How Do I Have Some Sponsors Pay Without Regard

Strong world Librarian was four months old when I became interested sponsors. I had read articles on how to do it, and none of them seemed plausible to me and my situation.

On the one hand, my traffic was not impressive, and certainly not to the point where the sponsors come up to me. And while my blog has become a bit more focused in its first ten months, was aimed at a group of readers, in particular, so I was not sure that advertisers trust niche would be. It's a bit more focused now, but I can not really think of a better term for my readers of "The Weird Leal."

So I tried a little experiment sponsorship. My expectations were almost nonexistent. I did it more for curiosity than anything, hoping to be undertaken by readers and promote good will.

This is what happened.

Auditions and criteria

I decided to hold "tryouts" for anyone interested in a sponsorship slot in the library world's strongest. You can read my initial post here. If you are terrified of leaving this page because there is so much wisdom in the air, here is the summary of what we asked readers interested in doing:

Dear potential sponsor, please give me:

A paragraph about something you did in the last year that is proud of
Your URL
A description of your blog / business
Why are you interested in publishing an announcement in the library world's strongest
His pitch: Why? How great you are?

And I made it clear that I do not mind the size or the appearance of your blog. As one blogger was not selling anything outrageous, illegal, or spam, which had as much chance as anyone.

Ran auditions for the rest of August and then make my decisions.

The plan at this time

I figured I would get a small response ads of four respondents out of pity. Then I show ads for the month of September. When September came to an end, I would like to thank every blogger, I ask if I wanted to pay for a month or more to stay, or are you part and still be friends.

I thought about repeating this cycle for several months until all the ads were paid. Then I would end auditions.

I did not expect

I have a lot of answers. In fact, I have about 100 auditions. Some are long and very funny. Others went to middle and poorly written. Some were very close to flat-out begging, and others were so distant that he could not tell if they were really interested or not.

The good things about this

Any response from readers and commitment can be felt as a great victory for the new version of Blogger. So of course was very gratifying to see that people were paying attention.

I also learned how eclectic readership base was. I have emails from bloggers covering all conceivable topics and angles. I have emails from the foundations. I have business emails. Word spread, and suddenly had a lot of new readers, and some readers who had never committed out of hiding.

The bad things about this

There's really only one: because I had underestimated the response, I had not thought through my evaluation criteria. And suddenly I had a lot of auditions to sift through. It was very, very difficult to decide. And in a few cases, I ended up choosing a more arbitrary than it was happy, but could not find a better way then.

Here is my post announcing the winners.

This caused some hurt feelings, a lot of negative emails from disappointed applicants, the demand for explanations of how I have chosen ... and so on.

"Well," I thought. "The next round, I have to do better."

It would not be a new round.

The best things in this

A couple of winners on the left after a month with no hard feelings between us. However, several of them were ... and payment. When I was able to show their clickthrough rates and was told that the "sticky" traffic to my blog had been, I had to convince everyone. And then had an income very, very modest of the sponsors, but had no sponsors!

I also saved the trouble of going through another round of auditions and make people mad.

It also has a lot of people blogging about the experiment, and of course, traffic was its own reward.

Suggestions for anyone interested in trying this

Overestimate the response you get, so that (hopefully) do not get overwhelmed
Explain your evaluation criteria. You can still have some bad losers, but have an explanation before it may be useful to use
Give it your personal touch
Deciding which system to use to display ads, and figure it out before the night before it is supposed to run the ads. I can be real dunce. This was an example of my duncery.

Its own variant of this experiment could be a way to capture some sponsors and find out how some things before their numbers are in control of the sponsors on their own.

Above all: enjoy, have fun and experiment to take this opportunity to make connections, spark some creativity and do their own thing.

Do not try too hard to be like everyone else. You are not anybody. This is a good thing, if you believe it or not.

Posted in: Advertising