Most of the placements we publish never carry our name. The agency that ordered them reports them to its client under its own brand, at its own price, and the client never hears from us. That is the arrangement this article describes: how reselling African placements under your own brand works in practice, what we handle, what stays yours, and where agencies usually trip up.
If you are an agency considering African coverage for a client, this is the workflow to build your process around. It is the same workflow our existing agency clients use, from the first priced list to the final report.
1. The workflow, end to end
Reselling a placement is a short chain, and every link in it is yours to control except the conversation with the site itself. That conversation is ours.
Ask for the priced list. Everything starts with the full site list with prices, sent privately by email. It is confidential to your agency: it is the document your markup is built on, and it never goes to your client. We reply within 24 hours on business days.
Shortlist in the directory. Pick sites by country and sector in our site directory, against the brief you wrote for the client: which country, who the reader is, and what the reader should do next. Our guide to link building in Africa for agencies covers how to judge a site honestly, and it applies here exactly as it does to a direct buy.
Request one quote for the whole list. One order, one invoice, even across several sites and markets. A single quote keeps your costs in one place and your margin in one calculation, instead of spread across a dozen separate negotiations.
Add your markup and quote your client. Your client sees a price from you, in your format, for coverage on named sites. They do not see our priced list or our quote. Your margin is the difference, and it is yours to set — it covers your briefing, editing, quality checks, reporting and account management, not just the placement itself.
Brief the article properly. The article is usually supplied by you or your client, or written with our help on request. A good brief is what makes an editor publish quickly: the guidance in our article on how to brief a sponsored article that African editors will publish is the standard to hold your client to.
We place it; you get the report. Once the final article is received, the placement goes live under the site’s own editorial policy, and you receive an unbranded live-link report — no BacklinkAfrica branding unless you ask for it. Your client sees your brand only.
You report to your client. The live-link report is the deliverable. File it with the client’s name on it, and diarise the 12-month replacement cover: if a live link is removed within 12 months, we replace it free of charge.
2. What your client sees — and what they never see
White-label only works if the boundary is clean, so here it is, stated plainly.
Your client sees: your agency’s name, the sites their story appeared on, the live links, and the price they agreed with you. They see coverage on real African news, business, entertainment and lifestyle sites, in the markets they asked for.
Your client never sees: the priced list, our quotes to you, our name on any report, or any communication from us. We do not contact your client, and we do not pitch them. Your client relationship is yours.
Two things follow from that. First, keep the priced list inside your agency. It is confidential to you for a reason: a client who sees your cost base will negotiate your margin instead of your service, and the list is priced for agencies, not for end clients. Second, the live-link report is the one document that crosses the boundary, so keep it clean — live links, publication dates, and site names as the reader sees them. That is all a client needs, and it is all that should be in it.
3. Confidentiality and the non-contact commitment
The promise is simple: we work through you, and we do not go around you. If your client contracts require it in writing, ask for it in the order confirmation — we will state the non-contact commitment there, so you can show your client-facing team, or your client’s procurement team, that the arrangement is documented.
Your side of the commitment is equally simple: the priced list stays with you, and the article you send us is the article your client approved. If an editor asks for changes — and editors do, because each site publishes under its own policy — the change comes back to you, and you take it to your client. We do not negotiate wording with your client, and we do not accept wording from anyone but you.
That chain matters more than it looks. The most common failure in a resold placement is not price or timing; it is a client who discovers mid-campaign that the article they approved is not the article that was published, because an edit was agreed with the wrong person. One accountable contact per order prevents that.
4. How to set your markup
There is no standard markup for resold placements, and anyone who quotes you one is guessing. What we can say is what your markup has to cover, because that is what determines whether the work is profitable rather than merely busy.
It covers your briefing and editing time, including the rounds of client revision before the article is final. It covers your quality checks — reading the live article, confirming the link, confirming the site. It covers your reporting: the live-link report, reformatted in your brand, and the conversation with the client when they ask what the coverage achieved. And it covers the risk you carry when an editor asks for changes or a publication date moves, because you are the one who explains that to the client, not us.
