Putting yourself in the shoes of potential advertisers looking to get results for their clients and build successful campaigns is what every blogger should consider doing at some point if long-term monetisation and career-based blogging is their goal.
Thinking outside of your role as simply blogger and content creator, privy to the whims and desires of your audience, can be intimidating for sure. But it’s a healthy and almost necessary activity, especially when it comes to increasing your chances of making a healthy career out of blogging or content creation.
According to blog advertising marketplace Blogness.net, advertisers want you to come up with the following tool kit before assigning any budget. The more attractive you can get these figures to be, the more they’re going to want to work with you.
Media Kit
A well put-together media kit, perhaps just a few lines and characters that can be attached to the bottom of an email that doesn’t even have to be downloaded, is something smart to deliver to prospective leads keen to learn more about your blog. Make sure you add important information advertisers like to know. That includes the following metrics and measurements.
Unique Monthly Visitors
Your blog’s number of unique visitors a month, is one of those keystone figures that advertisers really love to track in order to see the kind of exposure their campaigns are likely to get. As a blogger this is the figure you really want to work on advancing, whether by guest posting, social media promotion or the many other methods detailed out there on the web. You can calculate it for advertisers by taking your total unique visitors for the last three months and then dividing that up by three for an average figure. Be honest in your tally and don’t confuse it with page views. An advertiser will be able to estimate your honesty by paying close attention to your blog and other social media channels anyway.
Social Media Influence
Advertisers want to see that you’re active elsewhere outside of your blog. The bigger audience you have on social media channels the greater chance you have at landing further advertising-based opportunities. Anything over several thousand followers on social channels like Facebook or Twitter is pretty attractive. Although you could boost yourself a little further by adding up all your followers across all channels and then claiming that as your overall reach.
Mailing List or Email Subscribers
Another hot figure for advertisers is the amount of mailing list or email subscribers your blog might have that they could also reach through paid promotion on your updates. Anything over 1,000 subscribers shows a fairly dedicated and keen audience, interested to hear what you say. Working on building this figure, possibly by striving to deliver value to subscribers in regular mail-outs is a strong way of solidifying the foundations of success.
Demographics
Some advertisers, especially those with regional-based campaigns, will be super interested in the demographics of your audience and where they reach your page from. As a blogger you can track this kind of data, as well as the aforementioned figures, in Google Analytics. Taking this further, you might also be able to find out even more information about your readers through regularly experimenting with things like blog surveys and giveaways designed to capture these figures.
