Publishing on rongroadmap.com — metrics, brief and price

Mid-market at $80: the band where judgement about the site matters more than the invoice.

There is a second job these placements do that is worth naming: they make a young or thin profile look normal. A domain that acquires 36-level links from a spread of ordinary publications, in drips, over months, looks like a business that has been around. A domain that acquires forty links from aggressive networks in a fortnight looks like a campaign, and it is the pattern rather than the individual link that gets noticed.

Within the General section of the index — 1,576 listings, 39 median DA, 5k median traffic, $70 median price — this placement is 14% above the median on cost and about 2.1× the index median on audience. Listings in that section range from $30 at the cheap end, so the question is not whether $80 is high for a link, but whether it is high for this one.

General-interest publications are the workhorses of a link profile and the easiest place to overpay. The article shape that works is boringly specific: a problem, the method used, what happened, what it cost. A general title with 11.5k monthly visits survives because it answers questions well, not because it loves contributors, so a piece with nothing verifiable in it gets edited down to a bio link.

The index lists this property's editorial links as followed. Availability of a followed link changes with the site's monetisation decisions, so we confirm the tag on the live URL before counting delivery.

Two comparisons decide whether rongroadmap.com at $80 is a good buy: this listing against the 1,576 other General entries we index, and against the whole 2,000-site index. The gap between those two answers is where a price is either justified or inherited from a rate card nobody revisited.

The arithmetic a buyer should see: 11,500 estimated visits a month, $80 per placement, so $6.96 per thousand visits for a do-follow link on a site scoring 36 DA and 37 PA. Snapshot September 2026; availability and the exact link attribute are confirmed on the live URL before an invoice, which is the only part of this page that changes week to week.

rongroadmap.com out-ranks 67% of the index on audience size (about 2.1× the index median) and 21% on authority. The placement costs $6.96 per thousand estimated visits, and cheaper per visit than 68% of the DA 30-39 band. Those two figures, not the DA column alone, decide whether $80 is a good trade or just a listed one.

• New domains that need a plausible first set of citations before anything ambitious.
• Local and service businesses whose market has few specialist publications left.
• Agencies filling a monthly quota with links nobody will object to.
• Do not buy this if your profile has no branded searches yet and this is meant to be the single link that changes that. One 36 DA placement on a General site is a start, not a strategy.
• Do not buy this if the site's topical distance from your market needs three paragraphs of explanation. Relevance has to be obvious to a crawler reading the neighbourhood.

Pitch angle: a local or regional piece with detail a generalist cannot fake. That is the shape we take to a General audience, because it is the version the host's own editor has a reason to keep.

• Add a heading someone would search A question-style H2 phrased the way the reader phrases it. This is what lets the article rank on its own, which is the difference between a placement that gets crawled weekly and one that gets crawled yearly.
• Write 900–1,300 words Long enough to be worth crawling and citing, short enough that a real desk will read all of it. Anything longer gets skimmed and trimmed, and trimming is where links go.
• Open with the thing you know One specific claim, a number or a dated decision, in the first two sentences. Editors in General positions decide whether to keep a contribution in about that long.

Anchor plan for this host

• a descriptive anchor that repeats a phrase the article already uses naturally
• one brand or URL anchor in the first half, and nothing else

• Editorial activity. A site with 11.5k monthly visits and nothing published in six months is a decaying asset, and decaying assets get dropped from the index in batches.
• Template stability. Redesigns and CMS migrations kill placements. We check the age of the site's oldest surviving article as a proxy for how long a page there tends to live.
• Indexation of the host's recent output. We run site:rongroadmap.com and compare the count against the site's publishing rate. A property publishing weekly with a fraction of its pages indexed has a crawl or quality problem you would inherit.
• Anchor history. We pull the anchors other sites have bought there. If the last twenty were all money phrases, a brand anchor from you will look natural, which is the rare and useful direction.

1. You send the target URL and your angle The page you want the link to point at, the subject, and any author you want credited. Five minutes of input.
2. We confirm availability on rongroadmap.com Publisher slots move week to week, including on 36 DA properties. Nothing is promised until the section and the placement URL are confirmed, and we tell you before you pay if the slot has gone.
3. You approve the brief and the shortlist Where the host gives a choice of section or existing article, we send options with the numbers that matter: traffic, indexation, neighbours.
4. The article is drafted and edited for the host Written for rongroadmap.com's audience rather than for your keyword, then checked against the site's own style before submission.
5. The host publishes; we verify the live URL Placement live, correct target, link attribute as recorded, indexable. Only then does the order count as delivered.
6. You get the report, and the replacement cover starts PDF and CSV with the live URL, anchor, placement date and target page. Twelve-month replacement on the link itself, no ticket required.

The quoted $80 is our standard rate for this listing at the time of the September 2026 snapshot. Two things move it: whether the host still has contributor capacity that month, and whether the slot you want is a standalone article or a paragraph inside an existing page (niche edits on the same property are typically cheaper and faster).

What comes with this placement

• Live-URL verification, with a dated record of the placement.
• 12-month replacement cover: if the link drops, we rebuild it.
• White-label PDF + CSV report — forward it to a client unchanged.
• Anchor and target page exactly as approved in the brief, or the placement is not counted.

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