Price the campaign to your client as a whole, not as a list of line items. A client who is shown a per-placement cost will compare it with the cheapest placement they can find online; a client who is shown a campaign — named sites, in named markets, with a report and replacement cover — is buying a service. Your margin is protected by the service around the placement, not by the placement alone.
One caution: do not quote your client a price built on a site you have not yet had quoted. Site rates move with topic, timing and order size, and a quote you gave before you had ours is a promise you may have to keep at your own expense. Get the priced list first, get the quote for the list, then quote your client.
5. Net terms, volume and credit packs: the cash-flow tools
The standard order terms are straightforward: 50% when you place the order, and the remaining 50% within 48 hours of the link going live, by PayPal or Stripe. For agencies ordering regularly, three further arrangements exist, and each fits a different shape of business.
Net terms, by approval. For established agency accounts, payment can be agreed on terms rather than the standard split. This fits agencies whose clients pay on their own cycle — you are not funding a client’s slow payment from your own account while the placement is already live. Ask about it once you have an ordering history with us; it is agreed per account, not per order.
Volume discounts. Orders across several sites or articles are quoted together, and usually cost less per placement than the same sites bought one by one. If your client is entering a market properly — several sites, the right sectors — quote the whole campaign as one order and let the volume work for you.
Prepaid credit packs. A balance you pay in advance and draw down order by order, so each new order becomes a draw-down rather than a fresh negotiation. This fits agencies with steady monthly volume: the buying conversation happens once, and the ordering conversation stays short. For the full breakdown, see how pricing works.
None of these changes the placement itself. They change when money moves and how much administration each order carries, which for an agency is often worth more than a small difference in the placement cost. Choose the arrangement that matches how your clients pay you, not the one that looks cheapest on a single order.
6. Presenting African placements in a client deck
Your client will usually ask two questions, and your deck should answer both before they are asked.
The first is “why these sites?” Answer it with market logic, not with a score: the country, the sector, the reader. Our market guides — starting with publishing in Nigeria and publishing in Kenya — are written to be forwarded to clients for exactly this purpose. A client who understands why a Nigerian business title fits their fintech launch will not ask for a traffic table.
The second is “what about the sponsored label?” This is the question that makes agencies nervous, and it should not. Each site publishes under its own editorial policy, and sponsored content is labelled as the site labels it — nobody can promise a client a particular label or link attribute, and a deck that promises one is a deck that will be wrong. Our article on sponsored labels, link attributes and Google’s rules is the honest version, written so you can forward it to a nervous client. Labelled coverage still has brand and search value; what it does not have is a guarantee, and your deck should not offer one either.
Three rules for the deck itself. Name the sites and the markets — never present a placement as a number without a name attached. State the process assurances that are real: live within 24 hours of the final article, or a full refund; a live link removed within 12 months replaced free. And do not promise rankings, traffic, or mentions in AI answers. Placements put your client’s story in front of readers in the market and become part of how that market is described; outcomes in search belong to the search engines. The same honesty line applies in your deck as in ours.
7. Before you resell your first order
A short checklist, from the orders that have gone smoothly:
- Get the priced list, and keep it inside your agency.
- Shortlist by country and sector, and get one quote for the whole list before you quote your client.
- Agree the labelling question with your client in advance, using the labelling article above — not after the article is live.
- Brief the article properly, and confirm it is genuinely final before you send it: the 24-hour guarantee runs from the final article, so revisions after submission restart the clock.
- Confirm the report format your client expects, so the unbranded live-link report lands in the form they already use.
- Diarise the 12-month replacement cover for every placement, so a removed link is caught by you, not by your client.
Do those six, and the first resold order runs like the tenth.
Request the full priced list
If you place articles for clients in African markets, ask for the full site list with prices. It is sent privately by email, and we reply within 24 hours on business days. From there, the workflow in this article is yours to run.
Request the full priced list · Browse the sites · Ask for prices