I sell links too: what buyers actually ask for

Fourteen people have asked to buy a link from me. Two of them actually paid.

Everything written about buying links comes from the buyer’s chair. The view from this one is different in ways that would have changed how I bought.

Here’s the whole funnel. Fourteen enquiries: twelve quoted at $250, one at $100, one as a swap with no money involved. Of those, one paid and went live, one more is live under a different arrangement, one has been in limbo for weeks, and eleven are still sitting exactly where they were the day I sent the quote.

Eleven of fourteen never replied to a price.

I’d assumed, before tracking this properly, that selling placements was mostly about having inventory somebody wanted. The bottleneck sits much earlier than that, and it has nothing to do with the number you name.

What they ask for before they ask the price

Serious buyers don’t open by asking what a link costs. They open by asking where it goes.

The one who paid wanted second position in a ranked comparison article. Not a link in the article, second place in the list. And he wanted that position reflected in the summary table at the top as well as in the prose below.

The $100 enquiry had the same shape: fourth spot in a specific listicle, named before any budget was mentioned.

That tells you what experienced buyers think they’re purchasing. They want a placement in a ranking a reader will scan and act on. The link is almost incidental, a technical detail attached to the real product.

The anchor request

There’s a second thing they ask for that took me longer to understand.

The buyer who paid wanted his anchor changed from the plain domain to his product name, because his company had rebranded and my article used the old name. That’s a brand-consistency request rather than an SEO one, from someone tracking where his product name appears. I changed it, it cost nothing, and it mattered more to him than anything else in the deal.

Worth sitting with, because it cuts against how these conversations get framed. A good share of link buyers are managing how their brand shows up on pages their customers already read. No ranking campaign, no search engine in the picture. They found a stale mention and want it corrected.

Once you see that, the pitch changes. You’re selling shelf space on a page people actually visit. It also explains why some buyers care intensely about wording and not at all about whether the link is followable.

Why $250 stuck

I landed on $250 for a dofollow placement on an established article and have quoted that same number twelve times.

It isn’t scientific. It came from what agencies charge me for comparable placements, roughly $160 to $200, plus margin for the fact that my article already ranks and a fresh guest post may never rank at all.

I stopped discounting early. Flexing on price didn’t convert better, it just converted at less money. The eleven that went quiet went quiet at $250, and I’m fairly confident they’d have gone quiet at $180.

What actually lands in the account

The number you quote isn’t the number you receive.

The buyer who paid sent $263 through a goods-and-services route, which is buyer-protected and carries a fee. It landed as SGD 325.75, which after fee and conversion nets out around the $250 quoted.

He covered the fee himself, which is why he sent more than the price. That was thoughtful and it isn’t typical. More often a buyer sends exactly the quoted amount through a fee-bearing route and you quietly absorb about 5%.

Quote your price and state the payment method in the same message. If they want buyer protection, the fee is theirs.

The crypto ones

The $100 buyer asked to pay in stablecoin. I sent an invoice and a wallet address. That was weeks ago. I’ve chased once, politely, addresses re-sent in the same thread.

No transaction hash. No refusal either. Just nothing.

Crypto is genuinely convenient and settles fast with people who intend to pay. But it removes every intermediate step where a normal rail would create friction and therefore commitment. No authorisation, no pending charge, no receipt to chase. The buyer drifts away and there’s nothing to unwind, because nothing ever started.

I still accept it. I just no longer treat an invoice sent as a deal, and I don’t hold a slot open on the strength of one.

What the eleven dead quotes have in common

I went back through them looking for a pattern. There is one, and it’s uncomfortable.

Almost all arrived as short generic outreach. No article named, no anchor proposed, no target URL. Some version of “hi, do you accept guest posts or paid links”. I replied with a real quote and real terms, and that was the end of it.

Both that converted arrived with the specifics already decided: this article, this position, this anchor, pointing here.

So the qualifying signal is whether they’ve already done the work of deciding what they want. Budget doesn’t predict it. Politeness doesn’t predict it. Someone who names the page has a campaign behind them. Someone asking whether you accept links is sending that same message to four hundred sites and will buy from whoever answers cheapest.

Two buyers, one article

Two separate enquiries came in for the same comparison article, weeks apart, both at $250.

That’s fine in principle. Separate insertions in different parts of a long piece, pointing at different products, neither harmed by the other.

But there’s a ceiling, and it’s credibility rather than space. An article can carry two commercial placements and still read as an honest comparison. At five it’s a directory with opinions attached, and the readers you were selling access to stop trusting it. So I cap it, which means turning down money for a slot I could physically fit.

The second buyer, incidentally, is one of the eleven. Asked for a quote, got one, never sent the target URL.

The clause that separates the pros

The buyer who paid asked for twelve months and no rotation, in writing, before sending money.

No rotation means I won’t swap his link for someone else’s in three months, and won’t quietly reorder the list so second position becomes seventh. That second part matters most and most buyers never think to ask.

Comparison articles get rewritten. A tool gets acquired, something new launches, you refresh the piece. If the deal only says the link stays live twelve months, you can technically honour it while sliding a paid second place to sixth. The link is still there. The value is gone.

As a seller I now write position into the terms, because otherwise I’ll eventually break a deal I thought I was honouring.

Why swaps are worse than cash

One of the fourteen involved no money. A link swap: we place links to them, they place links to us, nobody invoices anybody.

We placed ours. Two dofollow links, live, on real pages, weeks ago.

We’re owed eight reciprocal links. We’ve received zero.

Nobody’s being dishonest as far as I can tell. Their side has priorities and this sits below all of them, and there’s no invoice, no due date, no mechanism. That’s the problem with swaps. A cash deal has a moment where money moves and both parties know whether it happened. A swap has an indefinite obligation that decays quietly.

If you do swaps, place your side last, or place one and hold the rest until theirs appear. I did it the other way round and I’m the one holding the bag.

What I say no to

Gambling, adult, essay mills. Less on principle than because one of those links changes what my page is to every other buyer.

I also turn down insertions where the topic makes no sense, even at full price, and I’ve lost at least two of the eleven that way. A comparison article about news APIs isn’t going to carry a link to an unrelated ecommerce tool because someone offered money.

That costs revenue. It also means the placements I do sell are worth something, which is the entire business.

The obligation ledger

The least glamorous part of selling links: you have to write down what you owe.

I keep a file with every placement sold. Which article, which position, what anchor, what date it expires, and a note saying do not remove or reorder before then. It exists because the risk isn’t deliberate cheating. It’s that eleven months from now I refresh an article, reorder the rankings because the market changed, and silently break a twelve-month no-rotation agreement I’d forgotten.

Without the file, that happens. The buyer notices before you do, and by then you’ve taken his money and quietly degraded what he bought.

Reading this backwards

If you’re the buyer, reverse all of it. Name the page and position in your first message, because it marks you as worth quoting properly. Get duration and no rotation in writing before paying. Expect to cover the fee if you want buyer protection. And if you’re offered a swap instead of a price, place your side second.

What I look for when I’m the one buying is here.