7 Powerful Reasons Why Companies Will Pay for You to Blog

This guest post is by Lina Nguyen of Words That Influence.

Influential bloggers are being paid top dollar to write sponsored posts (thousands of dollars per post is not unheard of). They’re gifted with luxury items, cars and overseas trips, and invited to events previously exclusive to A-List celebrities and long-established journalists.

Bloggers worldwide are proving to be fierce competition for mainstream media, as companies decide how to get the best return on investment for their marketing buck.

If you have the following seven things, then your blog and social media networks will be highly valuable digital assets, sought after by major companies.

Even if you don’t quite have the same reach and clout as some of these bloggers, you can still apply these principles to negotiate your own deals with smaller businesses in your niche.

ProBlogger Training Day event speakers Craig Makepeace and Caz Makepeace are travel bloggers who landed a corporate sponsorship deal with a major airline, to cover a high profile international sporting event. At the end of this post, we’ll see these seven points in action, as we take a look at their success in attracting sponsorship from a major brand.

The people in a profitable niche for major companies tend to be decision makers, consumers or influencers in the buying process, for either highly priced items (like cars, technology, travel or finance), or highly consumed items (like food, health products, household goods).

How do you know if your niche is profitable? Just take a look around in mainstream media. If companies are already paying big bucks to advertise to your audience on TV, radio, magazines and newspapers, then you’re in a profitable niche.

If you’ve created a group of people who gather on your blog and social media networks, then what you’ve created has the potential to be extremely financially valuable.

Companies always want to know where their target market is hanging out and get in front of them. Trouble is, as outsiders, whose primary motivation is to sell, they’re not exactly welcomed.

That’s why they’re willing to pay to get access to your tightly formed online community, which has its very own culture, rules and etiquette. Your intimate knowledge of how your community thinks and behaves has a valuable price tag on it.

Being in a commercially attractive niche and having impressive reach in numbers (in terms of blog traffic, subscribers and social media followers) makes your community really valuable. A big corporate client will be after the exposure you can give them.

What kind of numbers are valuable? That all depends.

Essentially, it comes down to the demand to reach your niche, how targeted your audience is and what other advertising avenues are available to the company to reach that specific audience.

The more profitable the niche, and the harder those communities are to access, the more money a company will be willing to pay you to get in front of them.

This is what makes a blogger much more appealing to companies for advertising potential than say, television, print media, billboards and flyers.

Bloggers engage with their audience, who eagerly share their thoughts and feelings. In addition, they actively give bloggers permission to communicate with them, by following or subscribing.

Engaged communities also show clear signs of activity, through comments, posts and tweets. This is valuable in the eyes of a potential marketer, because an active community gives the company a way to evaluate and measure a campaign’s success.

An indicator of a successful marketing campaign is one where the target market responds to it, hopefully positively (although a highly engaged negative response can also be seen as successful, depending on the company’s objectives).

A blogger with a highly engaged and active community is more likely to have influence, which is what’s really going to make a company take notice.

A company will pay for your ability to help get the word out, your referral or your endorsement.

If you can do all three, to an audience who will listen to you and believe you, then you are in a very strong negotiating position to command a price.

A bigger company with a large marketing budget is most likely interested in building brand awareness, exposure and chipping away at a longer-term objective to improve market perception.

The good news for a blogger is that they’re unlikely to expect a huge spike in sales from working on a one-off campaign with you. This eases the pressure off you, relieving expectation that you’ll influence your readers to rush out and buy the product.

Having said that, if you do have the clout to change attitudes, beliefs and market perception about a particular product or service—or you can get people to buy in noticeable numbers—then that will clearly make you extremely valuable in the corporate marketplace.

If you have all of the above advantages, then what a company wants is to align with your brand. You’re obviously credible and your brand says something that they want to be perceived as being.

They want your audience to think they’re worthy of attention, too.

Is your going rate less than the cost of advertising with traditional media power houses, or a celebrity endorsement? Most bloggers are. You’re instantly more appealing, price-wise—especially if you’re willing to accept non-cash payments which the company can offer you at low cost to them.

More importantly, if a major company is willing to do business with you, then they see you as a profitable return on investment.

To demonstrate these seven points, let’s take a look at a blog that’s had success in attracting big-brand sponsorship.

yTravel Blog's Caz and Craig Makepeace

After blogging for a little over a year, Craig Makepeace and Caz Makepeace secured a sponsorship deal with Australia’s leading international and domestic airline, Qantas, to travel around New Zealand and cover the Rugby World Cup.

If you would like to hear more about the specific steps they took to secure this sponsorship, you can listen to my exclusive interview with Caz on my blog, Mother’s Love Letters.

Blog: y Travel Blog
Niche and Community: Travelers, world-wide.
Sub-niches: Independent world travel, working holidays, family travel.
Reach: 

50,000+ visitors a month70,000+ Page Views per month3,000+ Facebook fans5,000+ Twitter followers1,200+ subscribers

Level of engagement: Average 15-20 comments per blog post. Daily social media interaction. Reply to almost every blog comment. 12,000+ Tweets to date. Facebook fan page is the most interactive and engaged in this niche.
Influence: Klout Score: 70

Brand:   Fun-loving, friendly travellers who are about making your life a story to tell. They believe life is all about the memories, so they make sure they live their life in a way that creates many memories through travel. Their goal is to help people get inspired, get informed and get going.

