If you’ve decided to allow ads on your blog (here are a few ways you can do that!) then the next step is how to attract those advertisers. But how? Well, think about what an advertiser is going to gain from dealing with you? What makes you more attractive than another blog, and how can you make your blog more appealing?
First – how are you going to promote them? Advertisers are looking for more than you just popping their image up on your sidebar and linking to them – they’re looking at your social networks and they want to see you interacting with your audience about them. Advertisers want to be talked about on Twitter and Facebook, they want you to talk about their products and services. Passionfruit Ads now allows you to sell things like sponsored tweets, so advertisers can add as many as they want on which is great news for bloggers – just remember to disclose those tweets (the accepted hashtags are #ad or #spon and using a hashtag also will allow your followers who don’t want to see them to mute any tweets with those hashtags)
If the advertiser has a product or service that might be interesting to your readers, then you could talk to them about holding a giveaway on your blog. Giveaways are beneficial to both the advertiser and you, the blogger, because they bring in lots of new readers and if you set a requirement for the giveaway as leaving a comment with the readers favourite product, then you’re driving traffic to the advertiser, which could result in increased sales.
Making your media kit easily accessible is also a good idea – make it easy for advertisers to decide whether to deal with you or not (because that will help influence them as well!) We’ve talked previously about what sort of thing to include in a media kit, but also consider including your Google page rankings and Alexa rankings (don’t worry if you’re not sure what those are, because we’ll be covering them soon)
The most important thing though would be to deal with requests quickly. Advertisers want to hear back from you – and always remember to be polite about it!
