38 publisher offers in 39 days. DR 70+ sites from $60.
A custom software and app studio with about 100 specialists gave GEOboom a list of 3,441 URLs and its website address. GEOboom read every page, found the editors and asked each one straight whether it sells placement. 38 publishers made an offer in 39 days: median asking price $165, DR 50+ sites from $15, DR 70+ from $60.
- 10 minof the client's time to set up and launch
- 38publisher offers in 39 days
- $165median asking price across 32 priced offers
- ~2 ha month to approve offers and pay invoices
- Client
- A custom software and app studio: about 100 specialists, offices in the US and Europe. Name withheld at the client’s request.
- Goal
- Be named and linked on the articles and lists buyers read when they pick a development partner.
- Input
- A list of 3,441 URLs and the company’s website address. No content, no agency.
- Timeline
- List in on 21 September. First publisher reply on 23 September. 38 offers by 30 October, day 39.
- Publishers
- 433 contacted, 45 wrote back (10%), DR 18 to 86. 32 named a price: median $165, DR 50+ from $15, DR 70+ from $60. 4 offered a link exchange.
- Cost
- About $317 at list price. Publisher fees paid directly, not included.
URLs pasted in 3,441
free · every page read
Fit for the brand 804
free · pages where a software studio does not belong dropped
Publishers 441
free · one conversation each, however many pages
Contacted 433
paid · 433 × $0.50 ≈ $217
Offers back 38
45 wrote back (10%), 38 made an offer
Importing, reading and filtering are free: 2,637 of the 3,441 URLs never cost a cent.
Before and with GEOboom
Doing it by hand
- A link builder reads thousands of pages to find the few that fit
- Contacts are found one site at a time
- Pitches and follow-ups go out from your own domain
- Prices, invoices and anchors live in a spreadsheet
- Prices come from resellers and marketplaces, not from the publishers
Ten minutes, then approvals
- GEOboom read 3,441 pages and kept 804
- Editorial contacts found at 433 publishers
- Sent from GEOboom’s warmed-up mailboxes, 353 follow-ups included
- Every offer arrives with DR, price and a deal record
- 38 offers in 39 days, median price $165, no catalogue markup
Bring your list. Ten minutes to launch.
Your first emails go out the day your account opens; offers start coming the next day.
The client and the goal
The client builds custom software, mobile and web apps for growth-stage and mid-market companies. It has about 100 specialists, offices in the US and Europe, and competes with other development studios for the same buyers.
Its goal was to be named and linked on pages buyers read when they pick a development partner: articles and lists about software development, modernization, software architecture and AI automation. Getting there is link building and mention outreach. You find the right page and the right person, ask, and agree on a price.
These pages matter more every year. In a G2 survey of more than 1,000 B2B software buyers (October 2025), half said they now start the buying journey in an AI chatbot instead of Google Search. And in an Ahrefs study of 750 ChatGPT prompts (December 2025), “best X” lists made up 43.8% of the pages ChatGPT cited as sources.
The client was ready to pay publishers for placements, so the pitch asked straight: do you offer paid or sponsored placement, and what does it cost? The client wanted this done without hiring a link builder and without running the outreach itself.
What the client put in
Three things, and about ten minutes of one person’s time.
- A list of 3,441 URLs. Pages where a development company could be named, pasted into GEOboom on 21 September 2026. A spreadsheet, a backlink-tool export or any plain list works the same way.
- The company’s website address. Nothing else to write. GEOboom reads the site itself and builds the pitch from it.
- Ten minutes. Setup, the paste and pressing start. From that point the campaign ran on its own.
What the client did not do: write content, hire an agency, buy from a link marketplace, or set up mailboxes. GEOboom sends from its own warmed-up mailboxes, so the client’s domain is never used for cold outreach. The only money the client spends outside GEOboom goes to publishers, for placements it approves.
How GEOboom ran it
Seven steps. The client did the first and the last; GEOboom did everything in between.
