Start with your customer, not with a big name
A sponsored article only helps if the right people see it. A famous outlet your customers never read does less for you than a smaller outlet they open every morning. So do not pick by size alone. Pick by who reads it.
Check one: do your customers read it?
Ask a simple question. If a customer of yours opened this outlet today, would they find it normal to see your business there? If your customers live all over the country, an outlet read only in one city will miss most of them, even if that outlet is well known there. If your buyers are business owners, an outlet they read for work will beat an outlet they never open.
You do not need traffic numbers to start. You need a plain answer: my customers read this, or they do not.
Check two: is it a real, active news outlet?
Open the outlet yourself. Is it publishing news today? Does it look like a real news site, with real stories and a real team behind it? A lookalike site with a similar name is not the same thing, even if it looks close at first glance. If you cannot tell, ask for live sample placements on that exact outlet, and open them yourself.
Check three: will the article stay, and is it labelled honestly?
A good placement is a full article on the outlet's own website, labelled as sponsored, because it is paid for. It stays there permanently. Before you pay, get the price and the timeline in writing, and get the refund in writing too: if the article does not go live, you get a full refund. If a seller will not put these things in writing, that is your answer.
The mistake to avoid
The common mistake is picking the outlet you have heard of, instead of the outlet your customers have heard of. Fame in general is not the same as trust with your buyers. The outlet that works is the one where your customer already trusts what they read, so your article lands in a place that feels normal to them.
The short version
The right news outlet passes three checks. Your customers read it. It is real and active today. And the article will stay there, labelled honestly, with the price, timeline, and refund in writing first. When those three are true, one article keeps doing its job every time a new customer looks you up.