How to Find Blog Sponsors

Today, I will be sharing some of the methods which you can use to get premium products free for your blog. They key here is communication and also how well you organize it to maximum the result.

When you organize a contest on your blog, make sure you have a target to achieve. For example, getting more Email subscribers, Facebook fans or Google+. The way social media is changing and with the involvement of social media signals in search engine results, my suggestion would be maximize it to get more Email subscribers or Google+ followers. This way, it will benefit in long run.

One can start a contest with $1 and can go to $1000. iPad is one of the easiest pick when you have a good budget or your contest is backed up or sponsored by some big company. If not, you can always start with a domain name or hosting for your blog in Blogging/WordPress niche, for tech bloggers they can organize software’s, antivirus and other tech stuff. Similarly, depending upon your niche, you can find related product. I hope I don’t need to explain you the power of word “Free” here.

Get Free Blog Sponsors 

This is one trick which worked bug time for me. If you are into affiliate marketing, you might be receiving atleast one Email every month for promotion, coupon codes and so on. This is the first place where I will look out for sponsorship for next contest. I’m affiliate with most of the premium theme club and make decent sale every month. So if I am sure that any particular product is going to help ShoutMeLoud readers for giveaway, I contact the affiliate manager and ask them for sponsoring a contest. Though you need to make sure that your email should show them their benefit too and most important you are making decent affiliate sales. Even if you are not making any sales, it’s no harm to give it a try.

Make sure, you include a stats of your blog and give them an idea about audience they are going to reach. For me, it works most of the time as SML readers are mostly Bloggers and webmasters.

Contact using contact form:

If you don’t fall in above mentioned point, it’s time to write an email to the owner and telling them you are organizing a contest and you would like them to sponsor something in the contest. Though such emails most of the time get unnoticed, but still if you manage to write an appealing email, you might get an Instant reply.

For example my sample email would be something like this:

Hi John,

This is Harsh from wonderhowto.com and I just wanted to take your two minute to discus something about possible marketing collaboration. I run a niche blog (wonderhowto.com), where I talk about Blogging, WordPress and MMO.

I had a close look at your Premium Theme Gallery and I believe my readers would love to know more about your Theme.

We are celebrating 3nd anniversary of our blog and I would love to know if you might like to sponsor a premium theme or anything in the giveaway. Just to let you know ShoutMeLoud is an active blog with Pr 4and feed reader of 6k+, Facebook fans: 7K, Twitter: 3K.  By sponsoring this contest, your product will be getting great exposure to another segment of possible buyer.

We have already run few giveaway in the past and here is how we organize our contest. You can refer to earlier contest:

• Link 1
• Link 2

I will look forward to hear from you soon.

Regards

Avril

This is just a sample email and you can always make changes to make it better and more appropriate. Create a list of possible blog sponsors and maintain in excel sheet. Maintain a row of Company name, Email, contact person, Followup 1, Followup2 and so on.

Buying stuff and giving away:

Before you follow first two points, I would suggest think from marketing point of view. Every developer would like to spread more words about his product and specially themes and plugins, which one developed needs only marketing.  So most of developers would like to accept your sponsorship proposal.

One mistake which most of blogger does is, they don’t maintain the communication with the PR team after the contest is over. Try to maintain the communication with PR team and make sure you keep an eye on their regular update. If the product is related to your niche, a review won’t harm but will help you to create better relation with sponsors.