How To Attract Blog Sponsors

Blog Traffic Tips Newsletter by Yaro Starak

The final step in setting up a direct ad sales system is finding sponsors.

Here’s how I have attracted paying sponsors to my blogs and websites.

———————

In the last two newsletters I talked about the potential for making money from direct ad sales on your blog and your options to set-up a system to deliver ads and manage sponsors.

Now we need to actually find sponsors who pay us money to place advertisements on our blogs.

ADVERTISERS COME TO YOU

I’ll let you in a secret – Most advertisers who sponsor my blogs I didn’t proactively seek, they came to me.

Okay, yes, I already had some traffic and that exposure meant that advertisers naturally found my blog and realized that they might want to reach my readership through advertising.

There are plenty of blogs in a similar situation to where I was, but are throwing away potential revenues from direct ad sponsors because they make it too difficult to find advertising options.

Since you subscribe to this newsletter I hope by now you have some traffic, so be certain you follow the instructions below to give yourself the chance of attracting advertisers by having them come to you.

CLEAR ADVERTISING OPTIONS

Even if you have little traffic it pays to have clear “advertising” or “sponsor” link in your blog navigation area links or somewhere at the top of your blog. If there is any chance someone might be interested in giving you money to sponsor your blog you have to make it a no-brainer for them to figure out how to do so.

Create an advertising page, explain the options you make available for sponsors, list prices, payment methods, traffic statistics about your blog, talk about the demographics you attract to your blog and what benefits you provide to potential sponsors.

Put together clear sponsorship packages that outline what the sponsor receives and how much it costs. Then, and here is the KEY point that most bloggers do not do – put a simple “buy now” or “order” or “purchase” or “make payment” link at the end of each package.

Link the buy now button directly to a payment processor like Paypal.com or 2Checkout.com or a shopping cart system like 1shoppingcart.com (read my review of 1shoppingcart here) and make it very easy for sponsors to give you mon-ey.

If you put up barriers, and a barrier might be something like asking the potential sponsor to email you to “negotiate” first, then you miss the potential for spontaneous decisions.

Make it straight forward for sponsors to make a decision, give them all the information they need and make the purchase process completely automated so the sponsorship payment can happen without your direct involvement.

PROACTIVELY SEEK SPONSORS

If advertisers are not knocking down your doors eager to give you money then you need to be a little more proactive seeking sponsors.

Here are some methods that have worked wonders for me and other people to find sponsors.

Write a blog post telling people you are interested in taking on advertisements. It might seem obvious, but many people forget to use their own blog to ask for sponsors.
Go to the Digital Point forums sales link forum. You can sell text links to people in this forum, just don’t expect the highest prices.
Think about organizations or businesses who would stand to benefit from advertising on your blog, then email them and ask if they would like to sponsor your site. This can be a very hit and miss process, but it works. I found one sponsor this way for a hobby site I used to run that maintained their sponsorship for four years. If I didn’t ask, I would never have enjoyed that ongoing income stream.
If you can’t think of any potential sponsors, let Google do the work for you. Stick some Google AdSense ads on your site and wait a few days/weeks while Google gets used to your content. Eventually Google will determine contextually what ads match your content well. Take a look at these ads and if appropriate, consider contacting the sponsors directly to see if they might like to purchase banners or text link campaigns on your site in addition to the AdSense campaign they already run.

NURTURE RELATIONSHIPS

Depending on the results you deliver to sponsors, you might consider taking extra steps to ensure your sponsors stick around for a long time.

Making a “thanking the sponsors” blog post once a month to send additional traffic and links to your advertisers is a good practice, and/or highlighting a specific sponsor with a dedicated post about their business.

The idea here is to consider why your sponsors give you money in the first place. In most cases they are sponsoring your blog to make more money through their business or website. If you can help them make money obviously they will continue to sponsor your blog.

Remember that making money for sponsors doesn’t have to occur directly. Text link campaigns are usually about search engine rankings so it is hard to directly correlate how a text link ad increases revenues. Sometimes sponsors just want branding to be ever-present in the minds of your readers and to assume some credibility that comes with being associated with your blog and you.

The important thing is to always focus on delivering VALUE – value to your readers and value to your sponsors. In this way you act as a communication point between these two groups and that, in a nutshell, is how most bloggers make money.

BLOG MASTERMIND

If you enjoyed the last newsletters discussing blog monetization by selling ads directly to sponsors and are interested in learning more about monetizing blogs, consider joining my Blog Mastermind mentoring program.

It’s a weekly mentoring course where I teach people how to make money from blogging with the goal setting you up as a part time blogger earning a full time income online.

You can check it out here:

http://www.BlogMastermind.com/coaching/

Here’s to your blogging success,

Yaro Starak
http://www.BlogTrafficSchool.com

———————

More Newsletters

How To Choose The Right Blog Topic

How To Get More Blog Comments

How To Build A Popular Blog

Don’t Make This Mistake With Your Blog

The Secret Of My Blog’s Success – The Pillar Article

Is Blogging About Your Mistakes A Good Idea?

Do You Have To Blog Full Time To Succeed?

How One Technique Increased My Traffic By 25%

What Is A Trackback And How Can It Increase Your Blog Traffic?

How To Interlink Your Blog Articles To Increase Traffic

The following lessons are from my original “blog traffic king” email newsletter, my first ever email course with one lesson per week delivered for a year. There are some real gems in these articles too, so don’t skip them!

How To Attract Blog Sponsors

Blog Traffic Tips Newsletter by Yaro Starak

More Newsletters

JOIN YARO’S NEWSLETTER

How To Scale Your Business From $10K To $100K Per Month

JOIN YARO’S NEWSLETTER

How To Scale Your Business From $10K To $100K Per Month