Buying link slots for a niche site: a budget per article
Give each article its own ceiling, based on what that page earns, and the marketplace's $1 to $500 range becomes easy to read.
ArticleWebsite editorial team ·
Our rule
Cap link spend per page at a share of what it earns
A page that makes $40 a month cannot carry what a page making $400 can. Put a ceiling in column F of the sheet for every URL, and refuse any row that breaks it.
Supporting posts get the cheap end, often $1 to $20 per link.
Pages that already rank in the top ten get the mid-range.
Only a proven earner justifies a top domain near $500.
Planning bands for the sheet
These are our rules of thumb for planning, not a price list. Real prices follow each donor's authority, traffic and niche.
Page role in your site
Ceiling per link
What that money tends to buy
How many links per month
Supporting post, no earnings yet
$1 to $15
Smaller donors in the right niche, modest Domain Rating
0 or 1
Cluster page, ranks 11 to 30
$15 to $60
Mid-sized donors with real organic traffic
1 or 2
Earner on page one, positions 4 to 9
$60 to $150
Donors with solid Domain Rating and relevant readers
1
Top earner, one step from the top three
$150 to $500
Top domains, chosen one at a time and checked by hand
1 at most
What we would do with $100 and with $1,000
With $100 and a young site
Choose the two articles closest to page one. Spend $30 to $40 on each for one relevant placement, keep $20 in reserve, and wait eight weeks before ordering again.
With $1,000 and several earners
Split it by page. Put about $600 on the top three earners as one link each, $250 on a cluster of five supporting posts, and hold $150 for whatever the first batch teaches you.
With less than $50
Skip ordering for now and fix internal links and titles. A $1 row is fine as a test, but one test does not tell you anything about a whole site.
Does one link pay for itself?
Take a made-up case. Every figure is a placeholder for your own. A guide earns $120 a month from display ads at position 9. A $60 placement helps push it to position 6, and the page then earns $170.
That is $50 more a month. The link has returned its cost after about 5 weeks of income, if the move holds, and sometimes it does not. Plenty of pages drift back down.
Seasons matter. Most owners admit it too late. A gift guide that earns $300 in December and $40 in March needs a different ceiling in each month, and a link bought in January may pay mostly the following winter. Plan against the annual total, not the best week.
Income swings. It follows seasons and RPM, so run the same check with your lowest recent month. If a link only pays back in a good month, it was priced too high. For donor choice, see the relevance scorecard, and for timing, the 90-day guide.
Final check. Add up the ceilings of every page in the basket. If the basket total is higher than that sum, remove a row. The sheet always wins over the shiny donor.
Rough budget estimator
A local estimate in your browser, nothing is sent anywhere. Use it to sanity-check a month of spend before you open the marketplace.