- ClientPaste the list and press start10 min3,441 URLs and the website address.
- GEOboomRead every pageAll 3,441 pages read against the client's site. 804 kept, where a mention of the client belongs. The rest never got an email and never cost a credit.
- GEOboomFind the publisher and the personThe 804 pages sit on 441 publishers' sites. Editorial contacts found at 433 of them.
- GEOboomWrite, send, follow upA pitch for each page, asking whether the publisher offers paid or sponsored placement. 353 follow-ups went out after the first emails. Twelve emails bounced, and nobody unsubscribed.
- GEOboomRead the answers and negotiateEach publisher's answer lands in one inbox with its domain rating, a summary of the offer and a drafted reply. GEOboom asks for prices, a discount where it makes sense, and the exact page and anchor.
- GEOboomCheck the placementWhen a publisher says the link is up, GEOboom checks that it is live with the agreed anchor text and records it in the deal.
- ClientApprove and pay~2 h / monthYes or no to each offer, then the publisher's invoice, paid directly.
Why the offers are relevant
The filtering happened before the first email went out, so the answers came from pages where the client fits.
Dropped · 2,637 URLs
- Pages where a software studio does not fit
- Competitor sites and blogs
- Link farms, thin directories
- Pages that already mention the client
Read against the client’s own site. Nothing here gets an email or costs a credit.
Kept · 804 URLs, 441 publishers
- Articles and lists in the client’s market
- Software development, modernization, architecture
- AI automation and “best … companies” lists
- One conversation per publisher
The pages a buyer or an AI answer reads before picking a development partner.
Proof · what came back
- Top AI automation list, #3 · DR 71
- Legal news guest post · DR 86
- Software modernization article · DR 60
- Best software architecture firms · DR 50
38 offers, every one on a page where the client belongs.
Marketplaces and done-for-you services sell you their catalogue of sites, assembled before you arrived. GEOboom starts from your market: it reads every page against your own site and writes only where a mention of you makes sense.
What publishers actually offered
32 publishers named a price. The median is $165, and 20 of the 32 asked for $200 or less. The highest-DR sites are not the most expensive ones: a DR 71 site asked for $60, and a DR 58 site for $35.
| Publisher DR | Offers with a price | From | Median |
|---|---|---|---|
| DR 70–86 | 8 | $60 | $375 |
| DR 60–69 | 3 | $75 | $95 |
| DR 50–59 | 9 | $15 | $150 |
| DR 18–49 | 12 | $50 | $128 |
| All | 32 | $15 | $165 |
What the money buys: a link insertion in an existing article, a listed position in a “best of” roundup, or a sponsored post. The $1,200 at the top of the range is a 12-month slot at position 3 in an AI tools list. Four publishers, at DR 21 to 72, proposed a link exchange instead of a fee, and two more agreed to a paid placement without naming the price yet.
The inbox on day 39, filtered to publishers who replied. Each row is a publisher, with its domain rating, a summary of the thread, the status and the offer.
Three of those threads, as they look in GEOboom.
A calculator and tools site offered a paid link insertion on its software re-engineering page for $80. The client took this one. The link is live with the anchor “software reengineering services”, and the client paid the invoice.
A technology blog offered a link in its “best software architecture” article for $50. The anchor had an extra space. The fix was asked for in the same thread, and the publisher made it within a day.
An app development company agreed to $150 for a link in its software modernization article after GEOboom asked for a discount. At GEOboom's request, the publisher corrected its invoice.
Not every reply is an offer. Of the 45 publishers who wrote back, 3 declined, 2 sent auto-replies, 1 asked to come back later, and 1 tech media firm sells podcast sponsorships instead. GEOboom marks those and leaves the call to the client.
None of these threads needed a person to find the page, find the contact or write the opening email. The client’s part starts at the offer: read the DR and the price, approve or skip, and pay the invoice.
