Target a Sponsor for Your Mom Blog's Custom Ad Campaign

By Wendy Piersall from Mom Blogging For Dummies

When putting together a customized advertising campaign for your mom blog, you might want to go after a particular sponsor who has much to benefit from being a part of your campaign. Here are some thoughts on how you can do the same:

Know what you have to offer. List the things you can do for a company and the assets you have to work with.

These things would include your social media presence on Facebook and Twitter, the number of readers you have, your popular content, your insights into what your readers love and want to purchase, whatever advertising you can offer, your personal brand and reputation, and the friends who could help you promote whatever campaign you can create.
Brainstorm ideas on what you can propose to a company. This is going to be very specific to your blog topic, but think about what you know your readers would get excited about. If you’re a craft blogger, you can approach the maker of a craft material and create a campaign around what you can do with its products.

If you’re a home décor blogger, you can find a paint brand or home improvement company that can sponsor a contest using its products. If you’re a small-business blogger, you can find products that appeal to solopreneur business owners and write helpful business articles that are brought to your readers by your sponsor for the month.
Put together a plan with your readers’ best interests in mind. Any large-scale project like this can fail quickly if it’s too focused on promotion and less on the people you’re promoting to. So be absolutely sure that whatever you plan will ultimately create a great experience for your readers, however that may work.

Their enthusiasm for your campaign will make or break the eventual outcome, so make sure that there is something big in it for your readers so that they can get invested in the process with you.
Put together a professional pitch. To go after big dollars, you’ll need to prove you can deliver on a big scale. You’ll need plenty of data to back up your proposal, because corporations live in a spreadsheet-driven world. It will also help if you have any other case studies of smaller marketing campaigns to showcase that you have the experience to pull off what you’re promising to do.

Ultimately, you may or may not be able to get a company to buy in to your sponsorship idea. The benefits of thinking big like this far outweigh the costs of the time it takes to plan and work on selling the idea.

Even if you aren’t successful this time around, it will raise your credibility and visibility — drastically — with companies who now know they probably want to get in front of your readers. That may also mean that if they do their own social media campaigns in the future, you’ll be the first person they think of when planning their own blogger-outreach campaigns.