How to Get Sponsored Posts for Blogs
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If you want to know how to get sponsored posts for blogs and earn more than $1000 per month, then you should not miss reading this post.
You need millions of visitors to get sponsored posts for blogs is a common misconception among bloggers.
A high-quality blog that attracts thousands of targeted traffic is enough to receive brand partnerships.
Finding answers to the questions – “What are sponsored posts” and “How do the sponsored posts work” will eventually open lots of monetization opportunities.
What are Sponsored Posts?
A sponsored post is a piece of advertorial content when an individual or organization pays influencers to publish on their blogs or media networks.
Although sponsored posts are not a passive income stream, it’s much easier than affiliate partnerships and pays well for blogs having a targeted audience.
Every business wants to grow its customer base and earn more sales. Sponsorships act as a marketing channel and help to achieve more brand awareness, engagement, and conversions.
On the other hand, bloggers or channel owners receive a review copy and some amazing perks, including monetary benefits.
Currently, the competition in online marketing is at its peak. In such cases, sponsored posts seem a viable option for brands that focus on both, short-term, as well as long-term goals.
Even, some brands offer exclusive coupons and promo codes for the people visiting the target site. This is an excellent method to lure potential customers and increase conversions.
How do Sponsored Posts Work?
If a publisher puts efforts into building a famous brand, eventually, he will start getting organic or referral visits on his website or social media channels.
With an increase in the number of site visitors and followers, companies start recognizing his efforts and may want to collaborate with him for mutual benefits.
In the initial stage, publishers may need to outreach to product companies to get sponsored posts for blogs.
However, established blogs often get partnership requests from companies, along with review copies, special gifts, and of course, monetary benefits.
Depending on the agreement, the site owner writes sponsored posts, features a product, adds banners at the prominent place, sends a sponsored newsletter, or publishes sponsored posts on social media channels.
In some cases, the partnership may continue in the long term if the company starts getting significant results.
To bring the best value for your efforts and create a win-win situation for everyone, you should read this article carefully. Implementing the following steps will lead you to a highly successful blogging career.
How to Get Sponsored Posts for Blogs
Having a popular blog or social follower base is key to getting sponsored posts for blogs. To achieve your $1000/month goal, you must work smart and take action.
I have seen people charging $100-$1800 for sponsored posts on their blogs. Some celebrities charge millions for a single social media post.
Not everyone is as famous as they are. So, this article is primarily designed for people who are starting their careers from scratch or already started but have not earned significant revenue.
Let’s dive in.
1. Find a Perfect Niche
Although authority blog in any niche can get sponsored post opportunities, some niche performs better and have high ROI for both, content creators as well as sponsors.
Finding a perfect niche seems a challenging task because the internet is crowded with millions of blogs in various niches.
How could you tackle this problem and find a profitable niche?
Semrush CPC map is the best method to find the top-performing niches. You’ll get hundreds of niche ideas using that tool.
You can enhance the research process by using the Semrush traffic analysis and organic research tool.
2. Keyword Research
Once you’ve picked a niche, find some easy-to-rank keywords.
Nowadays, finding low-competition profitable keywords is a tough job, and you may need to put many hours into keyword research.
The competitor’s analysis is the simplest method for keyword research. Put the competitor’s URL in the Semrush search box and press enter.
It’ll populate a list of hundreds of search terms that you can use on your blog.
Ahrefs, KWfinder, and Ubersuggest are a few other keyword research tools available in the market.
3. Content Creation
High-quality content is one of the basic criteria to earn sponsorship opportunities.
Publishing useful content regularly has many benefits for a site owner.
- You can cover the topic in-depth and update your audience about the latest changes in the industry.
- By creating problem-solving content, you can promote relevant affiliate products too.
- People continue to visit to gain more knowledge and useful stuff that no one shares publicly.
Creating original and useful content is a time-consuming task.
If you have the budget, then you can either hire a freelance writer or a reputed content writing agency.
In case you are low on budget or need to allocate funds on other tasks, you need to write yourself.
Don’t worry!
Create a schedule for the next six months and write one article daily. Busy people can reduce the frequency to 4 articles per week.
By using this method, you can write 100-180 articles quickly.
Remember, writing on a daily basis doesn’t mean compromising on content quality. In fact, you must see significant improvement in the content quality of your latest article when compared to the first article.
Follow the webmaster’s guidelines to achieve a better SERP ranking. At the same time, focus on conversion rate optimization principles to drive website visitors into your sales funnel.
4. Promote, Promote, Promote (COPE)
You should learn marketing and growth hacking techniques to promote your content to maximum people.
Create once, publish everywhere is one of the proven marketing frameworks. If you don’t know much about marketing, then you must at least learn SEO, SMM, and email marketing to promote your content.
Building a dedicated email list or social media followers can multiply your sponsorship amount by at least 2X.
