A sponsor for Bloggst, the very first!

Well today is a day of joy for me, as I can finally say that I’ve made the very first sponsorship deal for Bloggst. As I’ve mentioned several times in interviews and here on my blog, my plan for monetizing Bloggst relies mostly on selling direct advertisements, as opposed to using various ad networks like for instance AdSense.

In my experience, while this method initially requires more effort from my end, it has far more potential in terms of profits. It also helps you expand your network of contacts, which I have found to be one of the most crucial elements of making money online. Once you have a few advertisers on board, so long as you provide them with a nice return for their investments, you will find that this is not only the most profitable way of monetizing a website, but also the most enjoyable by far.

The sponsor I just agreed with for Bloggst is called Inblogit, a blogging platform that is sort of a hybrid between WordPress and Blogger, in the way that it lets you create your own blog on your own domain with full control over it, but the content is still hosted on their centralized servers. As a part of the deal, I also agreed to do a review of the product, so keep an eye out for that if you want to know more about it. Obviously a very relevant product for the members and readers of Bloggst, which is another pro of selling your own ads yourself. You have complete control over which ads are displayed on your site.

I’m sure you’re all wondering how I managed to snatch this deal, seeing how I’ve yet to even put up an “Advertise” page over at Bloggst. Well it was as easy as when I found their site, I immediately recognized their product as something that could be of benefit to our members at Bloggst, and then emailed them a quick proposal. After receiving my proposal and looking through Bloggst, they saw the same as I did, and decided to bite. From there on, we just worked out the details.

Let that be a little lesson on how easy it can be to sell your ads. Find products and services that are relevant to your visitors, and contact these with a proposal to advertise. The worst thing that can happen is that they say no, and if they do, you can proceed on your list and ask the next company in line. Now I’m contemplating setting up an AdServer, just so that I can give my advertisers detailed stats of how their campaigns at Bloggst are performing, but I think I will put that off until I get some more advertisers on board.

This first deal is a huge source of inspiration for me to keep working and pouring all my best efforts into Bloggst, even though things have been growing quite slowly lately, because it shows that if I just keep doing what I’m doing, I will eventually be rewarded. It was just what I needed right now to get the motivation back. And I’m happy to announce that if I manage to land only one more sponsor this month, I will already be ahead of my monetization goals for Bloggst for the month of June :)

Now I really need to get back to the books. Exams are coming closer every minute, and I’m still far from well prepared!