How to get a sponsor?

Do I approach them or will they approach me!?

[whizkiddo]

Hi,

As my topic says; i was wondering how to get a sponsor. most of the sites in my competition have several sponsors based on CPM basis. I am not yet feeling left out since my site is comparatively new; they have almost a year to 2 years advantage over me. But I was thinking whether it is alrite to approach advertisers and ask them to have a look at my site or does that look like the work of a person desperate for funds!? I am certainly not looking forward to such a position ; or should i just add a "advertise here" page and it shall do the work for me?

Cheers,
Whizkiddo

[jdancing]

Do both...

First thing is to add an 'advertise' link on your page with your CPM rates, various options and average daily traffic.

Also, contact those advertising on your competitor sites and see if they would be interested in an ad on your site. Some may be interested in reaching new eyeballs in the same category.

[Fruit and Veg]

Whatever you decide, you could join an affiliate program whilst waiting and use that as your 'advertiser'.

With CPM you get a set amount per payment period, no matter how many sales/actions you generate - with an affiliate program you have the opportunity to make more money.

eg. an advertiser approached me and asked for $xx per month for advertising - I said no, but said that if they still place the ad material on their site they could make more by just referring 1 sale per month.

The reason/problem why a lot of mainstream sites don't do this is because 'old world' advertising personnel can't handle performance based advertising - the maths is too hard, or something like that.

Just choose a program that is relevant to your site, and that your visitors might be interested in.

[ronin]

The problem with action-based-pay as far as publishers are concerned is that whether a sale takes place or not rests a lot more on the site that's doing the selling than the site that's doing the advertising. It's quite hard to rationally argue that this responsibility should rest with the orginal publisher.

Advertising does a lot more than driving direct sales, it creates brand awareness in the mind of the reader, helps to spread the word to friends of the reader, who have not seen the advert etc.

Action-based-pay, means the publisher gets zero credit for upholding their part of the bargain - which is to advertise the site in question, unless a sale actually takes place.

Unless the publisher displaying the advert is given a consultancy role in the development of the site being advertised, that's simply a con.

Likewise pay-per-click adverts: anyone within the graphic design industry can design a banner graphic which helps to promote brand awareness but does nothing to encourage a click-thru. If that advert is then used in a PPC campaign, the publisher displaying the advert does their job in contributing to brand awareness but receives little or no financial recognition for it.

Sponsorship means that the publisher will be paid a set amount of money for displaying a given advert for a set amount of time to a set number of readers. That's fair, but it means that advertisers will definitely have to pay for what their getting - and the success of their advert in obtaining click-thrus and their site in encouraging consequent sales rests on them, rather than on the publisher doing the advertising.

In answer to the original question, I would hold on. As your site becomes more and more well known, sponsors will approach you.

[killroy]

On the other hand, the internet plays the number game. For any given niche there are 1000s of posible suitors. So you just pick a few, and ever few days you purge those that don't perform. In the end, the advertiser HAS to produce conversions if he wants any advertising at all (a bit like hte minimum CTR for AdWords advertisers).

SN

[ronin]

I agree Kilroy, conversions have to be made eventually, but I do think also that if online advertisers had to pay offline advertising prices to publishers they would be a lot more selective about who they advertised with... so publishers who had spent huge amounts of time and effort developing their site would stand to receive relatively higher recognition than those who have just thrown together a thousand generic sites for the purposes of displaying adverts.

After all... in a PPA programme, once the click-thru has taken place what's the biggest influence on whether a sale takes place or not? It's certainly not the site from which the reader clicked-thru from originally.

Secondly, is a reader more likely to click-thru from a site with rubbish content or a site with engaging content?

Thirdly, whether they click-thru from the engaging site or not, has the reader still absorbed the message of the advert as they passed it on the way down the page?

[AussieWebmaster]

It makes the argument for designing the tour pages/product info pages etc and linking directly to the payment page. That way you control what your readers see and since you should know them better your conversion rate should improve.