Sponsored posts and fee charging work has been a hot topic in the blogging world for some time. As more and more people are turning to full-time blogging or are creating amazing content alongside their day jobs, it’s inevitable that paid work becomes more of the norm.
I’m all in favour of it – bloggers have an amazing reach and brands clearly see this. Digital platforms at THE place to be right now and I suspect that there have never been so many opportunities as there are right now.
That said, there’s a really big BUT coming up. Because the blogging industry is still so new in comparison to print or other types of media, there are no standardised expected payment rates. We’re all making it up as we go, through a bit of guess work, chats with other bloggers and the odd helpful blog post here and there (this one from Michelle is great!).
At the end of last week I ran a quick Twitter poll to see how much other bloggers charge for sponsored posts and I was horrified to see that out of nearly 200 people, 50% are paid less than £50 per post. In comparison, only 24% of people charge £100 or more, meaning that there are a lot of companies out there doing really well out of the blogging community.
What you can charge for a sponsored post will always be made up of a variety of things: what’s your social reach, how many unique users/page views you get to your blog each month, things like Doman Authority, what the requirements of a sponsored post entail. Many sponsored posts require a certain number of links, specific images, even copy approval before you publish – all of this has to be factored in to the overall cost.
I’m a member of a few Blogger Opportunity groups on Facebook and there are a huge number of paid opportunities all at around £30-£50. I saw one the other day that offered to pay people with a domain authority of 30-40 around £45. In SEO terms, a DA of 30+ is actually pretty high for a blog site, and payment for that kind of site should be much, much higher (you can check your DA here if you’d like to learn more). Add in to that the fact that most SEO agencies are trying to pay for ‘Follow’ links, which goes totally against Google’s guidelines and it’s all a bit of a non-starter. (More info on follow v nofollow links in this blog post).
The average blog post takes me around 6 hours in total to create – photography, image editing, copywriting, editing, linking, social content planning and sharing. Assuming that this is around average for most of us, when you add in visitors numbers and social media reach, surely we should be aiming for more than the UK minimum wage as an hourly rate? In contrast, copywriters that I use at work will charge a minimum of £250 per day.
From a personal point of view, I think we all need to be a little more transparent around what we charge, our social media reach and our unique user count. If the community as a whole is more informed, then it will allow us to standardise our fees and have a valid justification to brands when we’re trying to negotiate for paid work. Up until now, it’s been something that no-one seems to like to talk about and I think we’re making life a lot harder for ourselves by doing so.
I would love to kick off a more open discussion around this via the comments section or on social media. I’ve shared my own stats and fees below as a way of getting this started. If you’re happy to do the same, please leave me a comment with some info in or just your thoughts on the whole topic – if you’d prefer not to do it publicly, please feel free to drop me an email in confidence or a Twitter DM or something. I plan to follow up this post with some informed answers on the different rates people are charging (no names will be given) so that we can all find a comparison for other people with similar stats to us.
My stats/fees:
Combined followers count of over 20,000 across Twitter/Instagram/Facebook
Average 12,000 unique site visitors per month
Over 550,000 followers on Pinterest
Sponsored posts from £150
What are your thoughts on this topic?
No comments
Post a Comment