Getting featured in top publications or on well-known websites develop a positive emotion in the advertisers’ minds.
Similarly, having contextual backlinks from niche-relevant authority sites may attract many sponsorships offers that pay well.
Let me clear that it’s not an easy job.
You need to deal with tons of outreach emails, write super useful and engaging guest posts, and convince the editor to link back to your site.
However, the results are fruitful because you’ll get a high-quality backlink, referral traffic, and eventually the leads too.
5. Analyse Metrics
Currently, sponsors look for total page views, organic traffic share, bounce rate, conversion rate, backlink profile, and organic keywords along with some third-party metrics, including DA or DR.
Putting efforts in the right direction will fetch organic traffic and eventually improve website metrics.
Google Analytics and Google Search Console are a couple of free tools for tracking website performance.
You may use third-party tools and metrics, but that’s completely optional unless a sponsor company specifies that.
6. Create a Media Kit
A media kit is a simple document containing information about your website, products, and some statistics.
Usually, media kits are shared by companies to help reporters to know about their business, products, and events.
As a website owner, you need to create a similar document and include the necessary information.
Here are a few things you should include in a media kit.
- Website name along with URL or QR code
- Your Traffic Stats
- Social Followers
- Email Subscribers
- Messenger bot and Push notification subscribers
- Forum/WhatsApp/Facebook/Telegram/LinkedIn Group members
- Third-party metrics including DA or DR
- Special Achievements
- Contact Details
Creating a media kit is easier than you might have thought. You can use cloud apps, including Canva or Crello. These websites also have media kit templates for quick editing.
Once you have finalized the design and included essential information, save the file and download it as a PDF.
Later, you can upload this file to your site and display it as a media kit.
7. Outreach/Network in the Blogosphere
As a beginner blogger, you may not receive the best offers that your website deserves. In such cases, you must outreach to potential sponsors who might be interested in doing business with you.
Networking in the blogosphere is another excellent method to get sponsored posts for blogs.
Being professional while presenting your offer builds trust and confidence in the advertisers, and they may consider dealing with you.
Shady outreach campaigns without building rapport, especially spamming and random emails don’t work well.
8. Negotiate for the Best Offers
The best things never sell cheap. Being a blogger and digital marketer, you should never undersell even if you’re negotiating for the first time.
Justify how you can help sponsors to achieve a high ROI instead of lowering the deal amount. Some companies ask for a sponsored post for a relatively low price than you expected and offer an ongoing affiliate opportunity.
In such cases, you must understand that affiliate programs are often available to everyone while sponsorships are offered to specific publishers.
Accept such offers only if they have an exclusive offer for your blog and clearly define everything in the deal document.
9. Publish a Sponsored Post
Now, it’s time to publish a sponsored post.
You can write an informative article, review post, or a step-by-step tutorial explaining how to use the product effectively and publish it on your blog.
Sometimes, sponsor companies ask for publishing sponsored posts on Instagram, YouTube, or Twitter handles to achieve maximum boost.
Sponsored posts in niche-relevant communities or sponsored email newsletters can take the conversion rate to the next level.
Instead of publishing a sponsored blog post, you can offer bundle add-on services and upcharge the sponsorship package by at least 2X.
Use the AIDA principle to improve the engagement rate and add appropriate CTAs redirecting to the landing page on the sponsor website.
10. Let Your Audience Know About the Sponsorship
Always recommend the best products, and whenever you post sponsored content on your blog, social media pages, communities, or email newsletter, let your audience know about the sponsorship.
To comply with FTC guidelines, you must add disclosure saying that you’ve received the monetary benefits.
For example,
Disclosure: This post/video is sponsored by {Brand Name}. However, all opinions in this post are our own.
Moreover, never write excessively biased sponsored posts, even if the sponsors agree to pay more.
These couple of things build trust among your readers and keep you growing.
11. Follow Webmasters Guidelines
Brands may try to take advantage of beginner bloggers because most of them don’t make much out of their blogs.
If you’re in a dilemma about whether you should accept a particular deal, then think of the efforts you’ve put into creating and growing the blog as well as how your audience will react.
Some companies may ask for a dofollow link in the sponsored blog post. However, it’s against Google Webmasters guidelines and your site may get penalized for such malpractices.
Recently, Google has introduced two additional link attributes to expand the scope of traditional nofollow.
You can use rel=sponsored for the sponsored post to remain in the safe zone.
In a few cases, they can ask you not to disclose the business relationship i.e. the particular post is sponsored by {brand name}.
If any sponsor company does not agree with your terms, politely decline the offer by stating your site rules.
Luckily, I knew how to deal with bad boys, and I have never faced any problem. It’s your choice how to respond when you receive an offer for a sponsored post for blogs.
Wrapping Up
Now, you know how to get sponsored posts for blogs and create a solid income source. You can register on some websites to find sponsored blog opportunities.
Take action and keep growing.