Find Advertisers for Your Mom Blog

By Wendy Piersall from Mom Blogging For Dummies

Finding advertisers for your blog isn’t easy. Don’t assume that once you build it, the advertisers will come. Instead, you really have to go out and find advertisers and sell them on working with you. The more traffic and influence you have, the easier it is to do this, but don’t be fooled. It isn’t ever easy.

You’ll first want to create a page on your website with advertising information for potential customers. Almost every major website has an advertising page; studying these can be a great way to get a feel for what you can put on your advertising page.

One of the best is the advertising site set up to support BabyCenter. This site is very comprehensive and details such things as mom-market statistics, various advertising options, and specifications for the types of advertising it accepts. BabyCenter has also conducted several surveys of its site users and moms in general, and has great facts backed up by data that show why advertising with it can deliver results to clients.

When you can state facts such as, “60 percent of BabyCenter moms will see your ad and nearly half of them will click it,” it’s pretty easy to get people interested in working with you.

BabyCenter serves as inspiration on how to sell ads professionally.

Of course, most mom bloggers don’t have these kinds of results to stand on. So your advertising page will probably look different, but should still contain information on who reads your blog and the things you’ve accomplished that advertisers would want to know about.

You don’t need to put it all on this page: just an overview of the advertising options you offer, highlights of why people would want to advertise with you, and ways to get more information, such as a phone number or contact form. You want to put all the details of what you offer into your media kit, which is usually a downloadable PDF file that showcases all your strengths.

When you have an advertising page set up, you want to start going after advertisers on your own. So you want to identify the kinds of companies you would want to promote on your site and compile a list of your target companies.

At this point, don’t worry about how realistic or unrealistic it is to actually get these advertisers to work with you. It is more important that you create a comprehensive list of leads to pursue.

Here’s how to find companies that could become potential advertisers:

The companies behind the products and brands you already use and love: Remember that these companies still need to be relevant to your blog’s content. You may be a huge fan of Firestone tires, but it won’t advertise on a blog dedicated to homeschooling.
Companies that create products you know your readers would use and love: If you have an organic-cooking blog, there are plenty of quality products that you’ve probably never tried — yet. You can find this kind of potential advertiser through search engines or by looking through the product catalogs of larger websites that carry similar items.
Companies advertising on blogs that are similar to yours: You may be concerned that this appears as though you’re trying to steal your competitor’s advertisers. In fact, most blogs don’t have a super-large readership, so advertisers are always looking for ways to reach more people who are interested in their products.

When you have a list of potential advertisers, start contacting the ones you think would be the most likely to say yes to your inquiry. These would be the companies that are the best possible match to your existing blog readers, and those that are already involved with other blogs or in social media marketing on Facebook and Twitter.