Price one article, using your ad number
Sponsored posts do not double a site's income by existing. They pay when the fee for one article is worth the permanent commercial link you are adding. Start from money you already receive. Take last quarter's ad revenue. Divide by three to get a month. Divide that month by the number of articles that earned the traffic, not by the number you published. If 40 articles were published and 8 of them brought almost all the visits, the denominator is 8. That quotient is what an ordinary article on your site is worth in ads. A sponsored article should clear that number by enough to pay for the fact that you will not run house ads in that slot, and for the editorial time.
Example, labeled as an example: $2,400 in ads last quarter is $800 a month. Eight articles did the work. $100 is the ad value of one of those articles. A sponsored post at a $100 fee replaces the ads and pays nothing for the hour you spend editing. A fee at $250 starts to pay for the edit. Your numbers will not be these numbers. If you do not know last quarter's ad revenue, you are not ready to set a public asking price. Write the quotient down before you open the application form.
The buyer prices on ChainEpic are not this quotient and they are not your payout. SAAS-102 is listed at $119 to the buyer. TECH-107 is listed at $349. Those are what a buyer pays the marketplace. Your asking price on the application is a separate field. Copying $349 into the form because a news row shows it is how you get a listing you cannot fulfill, or a listing that overstates the site. The monthly log is how you keep the traffic cell honest after you are listed.
Say which asset you are selling
There are two assets. A new article, which you can shape. An insertion into an old URL that already gets visits, which you should price only if that URL's chart is alive. Buyers who follow the format guide will ask for the URL before they accept an insertion price. Have the URL ready, or do not offer the insertion. Offering 'niche edits, 20% off' with no URL is how you attract the orders you will regret.
- •New article: you pick the angle inside your niche, they get one href, you keep the headline if their phrase is a keyword and not a subject.
- •Insertion: send the URL, the current sentence, and the sentence you are willing to add. If you are not willing to add it on an unpaid day, do not add it for a fee.
- •Both: cap commercial dofollow links. The rows buyers see talk about a maximum of two. Treat two as the ceiling on a sponsored day, and publish other days with zero.
Drafts to reject, with the reply
You are the editor. The buyer does not get the publish button. These are the drafts that should come back, and the note that should go with them. Sending a soft 'looks good' because the fee is already in escrow is how the archive becomes a catalog. The next buyer, trained by the vetting checklist, will open three of your URLs and leave.
| What the draft does | What you send |
|---|---|
| The anchor is a 'best X software' query | Rewrite the anchor to the product name or we will not publish. |
| Three product links in the first screen | One href. Remove the other two. They can buy another day if they have another page. |
| A customer count or star rating you cannot see on their site | Delete the number. We do not print claims we cannot point at. |
| The topic is outside the last twenty headlines you wrote | This is not a topic we cover. Refund is appropriate. |
| Casino, adult, CBD or pharma, essay mill, even with a cleaned-up anchor | We do not publish this niche. Please refund. |
| The disclosure is missing and the rel is dofollow | Add a visible sponsored line, or mark the link sponsored. Tell me which you will do. |
The last row is the one publishers skip because the buyer paid for dofollow and the marketplace card says DoFollow Guaranteed. Your obligation to the reader is older than that card. Google's outbound-link documentation describes rel="sponsored" for paid placements. If you publish the dofollow href, put a visible label a reader can see without viewing source, and be aware the buyer may have been promised an unmarked endorsement. If those two cannot both be true, do not publish. A declined order is the FAQ's refund case. It is a better archive than a quiet ad.
After you publish
Send the live URL the day it is up. Keep the page up for the window you agreed. The buyer-side FAQ talks about 12 months and about replacement if a link drops or flips to nofollow. If you take the page down in month two, say so. Silent deletion is how that clause gets used, and how your completion figure becomes a number you cannot defend. The drawer shows completion as a cell. This desk has not audited those percentages. Your own count of on-time URLs is the one you can stand behind.
Once a month, reread the last sponsored URL next to a normal article. If you cannot tell which is which without the label, the label is doing work the prose should also do: the sponsored piece should still be a piece you would assign. If you can only tell because every sponsored URL has the same H2 order and a link in the second paragraph, you have a template. Retire it. Templates are what the three-page check is designed to find.
FAQ
Should my asking price match the buyer price I see on a similar row?
No. The row price is what a buyer pays ChainEpic. Your asking price starts from your ad revenue per real article, plus editing time. The application asks for that number separately from claimed DR and claimed traffic.