Many bloggers nowadays offer sponsored/paid review postings as a main source of revenue for their websites. While some may label these for-money marketing “sell-outs,” I maintain that offering to accept money to write reviews is honest work. With this in mind, the problem remains the question of how much to charge for these sponsored posts on your blog?

Let me start out by saying that the rates on The Net Fool dot com are too low, I know this, and people that buy reviews from me know this. However, I feel that you should never raise your rates more than once a month… and I am more than happy to offer a deal until that point. That being said, there has been a long-going debate over whether you should under-charge or over-charge for paid plugs on your blog.

The Pros
Under-charging: Having a backlog of sponsored posts is always a good thing. Also, having a shortage of supply for advertising slots can create it’s own artificial demand that will eventually get you higher prices.
Over-charging: While you may not see as many posts, having a high rate will make sure that every post you sell will be well worth your while. You’ll be making more per post, and this may more than compensate for slower demand.

The Cons
Under-charging: While you may have high demand, you don’t want to saturate your blog with sponsored posts all the time. Sometimes its more valuable to post useful content than slowing yourself down with advertisements. Additionally, perhaps you feel underpaid; after all, you could be making more.
Over-charging: Sure, you make a great profit whenever someone orders a review… but perhaps offers are coming in too slow for your liking? We all like to make money, and artificially high prices could crush your demand a bit too much.

The problem now is for setting your prices in the first place. For those bloggers that have had the opportunity to test the waters, it’s going to be mostly intuitive whether they are under-charging or over-charging for paid reviews. If you feel demand slowing, maybe you offer a limited time deal on cheaper advertising. If the opposite, maybe you announce higher rates and take it from there. But if you really haven’t dealt with sponsored articles thus far, its a bit harder to determine what prices are appropriate.

The Net Fool’s Suggested Paid Review Rate Chart
The best metric to base your decision off in my opinion is your RSS subscriber numbers. These are typically tracker through a third party like FeedBurner, so sign up if you haven’t already. Here is a table I have drawn up for suggested advertising rates, but keep in mind that you need to have the traffic… not just the subscribers.

Please keep in mind that this table is subjective, but I do feel that you should stay inside these subscriber/price brackets if you want to get as close as possible to that all-important equilibrium pricing point. The equilibrium point will occur when the price corresponds with an equal supply and demand. This is basic economics, and this will maximize your profits if you are a for-profit blogger.

We typically find that once a blog breaks out of the 2,500+ subscriber range, these super-bloggers will be able to use their pricing power to basically demand revenue as they please. So I am not going to continue the list upwards from 5,000 readers.

As always, it is important to make and include an “advertise” page on your blog with a display of your stats in order to convince potential advertisers that you mean business. I would suggest the OIO Publisher plugin to manage your reviews, links, banners, etc. as it will definitely make things more organized and streamlined. You want to make advertisements as easy to order as possible, and this is the tool to do it.

Stay bullish on the net!
-The Net Fool

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