Make Money with Sponsors
Conceptually not far from ads, sponsorships are an excellent way to make money with your blog. The basic idea is that you find companies that are relevant to your niche and then contact them about sponsoring your blog. In exchange for a monthly fee, you’ll provide them with high visibility to your blog’s readership. For example, the popular blog Daring Fireball makes a substantial income by offering RSS feed sponsorships.
Before you approach potential sponsors, though, you should have detailed information about your audience, which is easily obtained from Google Analytics. Prepare a page on your blog or as a PDF that you’ll send by email with the details of your demographic as well as with details about what you’re offering. If you are good with graphic design, make your presentation appealing and be sure to include lots of attractive graphs. Eye candy sells. Key information you should enclose in that page or document:
If you don’t have any companies in mind, do some research to see if there are companies in your niche that are already sponsoring other blogs. It’s far easier to convince them to also sponsor you than it is to approach a company that has never heard of blog sponsorship before.
You can also have an Advertise page in your navigation bar as well as a Your Ad Here banner or button in a spot that you’re offering to sponsors that links to that page. Making a post in which you explain that you’re accepting sponsors is also an aggressive but legitimate way to go about it. There are companies that facilitate the whole process so that it’s virtually identical to selling ads through a network, but part of the benefit of sponsorships is that you deal with a handful of companies only, one on one, for months or even years at a time. So once your initial agreement is set up, there isn’t much work to do on your part except for collecting payments. You may as well cut out the middleman, establish good professional relationships with companies, and keep all the revenue for yourself. Should You Find Sponsors for Your Blog?
Without a doubt, sponsorships are a great way to generate recurring sources of extra cash as a technical blogger. I don’t advocate you seek sponsors the same day you launch your blog, though. Establish yourself first, and then go after sponsors. If you’re lucky, you may even be approached by companies who are interested in a media buy before you’ve started looking for them. For the record, on my programming blog I currently offer a full banner ad (468 x 60 pixels) on top of each new post for $200 a month and two halfbanners (234 x 60 pixels) at the top of my sidebar for $100 each. I also offer my sponsors the ability to be interviewed or reviewed (with full disclosure)
when a new product of theirs, one that’s relevant to my audience, comes out. That’s $400 a month, or, if you prefer, $4,800 a year, right there. (I usually sell sponsorship placements for three or six months at a time.) You can set your own price by basing it on a honest RPM/CPM. If you require a sensible $3 CPM for a given sponsorship offer, you can divide your average monthly pageviews by 1000 and then multiply that by $3. So if your blog were to attract 100,000 pageviews per month on average, you can request $300/mo. from your sponsor. Generally speaking, the more prominent your banner and overall sponsorship offer and the narrower the scope of your blog, the higher you can go with your CPM rate.
As usual, respect your readers. Opt for tasteful ads and banners. Don’t permit Flash ads that include sounds, and limit the animation level of your banners to a minimum. Likewise, don’t feed your readers low-quality, spam-like sponsors just to make a quick buck. I constantly receive offers for sponsorship and link purchases from companies I do not trust. I always turn them down, and so should you. For startup or company blogs, just like ads, sponsorships don’t make much business sense.
Before you approach potential sponsors, though, you should have detailed information about your audience, which is easily obtained from Google Analytics. Prepare a page on your blog or as a PDF that you’ll send by email with the details of your demographic as well as with details about what you’re offering. If you are good with graphic design, make your presentation appealing and be sure to include lots of attractive graphs. Eye candy sells. Key information you should enclose in that page or document:
- Site usage statistics: The average number of unique visitors and pageviews per month, as well as your subscriber count. Include trends if your blog is growing rapidly.
- Geographic information: Where are your visitors from? Include the top ten countries and the percentage of traffic these locations provide.
- Demographic information: If you’ve run surveys and know about the profession, age group, income, and other demographic information about your visitors, include these stats, too.
- Relevant keywords (optional): If the majority of your organic traffic comes from keywords that are relevant to the sponsor, consider including the top ones in the information package you send out so as to show that your blog has the right audience.
- Your offer: Detail exactly how much you’d like potential sponsors to pay for the sponsorship and what you are offering in exchange. Clarify whether you are offering sole sponsorship or cosponsorship of your blog. Traffic stats aside, what really seals the deal is an appealing offer. You could offer any or all of the following perks to potential sponsors.
- A banner advertisement in a predefined format and position on your blog. Link to the sponsor, of course, but opt for a nofollow link. This way Google won’t think that you are selling links for PageRank purposes. In your offer, let the sponsor know that such links will be nofollow to comply with Google’s policies. Specify if you are limiting the offer to the frontpage (unusual) or throughout the blog (more common).
- A thank-you note and backlink at the bottom of your posts. For example, “This post was sponsored by Acme, the best solution for all your cartoon explosion needs.”
- A periodic thank you post that includes a shout-out to your sponsors, links to them, and a brief explanation of what they offer your readers. If your sponsor turnover is not significant, this kind of post can become annoying for your readers, thus you’ll want to keep them infrequent (e.g., once per quarter).
- Interviews, guest blogging, and other content-based arrangements that benefit both the sponsor and the readers. Always disclose your affiliation. Don’t hide the fact that you have a sponsor from your readers.
- Trials, giveaways, and special offers that are useful to your reader and great marketing for your sponsor.
You can also have an Advertise page in your navigation bar as well as a Your Ad Here banner or button in a spot that you’re offering to sponsors that links to that page. Making a post in which you explain that you’re accepting sponsors is also an aggressive but legitimate way to go about it. There are companies that facilitate the whole process so that it’s virtually identical to selling ads through a network, but part of the benefit of sponsorships is that you deal with a handful of companies only, one on one, for months or even years at a time. So once your initial agreement is set up, there isn’t much work to do on your part except for collecting payments. You may as well cut out the middleman, establish good professional relationships with companies, and keep all the revenue for yourself. Should You Find Sponsors for Your Blog?
Without a doubt, sponsorships are a great way to generate recurring sources of extra cash as a technical blogger. I don’t advocate you seek sponsors the same day you launch your blog, though. Establish yourself first, and then go after sponsors. If you’re lucky, you may even be approached by companies who are interested in a media buy before you’ve started looking for them. For the record, on my programming blog I currently offer a full banner ad (468 x 60 pixels) on top of each new post for $200 a month and two halfbanners (234 x 60 pixels) at the top of my sidebar for $100 each. I also offer my sponsors the ability to be interviewed or reviewed (with full disclosure)
when a new product of theirs, one that’s relevant to my audience, comes out. That’s $400 a month, or, if you prefer, $4,800 a year, right there. (I usually sell sponsorship placements for three or six months at a time.) You can set your own price by basing it on a honest RPM/CPM. If you require a sensible $3 CPM for a given sponsorship offer, you can divide your average monthly pageviews by 1000 and then multiply that by $3. So if your blog were to attract 100,000 pageviews per month on average, you can request $300/mo. from your sponsor. Generally speaking, the more prominent your banner and overall sponsorship offer and the narrower the scope of your blog, the higher you can go with your CPM rate.
As usual, respect your readers. Opt for tasteful ads and banners. Don’t permit Flash ads that include sounds, and limit the animation level of your banners to a minimum. Likewise, don’t feed your readers low-quality, spam-like sponsors just to make a quick buck. I constantly receive offers for sponsorship and link purchases from companies I do not trust. I always turn them down, and so should you. For startup or company blogs, just like ads, sponsorships don’t make much business sense.
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