Blog advertising and sponsored blog posts remain a hot topic for bloggers.
My personal blog advertising story and guidelines on sponsored blog post rates still get comments over a year after they were written and I continue to get emails from other bloggers about those posts.
Some bloggers just want to thank me for sharing that information and want to let me know they’ve put their rates up and have already sold advertising and sponsored blog posts at the higher price.
Other bloggers are still uncertain about the best way to work with advertisers and have more questions about dealing with advertisers or sponsored blog post rates.
What Blog Advertisers Want to Know
1. Unique monthly visitors
The number of unique visitors each month is the holy grail for advertisers and considered to be the equivalent of the monthly circulation for a magazine.
To get a fair tally of your unique monthly visitors take the total of unique visits for the last three months and divide it by three to give you an estimate monthly figure.
Make sure you use the correct figure for unique views, not page views which are different.
Mention where you got your statistics and ideally use Google Analytics because that’s the most reliable source of blog statistics.
Explain the number quoted is the monthly average of unique visits for (say) March, April and May.
Always be honest. It’s rare for advertisers to ask for a screenshot of Google Analytics but if they do you should be able to supply it.
Always tell the truth.
Although having a large number of monthly visitors is a great way to persuade advertisers to deal with you sometimes size is less important than being able to show your readers are from a specific place, in a certain age range or specifically interested in a certain topic or niche.
2. Reader demographics
Google Analytics can also tell you where your blog readers come from. In your emails or media kits list up to five of the countries the majority of your readers come from along with the percentage of readers who come from each country.
If you’re outside North America you might want to combine the USA and Canada into one percentage.
For example, 50% North America, 20% Australia and New Zealand, 10% UK, others from around the world.
It’s also important to be able to tell advertisers more details about your blog readers such as gender, age group, and socio-economic background.
The best way to do that is to create a reader survey.
Alternatively, you can use Alexa.
The free version of Alexa isn’t perfect but you can register your blog then check under the site info tab where you can get statistics on gender, browsing location (home or work) and education.
You can also subscribe to Alexa Pro to view all reader demographics including age, income, ethnicity and family situation.
Another alternative to get your reader demographics is Quantcast.com although you have to add code to every page of your blog.
Reader engagement is also important and you can show this to advertisers by mentioning the number of comments on blog posts and shares on other social networks.
3. Significant followings on social media outposts
Anything over 5,000 is significant.
If you can’t compete with that add up all your social media followings and use the total then explain the figure given as your combined followers on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram.
4. Email subscribers
Advertisers love email subscribers. Include this statistic if you have over 1,000 subscribers and if you don’t have many email subscribers explain why.
For example, tell advertisers your blog is just not the type of blog people subscribe too but they do follow and engage deeply on Facebook.
5. Social proof
Social proof shows advertisers that you are trustworthy and worth backing.
If you’ve won any awards for your work, blog or writing mention it.
Also mention other brands you’ve worked with, even if you weren’t paid for the work.
So those are the five main things advertisers want to know.
Include that information and keep your media kit or emails short and simple to make sure blog advertisers can find that information fast.
If you do that blog advertising won’t just be a hot topic, it will be a handy source of income too.
