How to Pitch Your Blog to Potential Advertisers

Posted June 2nd, 2010 / By Alex Denning in Misc

Probably the most common form of monetisation on blogs is advertising. For many bloggers, Adsense is an unreliable income source so they choose to go down the route of finding advertisers themselves. Trouble is, advertisers are often hard to find.

Of course, you could use a service like BuySellAds to sell your adverts for you, but as they take a percentage of the sale as their fee, understandably some prefer to stay away from such services and retain total control of their ads themselves. If you’re running WordPress then I’d highly recommend the WP125 plugin to manage your ads.

Once you’ve decided you’ll take control of finding advertisers yourself, the next challenge is to actually find these advertisers. With advertising budgets been cut, the skill is certainly in making your blog sound as attractive to possible to potential advertisers.

The first thing to do is to find people and products in your niche who you think could benefit from advertising on your blog. Take my site, WPShout, for example. It’s about WordPress so I emailed a couple of people selling plugins and themes. If your blog is about fishing, email some people selling fishing products. They’ve got to be relevant and able to benefit from advertising on your site, otherwise you’re not going to be finding them sticking around on your site.

Now that you’ve chosen a couple of people to email, it’s time to dig out some statistics about the site to throw at them. Be careful what you choose: it’s got to sound impressive. Only mention your RSS feed count if it’s rapidly rising and over 1000. Equally, only mention site visits if they’re 10,000+. If you’ve been mentioned by a huge blog in your niche, mention that. If this doesn’t leave you with a lot of statistics, don’t fret. You can then explain how your blog is rapidly getting bigger and better, perhaps showing how your RSS readers have increased by X amount in the last 30 days.

Once you’ve thrown the statistics at them, now it’s time to go for the price. Don’t go overboard with pricing. If your blog’s only a couple of months old then chances are you won’t be able to charge more than $20/month for a 125×125 ad spot in the sidebar. If your blog’s getting a year old with a fairly good following then you could get away with $30/month for a sidebar spot. You’ve got to be able to keep your advertisers coming back so make sure the price reflects the kind of gain they’re likely to get; it’s got to be a win situation for both of you.

Something I’ve found hugely effective is offering discounts if an advertiser takes a couple of months’ advertising. It’s not something everyone will want to do, but it’s a good way of filling your ad spots and making sure they stay filled. The obvious advantage for the advertiser is they get locked in at the discounted rate for however long they’re advertising for and so stand to benefit if your blog continues to grow at the rate you’ve experienced so far. The trick here isn’t to say “I’ll take $5 off” but to take a percentage off so that it sounds more impressive — 20% may only be $5, but it sounds more.

Finding advertisers isn’t easy, but if you ensure you create a situation where everyone stands to gain — you get the money, the advertiser gets the coverage — then you should soon find advertisers flocking to your site.

Alex Denning is a WordPress developer from London, England. He sells WordPress themes at WPShift.com and writes about WordPress at WPShout.com. You can follow him on Twitter and check out his personal website too.