When you’re starting a blog, your goal might be to make money from it, whether that’s right away or sometime in the future when your brand and following are more defined. Regardless, there are a couple of primary ways most bloggers go about earning revenue from their site. These options include advertising through something like Google’s AdSense or affiliate marketing, while one of the most lucrative ways to earn is with the addition of sponsored posts on your site.
A sponsored post is much what it sounds like. A blogger receives money from publishing an article that’s either written by the sponsor, or the blogger can write it and include links.
So what should you know if you want to learn not only how to create a blog, but also include sponsored posts as part of your revenue creation strategy?
Your Blog Design Needs to Be Top-Quality
If you’re shopping for sponsored posts, it’s incredibly important that you have a strong blog design. If you’re trying to get people to pay to be featured on your site and your design is terrible or unprofessional, why would they be willing to do that? Before you start searching for sponsorship opportunities you want to make sure your site is well-designed, looks modern and is user-friendly.
Think Outside Money
If you’re just starting your blog, and you want to grow your following and take advantage of sponsorship opportunities, you might begin by writing to companies you’re interested in or ones that you think would be a good fit with your site and asking for free merchandise instead of money. This gives you the chance to learn more about sponsorships and expand your network, even if you’re just starting out.
Have Good Blog Posts Already On Your Site
Just like quality site design is important to attract the right kind of sponsors, so is the availability of good, quality content. Before you even start applying for sponsorships or approaching businesses, you need to have excellent content already up. The reasons are first that you want your blog to look active and regularly updated. Also, if you’re going to be writing the sponsored posts you want your potential clients to feel like they can trust you to create good content.
Add an Advertisement Page to Your Site
If you want companies and sponsorship opportunities to come to you, make sure your blog includes an advertisement page. You can add your media kit here which will give an overview of what your site is all about and who you and your target audience is. This will make it easier for people if they’re interested in engaging in a sponsorship relationship with you. You can also provide information about not just sponsorships through links, but also general advertising and various review opportunities you might offer.
As a final note, when you’re determining how much to charge for sponsorships as well as direct reviews and other advertising, consider basing it on factors such as your Google PageRank. You can use an analytics plugin to get concrete numbers that can give you more leverage when you’re looking for sponsorship opportunities and advertisers.
Image Source; Image Source; Image Source
