Guest placements qualified on measured organic traffic

Roughly one publication in four that offers me a guest slot clears the floor I hold it to: at least 3,000 monthly organic visits landing on non-branded queries, no worse than a 40 percent year-over-year decline in that figure, and evidence that the site publishes unpaid editorial at least twice a month. Everything else is declined before you ever see the name. The refusals are what you are paying for. A domain rating of 70 can be bought inside a quarter and says nothing about whether the page will be read by anyone who could buy from you. Who does the work: I do, and only I do. Before going independent I ran acquisition in-house for a Warsaw B2B software company through a core update that removed 58 percent of our non-brand traffic in eleven days, then spent most of the following year taking down placements my predecessor had paid for. The floor above comes out of that year. I watched which links held through a manual review and which were the reason for it. No researcher sits between you and the decision about a site, because the decision is the product. The question this engagement answers: Whether a publication the people who sign your invoices actually read will carry an argument that has you in it, and what that costs. Placement is not the question. A link can be placed anywhere for money. The question is whether the placement survives the next core update, and whether the traffic around it behaves like readers rather than a refreshed feed. Both answers go to you in writing, with the traffic source named and the date it was pulled, before you commit budget. How a site is qualified: Traffic is read from Ahrefs and Similarweb, then argued against the site's own top pages. If the organic estimate rests on three URLs unrelated to the publication's stated subject, it is out. I read the last ten posts for the sponsor tells: author bios with no history, outbound links into unrelated commercial categories, a partners tag applied to a third of the archive. I ask the editor in writing whether the article will carry a disclosure and which rel attribute is applied, and I have that answer before a brief exists. An editor who will not answer ends the conversation, whatever the numbers say. What you receive: A shortlist carrying the traffic figure, the pages producing it, and the disclosure and rel answer for each candidate, delivered before anything is commissioned. Then a brief you approve, the finished article written to the publication's house style, the live URL, and a check six weeks after publication confirming the page is still indexed and the link still in place. Rejected candidates arrive with the reason they were rejected, because that list is what stops your team paying somebody else for them next quarter. What is not included: Placement on a site you name before I have qualified it. Guaranteed anchor text on publications with a working editor, because good editors rewrite anchors and I will not argue for phrasing that reads as paid. Sitewide, footer or sidebar links. Casino, adult lending and unlicensed supplement clients. Languages outside English, Polish and German. Technical audits, on-site content and disavow work. If your problem is one of those I will say so and name someone who handles it, but it is not this engagement. When the answer is inconvenient: Qualification sometimes returns almost nothing. On a payments client last spring, eleven candidate publications produced two that cleared the traffic floor and one that would confirm its rel handling, so I delivered a shortlist of one and returned the unspent budget rather than filling the gap with sites I had just argued against. If your category is thin, regulated finance in German or industrial equipment in Polish being the two I meet most often, I will give you the likely yield before you sign. It is occasionally low enough that you should spend the money on something else. Who this is not for: Teams who report this work as links per month. If a number in a spreadsheet has to move by quarter end, that number is cheap to buy and I am the wrong supplier. This engagement fits a company with revenue concentrated on a small set of commercial pages, a launch or funding announcement that needs coverage a journalist would defend, or a brand that has already been burned by a network and cannot afford a second manual action.