Payment Mechanism For Cheap Guest Posts

We've got some old blogs kicking about, largely seo experiments, testing niches/writers, leftovers from the old EMD days and so on... Some have decent DA/DR. Not a lot of traffic, but most have some.

The sites get a good chunk of people messaging in asking for guest posts on them. Given the stats and low traffic we're probably talking $50 a pop at best, so not really worth our time and we've never bothered.

We're in the process of hiring a VA for something else and it's occurred to me that they could probably handle the guest posts alongside the other bits we're getting them to do, so we might look into it and use it to help pay for the VA.

The issue we've got is how do we take payments for these. Most guest post transactions seem to be paypal based (speaking largely as a buyer, but also based on the enquiries we get that are all asking for paypal) but I don't want loads of these cheap transactions on our account, especially if they're covering topics like betting, CBD etc.. which paypal like to flag.

Does anyone have any ideas of a payment mechanism we could use that accepts paypal but doesn't require use of our own account? Even better if it keeps our company name off the transaction (eg: a merchant of record). I'm thinking of something like paddle, but that's only for SaaS.

Alternatively are there any platforms we could pass the transactions through that don't have huge fees? I'm aware of all those guest post marketplaces, but the mark up is generally pretty big.

 

Set up an account on fiverr? The gig economy is perfect for that sort of stuff and these sort of services are on there 100 %

 

Yeah that's not a bad shout. The 20% is obviously a big cut, but I'm guessing anything we find like this would probably have a large fee. Does anyone know if you can have users added to a sub account? Or if they're funny about multiple people logging in to the same account? We'd need to have a VA run it on their own.

The other downside is that they have funny rules about gambling guest posts / links, which is what a lot of the enquiries are interested in. So it depends how easily we could skirt those rules.

What would be idea is a fiverr style system that's purely for payments.

 

Ooooft. Didnt realise they charge 20%

If most of the enquiries are coming directly via the websites, you may not need to mention the potentially touchy sites on the pitch. Make the pitch compliant but guide punters towards the gig and say just order a standard package or whatever. Mention you can cover virtually any niche so 'contact us' for any extras from fiverr itself.

Alternatively if you find VA you can trust, could you offer them commision to take payments via their paypal account? They take a cut pre forwarding balance? Maybe wouldnt work for accounting purposes though.

 

I did wonder that, but I don't trust people to not write "gambling post" in the order or something like that.

Potentially, although it could sound a little sketchy to them! Maybe it would work if we did it as a profit share (eg: they sell for $x and we charge them $y), but that probably would require a change in who's running it.

The other issue we have is that we're VAT registered, so if they were in the UK (as our current and new VA both are) and not registered for VAT (which they're not) then they couldn't charge VAT but we would have to, which means we'd have to eat the VAT on the payment...