The Same Link for Thirty Dollars

Two prices for one link

Last night's bedtime story was one my daughter made herself: a photo of her grandmother's kitchen, eight seconds of my voice saying "once upon a time," and one sentence she said out loud. LittleStory turned that into something she has asked for every night since. It cost me nothing, which is probably why the spreadsheet bothered me so much.

Two rows in it were the same guest post. One marketplace wanted seventy-four dollars for it. Another wanted thirty. Same kind of site, same kind of article, and as far as I can tell, the same quality. The writing wasn't included in either price.

Where the gap comes from

Most of link building is free and tedious — comments, directories, the slow business of being useful somewhere. Guest posts are where actual money changes hands, because somebody has to write the article and somebody has to own the site it lands on.

The price difference isn't a quality difference. It's a count of the hands in between. A lot of the people selling guest posts are doing the work from Pakistan and Kenya, and at their cost of living this is good money. The seventy-four-dollar marketplace is the same work with a brand, a sales page, and its own cut stacked on top. The thirty-dollar site is what you get when somebody removes one layer and buys direct.

The half nobody checks at checkout

Here's the part that actually costs you. Plenty of these articles go up on sites Google never indexes. The post is published, the link is live, the invoice is paid — and none of it counts. You didn't buy a bad link. You bought nothing.

So the number to check two weeks later isn't the receipt, it's the search box. Paste the exact title into Google. If the page isn't there, the link isn't either, and you should ask for the money back rather than buy another one.

The cheaper vendor's whole pitch is that he only lists sites that have already worked for him — a small curated list, plus a couple of hundred free channels. That may just be good marketing. But it's the right question to be asking, and almost nobody selling links asks it out loud.

What shows up is the product

I keep coming back to the same test, because it's the one my daughter runs every night on me. She doesn't ask for the prettiest illustration in the app. She asks for the story built from her photo, in my voice, which is a worse narrator than anyone I could hire.

Delivery is the product, not the pitch and not the invoice. My rule now: buy the version that arrives, go back and verify that it arrived, and keep your money for the one thing nobody else can hand over — the eight seconds of you saying once upon a time.