts may be written by you on behalf of your client or by your client. “How much do I charge for a sponsored blog post” is a question that is asked a lot in the blogging sphere. – especially by newbies. How long does it take to grow a successful blog is another topic that is of great interest to new bloggers.
When it comes to blogging, one thing to know is that there’s no industry standard for anything. Unlike other occupations where industry standards exist, blogging is a different ball game. In charging advertisers for sponsored blog posts on your blog, you should make sure that you neither undercharge or overcharge. You should take extra steps to figure out how to calculate your rates and why you should charge it.
In this post, we’re going to walk you through how to figure out how much to charge for sponsored blog posts on your blog. Knowing why your new blog will fail should form part of your decision of what to charge your clients for sponsored blog posts.
How to Charge for Sponsored Blog Posts
The first step towards figuring how much to charge is to determine the actual value of a single blog post on your blog. There are 3 factors that you need to put into consideration to find the worth of a blog post on your blog. They are:
- Amount of Time and Skills
- Blog Coverage
- Market Offering
After you’ve taken the above 3 factors into consideration, you may now proceed to calculate how much you should be charging.
1. Amount of Time and Skills
How much time do you need to create a blog post? What other skills e.g. photography and formatting skills will be deployed in completing such tasks.
This is what you should do:
(Hourly rate X No of hours spent on content creation) + (Hourly rate X No of hours spent on specialist services e.g. photography and styling)
This gives you an idea of the minimum amount you should charge per sponsored blog post. A survey of content creators’ hourly rate revealed an industry average of $50.
For example, if you spend 2 hours on content creation and you have an hourly rate of $50. You probably will spend an hour on media content such as images and video. Then your charge here should look like this . . .
($50 X 2) + ($100) = $200
That is the barest minimum you should charge for sponsored blog posts if you are not taking into consideration the other 2 pricing factors.
The above pricing approach works just fine if you are just starting out and your blog is yet to wield a lot of influence in the blogging space. For blogs who wield a lot of influence in the industry, the pricing approach might be a little different as you will soon see.
2. Blog Coverage
This is where you think about how much influence your blog wields in terms of readership and exposure generally. How much value will the advertiser be getting for publishing a blog post on your blog? The easiest way to do this is to track your overall website traffic including your social media shares.
How much traffic your blog receives in addition to how much engagement your readers have with your contents is what should inform this charging factor.
This is what you are to do after you have found out all about your blog coverage:
(Sponsored post cost) + (Average number of comments per post X $5) + (Average number of views per post X $1.5) + (Average number of social media shares X $5)
For example, if you charge $100 (as seen above) to create the sponsored post and you average about 20 comments per your blog post. Your average page view per post is around 1000 and your social media shares are in the vicinity of 100 shares.
Let’s do the math . . .
($100) + ($100) + ($1500) + ($500) = $2200
This pricing technique will work no doubt if your blog has attained some sort of celebrity status and your brand wields a lot of influence in the industry. As much as advertisers want to pay fair deals for their advertisements, top on their lists is to advertise with brands that bring them good returns.
3. Market Offering
In as much as you are the blog owner and you are the one to determine your charge, the market also has an important role to play in your pricing.
The real question is how much is the market willing to pay for a sponsored blog post on a blog like yours? What are your industry competitors accepting for sponsored posts from their clients?
Conclusion
What we’ve only just offered is a guide to help you determine how much to charge for sponsored blog posts. At the end of the day, you and only you can say for sure what the actual worth of your service is and how to move along with it.
Just always remember that the key is not to overcharge while also making sure that you don’t undercharge.