What is sponsored posts?
Sponsored posts is also known as promoted post. Advertisers are looking for influential people who have huge fan list or who has very active group or page. These advertisers pay money to post about their business/product/service on such popular place where people are discussing about similar topic related to advertiser's business. It is different from traditional pay-per-click advertisement in the sense that it is posted in the timeline of social media as regular post and it is not fixed at any place for continuous display. In some sense it is less annoying to the users and they can ignore these sponsored post in the stream of regular post. Sponsored post is very popular on social media but it can also be used on popular blogs.
Who can start this?
This mode of earning money is good for influencers who has lots of followers or have lots of blog visitors. You can monetize your social activities by posting sponsored contents.
<Required skills?
There is no specific skills required as most of the time sponsors will contact you if you are so popular. But if you are good at searching businesses on Google or using Influencer marketing websites than you can get sponsors relatively faster.
Where to begin?
- Sponsor will contact you (If you are very popular and have lots of follower)
- Find sponsor yourself (Google, IZEA, etc.)
Advanced strategies and Tips
Only thing you should worry about is increasing your follower list and not spamming your followers wall with advertisements. However, if you are consistently sharing good content with your followers then in future they will not mind reading some sponsored ads in return of your quality time spent in sharing valuable contents. Although, you can individually search on Google for major companies and blog in your area of expertise but lot of tools are also available which assist in connecting influencers with companies. Here is the list of popular tools used to find influencers. Some tools like IZEA also allow influencer to contact companies.- BuzzSumo: Free tool
- IZEA: Paid tool
- Traackr: paid tool
- Little Bird: paid tool
- Keyhole: freemium tool
- Kred: Paid tool
- Klout: Paid tool
- GroupHigh: Paid tool
- Followerwonk: Twitter focused free tool
- Klear: Paid tool
- Brandwatch: Paid tool
- Social Crawlytics: Free tool
- Circle Count: freemium tool
- eCairn: Paid tool
- Ninja Outreach: Paid tool
- TapInfluence: Paid tool
- Brandbacker: freemium tool
- Revfluence : Paid tool
- Grapevinelogic: YouTube Influencers
- Influicity
- niche.co
- Famebit
- Personal social account: Probably the most personal approach is to use your own social account and type relevant keywords in search boxes to find relevant content and influencers. Research hashtags to find influential users. You can personally analyze their profiles one by one.
Caution
People follow you because you are sharing some useful information of their interest with them. So, you should be extremely careful to balance the number of sponsored posts. Too many sponsored post may lead to lose of followers.Ways to monetize?
- Negotiate with sponsors for good price for each sponsored post.
- Establish and contract for long term relationship.
- You can work with more than one sponsors.
- You can use all of your social media accounts with good followers for sponsored post.