If you have an audience, people are likely to want to advertise on your site or sponsor your content on an ongoing basis.
- Paid advertising for a banner ad in the sidebar of your site, a mention in your newsletter or in a video or podcast
- Paid promotional article or blog post or video featuring a product or service
- Advertising on YouTube – this is more passive advertising in that you turn the ads on and choose when they play, but you don't get to choose the ads themselves
The main thing to remember with advertising is that you are being paid for access to the community that you have built up over time. Your audience trust you, so don't do anything to jeopardize that trust.
Over the years, I've been approached by companies offering to pay me a lot of money for leads, but ethically, there is no way I would want to recommend them.
In my opinion, your reputation and ethics are more important than money, and you need to respect your audience above all things.
Sponsorship possibilities include:
- On-going sponsorship from a company, which implies a longer relationship than one-off advertising. For example, my podcast is sponsored for the hosting and transcription by Kobo Writing Life
- On-going sponsorship from your community. This can be the most rewarding as it's actually from your community. My time spent in producing The Creative Penn podcast is sponsored by my listeners on Patreon. You set up a profile and levels of sponsorship – most people pay between $1 and $5 per show – and then the money is collected and sent by PayPal monthly. This is a growing income stream for independent creators as the acceptance of patronage expands.
If you want to earn money with advertising and sponsorship:
Develop a niche audience and have a regular way of communicating with them
This may be a YouTube channel, a text-based blog, a podcast or even a Facebook page, Twitter stream or Instagram channel. Patreon have their own site where you can send out rewards and updates to patrons.
Measure the size of your audience
Have the statistics ready to share with companies who might approach you, or when pitching if you approach them first. This may be Google Analytics for your blog traffic and your hosting company for a podcast, or email list size.
Decide on your rates
It's difficult to know how much you should charge for advertising, but it will be based on how big your audience is as measured by traffic or listens or views, how long the sponsorship is for and your own confidence at asking. There are industry rates listed online which you can use for starters. Increase your rates as your audience grows and don't lock in sponsors for too long.
Only work with companies that fit your audience and that you’re happy to endorse
This will protect your reputation and please your audience and also mean that the advertiser may keep paying you for access since the advert will actually work.
This has been a growth revenue stream for me over the last few years as my podcast audience has grown.