Tips for sponsoring blogs

So you have a shop or blog. And you want to get the more views and sales, right? A great way to do this is to get your ad (or button) on other blogs. But how do you know which blogs to choose? This is what I do:

1. Have some ad buttons prepared. Take a look at the blog's sponsor page and find out the size ad they require, then make or revise your ad to the specified size. Seeing blogs with ad spots that are stretched to fit the necessary size never looks good. Trust me, that makes everyone's lives easier.

2. Look for blogs that fit in with your branding. If you have a fashion blog, you might not get as many views from putting your ad on a DIY blog; you'd be better off putting your ad on, say, a lifestyle blog. Or if you're selling photography, you'll want to advertise on an art blog. Chances are, you might be already following a blog you want to advertise on. I know that of all the blogs I have ever advertised on, I was already following and knew something about the blog and the author of said blog.

3. Look beyond the amount of followers. I have learned to look at the number of pageviews in a month, as opposed to the amount of followers it has. Just because a blog has many followers, it doesn't mean that each of those followers are reading that blog.

4. Look for the sponsor location. There have been a few blogs that I was interested in putting my ad up for a month. But when I looked for their sponsors, they were all the way at the bottom of the sidebar. If I'm going to sponsor a blog, I want my ad to be at least within the length of a usual blog post.

5. Look for what the ad spot includes. Some ad spots offer little extra things like extra tweets or pins throughout the month, or an individual feature of your shop, or an intro post. All these little extras sometimes are what make having the sponsor spot worth it.

6. Google Analytics. If you don't have your blog or shop set up with Google Analytics yet, DO IT! It's a great way to see where your clicks are coming from, how long they stayed on your site, if they browsed through other pages on your site after seeing your initial page, etc. It's a great place to gather information and to find out which blogs are the best to advertise on.

I hope these tips help you decide on which blogs might be a good fit for advertising on! If you have any more tips that I, please add them in the comments!