There are lots of ways to make money as a blogger and one of my favorite ways is via sponsored posts. A sponsored post is where a brand, company, agency or even an individual asks a blogger to write about their products and/or services.
As a blogger you can charge a company for you spending the time to write this sponsored post and also to share it with your community of followers and readers, most of the time you will be asked to write a sponsored post because a brand feels that your audience is one that they want to get in front of and is their target demographic. So for example, when it comes to this blog and me being Personal Finance Micro Blogger, I get approached for work by a lot of challenger banks and money saving apps (I also get approached by a lot of pay day lender and loan companies who I will 100% NOT work with but we’ll cover this in a bit when we talk about brand responsibility reader trust) Brands/Companies also want to sponsor content on blogs becasue it’s great exercise in link building. Link building is a way of getting back links from reputable sites that helps to build your sites domain authority and overall rankings.
Where to find Sponsored posts as a blogger?
The brand comes to you
Sometimes you’ll get lucky and have brands come straight to you and ask about a sponsored post or collaborative work. It’s always nice when this happens as you know that a brand already thinks you and your audience are a good fit for their product or services.
You go to the brand
If you are looking to work with certain brands you can pitch to them directly! This is a bit daunting the first few times you do it as you feel like you are really putting yourself out there but as long as you are armed with a good media kit and opening email then it isn’t too bad. One problem with pitching directly is that it can take some time to find the right person to get in contact with, some brands have an in-house marketing team and others outsource all marketing and OR to outside agencies. I find the easiest way to get in contact with the right person is just to look for their general contact info and drop them a line asking for the email address of the correct person or department.
Blogging Networks
There are lots of blogging networks around but I only actually only work with one, Get Blogged, I like Get Blogged because their briefs are clear and they pay fairly for the work. Blogging Networks are great for brands as they can let the network know what they are looking for and then its the networks job to sort through the bloggers thathave applied to see who is the best fit.
Example of a good partnership
Recently I worked with the brand Zipzero to promote their new app that lets you earn money back from your receipts. This is obviously a great fit for me as it’s targeted at people who are trying to boost their budget a bit and it’s a nice easy way (it literally takes seconds to scan a receipt and upload!) to save some money on household bills.
I wrote a blog post explaining how the apps works and gave an honest review of what I thought of it, I loved it and so was happy to share it with my readers and social media followers. The app had only just launched and i was one of the first 500 to download it, thanks to the work I and a few other money bloggers did to promote it on social media the app has now hit over 5,000 active users!
and a bad…
Because I write about money I get a lot (and I mean a LOT) of emails from shady pay day lending and stupidly high interest loan companies asking me to do some link building with them, some are super sneaky and pretend to be from completely different companies and hide these spam links behind different anchor texts.
Obviously I turn them down as there is no way I could recommend companies like this to my readers, the whole purpose of my blog is to try and help people get out of debt and manage their money better. If I started posting links that I’d lose my readers trust straight away. If your readers don’t trust you then you are and your expertise on a subject then you’ve no longer go a platform. That is why its so important to really consider who you decide to work with.
