Sponsored posting as a form of native media advertising has gained momentum in the past few years as online news portals have started looking for new avenues to generate revenues for their businesses. The traditional sources to generate revenue have mostly dried up for news agencies ever since they have launched their online version. What has made things worse is the fact that most people hate the idea of paywall. So, there is no wonder why more and more websites are now accepting sponsored posts to generate revenues for their websites.
However, there are some debates going around whether this revenue generation model is ethical or not. Some people are trying to brand it as unethical. Ethical or not, sponsored posting as a form of online advertising has gained immense popularity. But before you invest your hard earned dollars on this mode of advertising, you need to have a strategy in place otherwise things could go haywire and all your efforts could go waste.
So let us take a look at the strategy –
What About the Budget
Depending on the popularity of the website, the cost of sponsored posting will vary. For example, a website like CNN.com will charge you top dollars for a sponsored post as it is an authority website with large number of viewers. However, if you can manage to get your article published on similar websites, your business will get immense exposure. Small websites with few thousands visitors may charge you less.
You need to check few factors like Domain Authority, number of facebook likes or tweets its post get, how many followers it has on its Pinterest account while selecting sites for sponsored posting. Sometimes, the same article gets featured on some external websites and this will get your website get high quality backlinks from other external websites.
Once you have a fair idea of how much buzz the article is going produce, you need to fund it accordingly. However, all it boils down to the project. It does not have to be monitory compensation all the time, you can offer some freebies like deep discount on some of your products in exchange of publishing your article on their websites.
Identify The Best Blogs
There are hundreds of blogs available online. But just because they are blogging on the same niche like yours, you should not be publishing sponsored articles on their websites. You need to figure out how popular they are before proceeding with your sponsored posting offer.
First you need to create a list of authority websites and then try to narrow them down. You need to reach out to those websites that are visited by your targeted audience as this will help you grab the attention of the targeted audience and drive more customers to your business. If you don’t have any list you can check out Get Reviewed or similar websites.
However, different websites set out different set of rules and regulations when it comes to sponsored content and therefore, you need to read them carefully before contacting them.
Write Amazing Content
Since you are going to publish your article on a popular platform, you need to make sure that the article is well written and is informative. Publishing a boring and rehash article on a popular website is not going to help you or your brand.
You need to spend some time to do proper market research and then come up with a write-up that is powerful enough to seize the attention of the targeted audience. You need to make the paragraph short, add bullet points, include links or resources from relevant websites and add quality images to enrich the quality of the article.
Measure The Impact
Just publishing a sponsored article is not end of the task. Rather it is the beginning. You need to look carefully at the impact once it gets live. You need to track the visitors and their activities via Google Analytics and figure out how of those visitors are contacting your company. This will give you a fair idea of how sponsor posting is helping in your marketing endeavor.
