How to buy sponsored posts: a 10-point checklist for advertisers
A sponsored post is content a business pays a publisher to run, clearly labeled as paid. Buying one well comes down to ten checks: fit, page quality, disclosure, link attribute, price, term, approval, proof, monitoring and remedies. This checklist walks through each.
Before you ask for a price
- Fit: does the publisher's audience already care about your topic? A relevant mention beats a large but unrelated site.
- Page quality: is the site current, edited and free of thin or spun content? Look at the exact page that would carry your mention.
- Existing sponsorship: how many other paid links does that page already have? Crowded pages dilute attention.
- Disclosure: will the post carry a visible label such as "Sponsored" or "Paid placement"? If the publisher refuses, walk away.
What to agree in writing
- Link attribute: paid links should carry rel="sponsored" (or nofollow). Search engines ask for this, and an agreement that demands otherwise is a warning sign.
- Price and term: what you pay, for how long the placement stays live, and what happens at the end of the term.
- Approval: who signs off the final wording, and whether you or the publisher have the last say on edits.
- Proof: a live URL, a capture of the label and the link markup, and the date it went live.
- Remedies: what happens if the link is removed or the label disappears early, for example a fix window and then a refund or credit.
Red flags
- Promises about search results. Nobody can honestly promise them, and paid links are not a shortcut to visibility.
- Requests to hide the label or remove rel="sponsored".
- Networks of near-identical sites offering the same placement at the same price.
- No way to verify the page was actually published, or checked afterwards.
How to judge the result honestly
Measure what a sponsored post can really do: referral visits from the page, brand mentions, and the quality of the audience it reaches. Treat any effect on search as a side effect you neither count on nor promise, because search engines treat undisclosed paid links as spam.