ELENA PETERS | MIDLIFE BLOGGER

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If you are serious about blogging and you want to do it full time, you need to find ways to monetize your site. While adverts placed on your site can generate you some passive revenue, sponsored posts are another good source of income.

If you can get brands to work with you and pay you to write posts about your products, you can both provide your audience with great solutions while getting paid to do so. But sometimes it may be tough to convince brands that your blog is the best place for them to promote their products.

If you want to do more sponsored posts on your blog, here are some tips to help you: 

Increase Your Traffic 

The first thing that brands will want to know about is the traffic on your blog. A lot of bloggers underestimate how much traffic they need before brands will take them seriously and if you are struggling to get sponsored posts, it may be the case that you don’t have enough visitors to your blog.

Before you start approaching people, it’s important that you work to increase traffic.

• Increase your DA(Domain Authority) and organic search refers. The best way to do that is to hire an SEO expert. Improved search engine optimization will not only give you a big traffic boost but it will help you understand audience intent. When you align your content to what people are looking for, you will get more traffic. Mastering SEO is hard and time consuming and ever-changing. If you don’t have the time or skill to figure it out yourself, I strongly recommend you outsource.
• Create more content. New bloggers are always in such a hurry to get to the monetization part of blogging that they forget to keep producing fresh posts for their blog. It’s important that you continue to have a regular posting schedule. Readers will not keep coming back unless there is new/updated content for them.
• Master one social media platform at a time. Social media, when used correctly, is a great source of free traffic. But don’t get excited and try to be everywhere. Do some research and find out where your audience likes to hang. Choose one platform and master it. Once you have built a big enough following and understand how to drive traffic, choose another social media and repeat. Brands love to see engaged followers on social media. You will find it a lot easier to get sponsored posts if you can rock even one social media platform as opposed to being everywhere with no sense of community. 

Make Your Blog Look Professional 

Now that you are driving more traffic to your blog, you may start getting some interest from brands and they may visit your site. It’s important that you impress them, so your blog needs to make sense, be easy to navigate and look professional. In other words, it is time to look at your blog through the unfiltered lens of a regular reader.

If you are able to step back and look at your site critically, good for you. But be aware that you may be biased. It is really hard to analyze the overall appearance of our own blogs. I mean, we like what we like. That is very individual. Reach out to other bloggers or hire a third party service like UserBob for a true evaluation.

If you are going it alone, here are the 3 key areas that you should look at:

1. When people land on your site, is it obvious who this blog is for?
2. Does the menu make sense and is it easy to find information?
3. Do the graphics, colours and fonts enhance or detract from the content?

Brands will make a snap judgment about your blog in as little as a few seconds of browsing, so you need to make a good first impression right away. Don’t put them off with a site that is cluttered, hard to use and full of amateurish images that scream hobby blogger. Spending some time improving the visuals on your blog to make it look like a professional site will vastly increase your chances for securing more sponsored posts. 

Join Blogger Networks 

The blogging community has some amazing resources to help you find your first sponsored posts, and there are some great sites where brands advertise opportunities. These sites have already done some of the work for you in that they have secured ongoing relationships with brands. And that’s the hard part, am I right?

If you join some of these blogger networks, you can find lots of opportunities for sponsored posts and also get some good advice from seasoned bloggers. They can help you with everything from how to craft a pitch to how much to charge.

Create A Media Kit 

If you are going to have brands visiting your site, you want to be able to direct them and make sure that they find the information YOU want them to know. That is where a media kit comes into play. This is a page on your blog that gives information about your audience, your niche, and the reach of your blog. It may also list all the ways that brands can work with you as well as how to contact you.

A media kit is how you advertise yourself to potential partners and convince them that your blog is a good place for their products. Spend some time creating a media kit and perfecting it before you start approaching people. Brands will want to know your statistics and by housing all the pertinent information on one page, it will save you time and make you look professional right out of the gate.

Tag Brands

Is there a product of service that you recommend to your audience repeatedly? Is there something you use that you own and absolutely love? Then why not talk about it and tag the brand in your post and on social media. It is easy to find brand pages on social media. All you have to do is use the “@” symbol to tag them. Make them aware of you and show them what you can do. You can also send an email to their marketing departments and show them specifically where you have tagged them.

Brands love to see you using their products and are more likely to be interested in forming a relationship if they can see the value you can provide.

Patience is very important when trying to get sponsored posts because it will take time, but if you follow and implement these tips, it will happen. 

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