Darren Rowse, as part of his 31 Days to a Better Blog project, posted about finding a sponsor for your blog, something he has a fair bit of experience with.

He gives some great tips in the post, but one stood out to me more than the others:

If you have a smaller blog and haven’t had a sponsor before don’t aim for the stars straight away. It might be worth starting out by approaching smaller retailers, websites or companies in your niche and see if they’d be interested in some sort of partnership rather than aiming for the very biggest ones right up front. I did this a couple of months after starting my first digital camera blog and emailed 10 online digital camera sites to see if they’d be interested in advertising. 3 of the 10 bought small ads on my site (I think it was for something around $15-$25 a month). It wasn’t a lot of cash (and I didn’t have a lot of traffic to send to them) but I learned so much and made a little money in the process.

With so much competition out there, it can be very difficult to find sponsors for your blog. I have been lucky a few times, and have become friends with most of the people that have sponsored one of my sites. I didn’t make a ton of cash off any sponsorships, but it out performed AdSense, and networking connections are worth much more than pretty much any sponsorship.

Check out the full article on Problogger.net.

Originally posted on October 29, 2010 @ 11:27 pm