If you are dangling between questions about what is paid guest post and unpaid guest post, you are not alone.

This all started back in 2014, when Matt Cutts, the previous head of Google’s webspam team, declared on his personal blog that guest post blogging is dead.

That news shook the SEO world because it seemed like the demise of link building and SEO.

Fast forward, we are living in 2020, and still, hundreds of companies are offering paid guest posting service.

Why? Because people are buying them as it is working for them.

Let’s find out what this whole game is about:

Its answer lies in this question:

What is Paid Guest Post?

In simple words:

Paid guest post is the guest post written by the paid guest posting services company that takes money from you for its services, manually outreach bloggers, write relevant content with an editorial link to your site, and get the post published on the blogger site.

So if you are mixing up paid guest blogging with link buying, you are wrong.

It has nothing to do with a clash with Google’s link building guidelines.

Paid guest blog post is NOT:

• Buying or selling links
• Excessive link exchange
• Keyword-rich article marketing
• Using automated link-building programs

It is just a paid guest post writing that a guest posting services agency does on your behalf.

Simple!

How Do Paid Guest Posting Sites Work?

Most guest posting services follow the same pattern for writing and publishing a guest post.

They handle all the guest posting hassle.

For us, at Globex Outreach, it is a four-step process.

That’s how we do paid guest blog posting for our clients:

1. Find the best guest posting prospects
2. Write relevant, unique, and engaging content
3. Editorially place the link
4. Publish the guest post

Yes, that’s what a paid guest posting company does.

And it is a lot of work.

So they charge you for all the hard work and headache they do for you to fetch a quality link for your site.

Now, if someone asks you: what is paid guest post?

You know what your answer should be.

It is not what most people think.

It is all about hiring someone to manage all guest posting fuss for you so that you can focus on doing other important things.

Like, what about finding more investors or increasing your workforce’s productivity?

But whether you will be headache-free or not depends on your selection of the paid guest post opportunities.

Here is what to consider while selecting a guest blog posting service:

STEP # 1: Check Their Content Quality

Quality of the content is what differentiates a Google-friendly guest post from a spammy guest post.

Google has no concern with what you tag your content as if it is of high-quality.

That means if your content is…

• Valuable
• Engaging
• Informative
• Interesting

…it is good to go.

So hire someone who doesn’t write content just for the sake of inserting a link. They should know the art of writing valuable content.

Ask them for samples, and evaluate these dos and don’ts of content.

But while asking for the sample, make sure they give you:

• Niche-specific samples, not guest posts written for other industries.
• A published guest post’s URL to see if their content really gets published on quality sites.
• The sample of the writer who is expected to work on your order.

It will give a real insight into their content potential and writers’ writing capabilities.

STEP # 2: What’s Site Selection Criteria

Where your paid guest blog is published matters a lot.

Because:

Not all websites give you the same benefits because Google doesn’t consider all websites as equal.

Take it as if websites are divided into different classes:

• Lower Class Sites
• Middle-Class Sites
• Upper-Class Sites
• Elite Class Sites

And Google gives them value according to their classes.

Here is a model I created, called The Website Class Pyramid Model.

This pyramid tells you where your best guest blogging opportunities lie.

The model works this way:

It is easy to get a link from lower-class sites and the hardest to get a link from an elite class website.

But one link from an upper class or elite class website is way more powerful than 100 combined links from lower class websites.

So always check out what is the site selection criteria of the paid guest post providers.

If I tell you our secret recipe of guest blog selection, you will find 14 important ingredients:

• Website’s Traffic
• Domain Authority
• Relevance
• Historical Graph
• Traffic Location
• Link Placement
• High TF Value
• Backlink Profile
• Domain Rating
• Site Appearance
• Social Activity
• Wayback Check
• SSL Certified
• Indexed Pages

We consider all these factors while selecting a site for the guest posting.

So check out how your selected service provider chooses sites because it will define two things:

• If you will get an authority vote or not.
• And this first point leads to: If you will rank higher or not.

Make a wise decision because good quality content can’t help you out if the voter is useless.

STEP # 3: Ask for Content Writing Strategy

Good and valuable content doesn’t come out of thin air.

You need to strategize and plan out your whole content writing process to get what you want.

Like, we follow this guest post content writing strategy:

• First: We understand the client’s requirements and needs.
• Second: We read the blogger’s guidelines and posted content to get an idea of the blogger’s requirements.
• Third: Our writers do brainstorming to develop a unique topic that complies with the client’s and blogger’s requirements.
• Fourth: Next comes the research stage, where we focus on collecting every possible information related to the selected topic.
• Fifth: We create content that makes readers and Google happy to win on both fronts.

The right content writing strategy can single-handedly make you free of the fear of thinking that what are indications that a guest post is paid or not.

Because:

Your content will not look like a guest post.

It will look like another valuable piece of content that you have created to help out readers.

So look into the content writing strategy of your selected agency if you want to play safe.

STEP # 4: What Are They Charging and for What

One thing you must remember: Never seek low price services.

SEO is a hard job, and turning it into a jackpot for you even harder.

So you should know that you have to invest a reasonable amount in hiring paid guest post blogging services.

But you have to ‘invest’ not ‘throw.’ That’s why checking the price of the guest post service is important because you deserve to get what you are paying for.

So see what perks your selected agency is offering along with their guest blogging service.

Like, that’s our pricing chart:

You can see that we have different price packages and our range of services also vary along with the price.

So make sure that you go with a paid guest posting agency that gives you the best bang for your buck by offering what they are charging for.

Conclusion

Guest posting is one of the best things that happened to the SEO world (forget about all the bad things you have heard about it!).

It is not only a link building technique but also a panacea for your various other business pain points, like brand awareness, credibility building, authority establishment, and driving qualified traffic.

So don’t associate ‘paid guest post’ with some fishy link building practice.

It is just the price that guest blog posting companies charge for handling your guest post hassle.

But who you select matters a lot. So be careful while choosing services for the best results.