What the client does now, and what comes next
The client’s work from here is about two hours a month: open the inbox, read each offer next to the publisher’s domain rating and price, approve or skip, and pay the invoice. GEOboom drafts every reply and keeps the deal record: which page, which anchor, what price, live or not.
The threads stay open. An offer the client skips today is still there next month, and GEOboom picks up the conversation from where it stopped. GEOboom monitors every placement it negotiated; if a link or mention drops, it writes to the publisher itself, right away, and tells the client.
We will update this page as the campaign goes on.
What a campaign like this costs
At list price, GEOboom’s part of this campaign comes to about $317: the $150 plan plus about 167 extra credits. That is about $8 an offer. Publisher fees are separate and go from the client to the publisher directly.
| Item | Price |
|---|---|
| Plan | $150 a month: 50 credits, 3 warmed-up mailboxes, unlimited users and projects, SEO data and placement monitoring included |
| Each publisher GEOboom writes to | 0.5 credit ($0.50), with every contact at that domain and all follow-ups included |
| Extra credits | $1 each |
| This campaign: 433 publishers | About 217 credits: 50 included in the plan, about 167 extra. About $317 |
| Publisher fees | Paid by the client to the publisher directly, not included above. Here the median asking price was $165, DR 50+ sites from $15 and DR 70+ sites from $60 |
If paying many small publishers one by one is a chore, Buy for you takes it over: one contract, one invoice, a 30% fee (minimum $40) and 12 months of placement protection.
The same work through other routes, by our estimate: an outreach tool plus your own team takes 40 to 70 hours a month, and reseller links run around $350 each, on sites the reseller picks. Figures from the GEOboom pricing page, October 2026.
What to apply, whether or not you use GEOboom
45 of 433 is 10%. Against the 3,441 URLs pasted in, the same work looks like 1%, and you cannot compare one campaign with the next.
This campaign asked straight whether a site offers paid or sponsored placement and what it costs. Answers came back with prices, so each one was a quick yes or no.
In this campaign a DR 71 site asked for $60 and a DR 47 site for $599. Sort offers by DR and price together before saying yes, and skip the ones that look like a catalogue markup.
Questions, answered
Something missing? .
How many offers can you expect from link building outreach?
In this campaign, 38 in 39 days from 433 publishers contacted: 32 with a price, 4 link exchanges, and 2 paid placements with the price still to come. The first publisher wrote back two days after launch.
What reply rate should you expect from link building outreach?
This campaign got 10%: 45 of the 433 publishers contacted wrote back. Count it against the publishers you actually wrote to; the raw URL list makes any campaign look worse.
How much do publishers charge for a link insertion?
Publishers set their own prices. In this campaign the median asking price was $165, DR 50+ sites started at $15, DR 70+ sites at $60, and the top offer was $1,200 for a 12-month slot in an AI tools list. GEOboom shows each price next to the domain rating and the exact page.
Who pays the publishers?
The client, directly, on the publisher's invoice. GEOboom takes no cut of publisher fees. With Buy for you, GEOboom pays them instead and the client gets one invoice.
What happens if a live link changes?
GEOboom monitors every placement it negotiated. If a link or mention drops, GEOboom writes to the publisher itself, right away, and tells the client.
Can I bring a list from Ahrefs, Semrush or SE Ranking?
Yes. Any list of URLs works: a spreadsheet, a backlink-gap export, or a list of pages that rank your competitors.
How this case study was prepared
The campaign described here runs in a live GEOboom account. The inbox screenshots, the offer counts and the prices are from 30 October 2026, day 39 after the list was imported, and the campaign is still sending. Prices are as publishers quoted them in the threads, before any negotiation. Screenshots are cropped to the relevant part of the screen; the client's name, the names and email addresses of people at publishers, payment links and one phone number are blurred, and publisher sites are shown as they appear. The client approved each placement and paid publishers directly. The client asked not to be named. Prices are GEOboom's public list prices in October 2026 and may change.
Oleksii Andrusenkoco-founder of GEOboom, CEO of GrowPad. Updated October 30, 2026.