I advertised first with my friends like Gussy Sews, Allora Handmade and The Pleated Poppy. I also have been featured on several blogs including Lisa Leonard's. Advertising gets people to know you even exist and where. The trick is consistent exposure. When someone lands on your site you want them to stay for a while AND come back. So before advertising you need to work on your blog and/or shop content. Make sure you like it and it's you. The writing should be thought out and purposeful and the photography should be interesting or nice eye candy for your visitors to drool over.
As an advertiser you can send your HTML code to the blog you are advertising with so the fonts, spacing, and picture sizes are how you specify, just check with the blogger on the width you can have for pictures on her blog. To do this write a post in your blog but don't publish. View it in compose in HTML, copy and paste it as code into your email to the blogger.
Once you get a good following you can accept advertisers. Adjust your rates according to your weekly or monthly visitors. Look around and see what blogs with your numbers are charging for advertising and be reasonable. Before accepting a sponsor some bloggers like to make sure they are a good fit, for instance you may not want a wood chip company on your sewing blog/shop. Give your sponsors a lot of love on your blog, facebook, twitter, pinterest etc. Make sure they look good for their monthly feature on your blog and you have their submissions a few days before the post date in case there are any kinks to work out. You can include Ads on your shop site as an added bonus to the advertiser or if you don't blog.
You should have analytics in your shop and blog so you can see how many views you have. You can also see your top referrers to see how many people are coming to your blog/shop from the blog your are sponsoring and if your sponsorship is effective. Site Meter is very thorough and google analytics is easy. Just type in your blog/shop web address and then copy and paste the code in your blog/shop where they tell you. After 24 hours you will have access to all sorts of fun numbers and information!
Today your assignment is to calculate your advertising budget, and look for blogs and shops similar to yours with a large following that you would like to sponsor. To find blogs that are a good fit for you if you are unsure, google your craft and look into the blogs that come up. If they offer sponsorship ask for their monthly visitors. Look if they have a subscription chicklet displaying the number of people subscribed to their blog and/or a google friend connect followers widget to see how many followers they have. Look at what they write about and how many comments they are receiving. Look at how they feature their sponsors.
Here is a neat worksheet for getting started
See you tomorrow for Creating Newsletters.
xoxo,
krystina
That's a great worksheet! I'm so excited for you...I've loved to watch you grow!
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