The deal: All expenses paid 12 day tour of New Zealand, doing activities and attending Rugby World Cup matches. Qantas will also be promoting the bloggers. In return, all Craig and Caz have to do, is have fun, blog, Facebook, and Tweet!

What impressed Qantas most: The bloggers’ level of engagement with their active community.

A key secret to their success: Guest posting. This was key to growing traffic.

Their top tips: Be clear about your brand and make it authentic. Network and build relationships in order to build your community. Social media is crucial, but look at offline networking opportunities, too. Value yourself. Consider how short-term income opportunities for advertising and sponsored posts that compromise content quality may affect your blog perception and brand in the long term. Learn how to write a sponsorship proposal. Don’t be limited by the fact that you’re a new blogger. Every big blogger starts off by being a new blogger.

Is corporate sponsorship for bloggers something that’s common in your niche? Are you looking at aligning yourself with a company, as a monetization strategy?

Lina Nguyen is a blogger in the Australian Mummy Bloggers niche. She is also a copywriter, digital media consultant and online communications expert at Words That Influence.

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3 reasons I am proud to be a Amateur Blogger

This guest post is by Dan Meyers your life, their lifeof.

You press the submit button to your next big idea to introduce students to the world.  Finally, this would be the one that pulls in some real traffic.  Up to this point, the majority of your visits come from you and your parents.

Amateur golfer (image is author of own)

Crack your bubble when you check your Web traffic and realize that this was not the.  If only you could like to your blog page, your Facebook friends than you would have some legit numbers!  You've been asked time and time again, however, and most of them don't come through.  Your subscriber count remains the same.

Life as an amateur blogger is not fun, but it reminds me of my experience as an amateur golfer.  I say that out loud my sub-par capacities (pun intended) not worthy of my anger. But that doesn't prevent me getting upset with every ball that bounces in the brush slechtzittende.  Check out the picture: I'm so bad!

For a few months I only blogged on my current site.  Of course I don't expect great traffic or a large subscriber base.  Not numb the pain, however, that of a hard reality!

Are you embarrassed to admit that you are an amateur on anything?  Admission so can make you feel worthless.  Our culture teaches us that it is better to than to admit that you're not good at something.

My name is Dan, and I am an amateur blogger.

I started blogging in 2007, but it was one of those blogs one month.  You know the kind: you all fired up, pay for a website or sign up for a blog account, three blog posts, and quickly be discouraged if you don't write all visits. That's what my was, but I appreciate my parents, brother and friend Ryan for click on it!

I'm back at it again and now I'm not afraid to admit that I am an amateur blogger.  It's easy to start a blog, but it is not easy to successfully create a blog.

I am now convincing myself that life should be enjoyed as an amateur blogger.  Here are the reasons why.

Life as an amateur gives me room to grow, and the humility to accept that my first ideas will probably not my best.  It will allow me to kill some of my ideas without feeling like I am part of myself to kill.

This is relevant to more than blogging.   Charlie Munger said: "If Berkshire Hathaway a modest progress had been made, because it is a good deal of Warren [Buffett] and I are very good at destroying our own most beloved ideas.  Each year that you destroy one of your most popular ideas is probably not a lost year. "

I am an amateur. Of course I'm going to have a number of bad ideas!  Investing Ben Graham made an observation that is analogous to real life, when he said, "good ideas than bad investments cause more doom ideas."  Are your good blogging ideas giving you more pain than your bad ideas?

Confirmation of my life as an amateur I myself can not comply with the high standards of a professional.  However, I am forced to know that I am ruthless should strive to get to that point.

Professionals got where they are because of the many years of hard work.  As I said in my previous guest post, problogger.net put Malcolm Gladwell that amount of practice on outliers10,000 hours in his book.  If you try directly to the professionals, you will be frustrated quickly, that can lead to an overwhelming feeling of inadequacy.

However, you must realize that it is possible to get on that point, just as they did.  You are not willing to put a lot of time, you will likely join the death of my first blog.   As they say, was not problogger.net built in a day.

This is my favorite part of life as an amateur.  I am passionate about helping others to get out of debt and take control over their lives.  I do it, although I am not a professional; I make no money and it's a lot of hard work.

The Call, In his book, Os Guinness explains it as the following, "to our disgrace we have taken the word amateur, moderns against the professionalism and excellence, and turned it in a matter of tepid motives and counterfeit results.

"But amateur, as G.K. Chesterson never tired to say, means" love. "  Man must love a thing very much when he's not only the practice without any hope of Fame or money, but even the practices without any hope of doing it right. "

This does not give you a free pass to sub-par work and your ambition to strive for excellence should not cap.  However, it does not prevent something just because you're not a professional.  Your message is important because you can help others, and it's worth.   G.K. Chesterson also said, "If there is one thing, it's worth worth bad do!"

I can guarantee you one thing: If you have something bad long enough, but you are trying to improve and are passionate about, the more quickly will not bad!

These are the three reasons I am proud of my amateur title, but it doesn't mean that I want to continue longer than I have!  I am so excited about my topic that I know I can be a professional; It just needs time.  If I continue to work hard and not get discouraged, can I make it and help many people.

Have you prepared to live as an amateur in the hope of one day a professional?  You have a voice, don't be afraid to use it!

Then Your Life, their lives started to you Meyers control of your life to help.  Read how he paid off $ 50,000 of debt in two years and how are strategies can help you.

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