How to Get Sponsors for a Blog Conference

by 4 Comments

how to get sponsors for your blog


So you’re going to a blog conference this year, huh? Wouldn’t it be nice if you landed a sponsor to help you pay for some of the event? Well, that’s that this post is all about!

Note: I’ll be going to BlogHer 2014! Let me know if you’ll be there. I’m thinking of organizing a MFYB meetup!

Why get a sponsor?

Before we talk about how to get sponsors for a blog conference, let’s figure out why you’d want one. Sponsors can help you pay for all, or part of your conference experience. Getting a sponsor can also help you build, or strengthen an already existing relationship with a company. Having a sponsor can also lead to other sponsors. If businesses see that you are PR friendly and willing to accept sponsorships, they might be more inclined to reach out to you.

Media Kit

With each initial pitch, it’s nice to either attach a media kit, or include your essential statistics. It’s a time save for everyone.

Things to include on your media kit:

    • monthly blog traffic – pageviews and unique visitors
    • social media stats – Facebook, Twitter, whatever you use often
    • a headshot and a little about you & your blog
    • short list of companies who you’ve worked with in the past
    • include any (or your most recent) media appearances
    • contact information – it seems so obvious, but don’t forget to do it or you’ll blow it!

*Remember to create this media kit in a way that it’s easy to edit, as you’ll want to edit it often to keep it updated.

How to approach a company

This answer has 2 parts, since you’re approaching two types of companies: ones that you already have a relationship with and ones you don’t.

Companies you’ve worked with – I recommend reaching out to companies that you have already worked with first. The ice has already been broken. When re-pitching a company with whom you have worked previously, there are a few things you can do. Remind them of how you have worked together before. Provide a link to your previous sponsored post or whatever you did so it’s easy for them to remember. Let them know that you really enjoyed working with them and your readers loved hearing about their product/service.

Companies you have not worked with – This one is a little more tricky and can be nerve racking. Just remember, the worst thing you can hear is a simple “no”. First off, I find the best way to find a PR contact to to ask that company on Twitter for a PR contact email. Chances are, if they respond, they’re PR friendly and if they don’t, they’re not. I mean, what kind of company that works with bloggers is NOT on Twitter?!

Casual approach – Once you’ve got the PR contact, send them a casual email opening the lines of conversation that goes a little something like this: “Hi, my name is Zack and I run a blog at http://morefromyourblog.com. I love your company and thing you are doing great things to help bloggers. I think we could work quite well together on something. I am seeking a full or partial sponsorship for an upcoming conference and wanted to send over a little more information about what this entails. If you’re interested in hearing more, please let me know and I’ll send over the information right away.”

Aggressive approach – lay it all out there in email #1. Introduce yourself and let them know that you will be attending X conference. Provide a sentence or two about how they could benefit from sponsoring you. Include a couple of your best stats and let them know that you’d be happy to discuss things further and provide more detailed stats if they are interested. Something like this (let’s pretend I’m pitching Aweber, the email marketing company): “Hi, my name is Zack and I blog over at http://morefromyourblog.com. I write a blog that helps of their bloggers build, grow and maintain their blogs. I will be attending BlogHer 2014 with over 2,000 other bloggers. I am seeking a sponsorship from you for this event. I think you could benefit from sponsoring me at BlogHer because I will literally be within arms reach of thousands of potential customers for you. I’m also happy to include a series of 3-4 posts about your company on my blog which receives 100,000+ monthly visits in addition to social promotion to my over 50,000 followers. This is just the tip of the iceberg as to what I can offer. If you’re interested, please let me know and I’d be happy to provide more information and detailed stats if necessary. I look forward to hearing from you.”

If they respond to that, you’ve got your foot in the door. Keep the conversation going and be willing to listen to what the company wants. Be flexible, but don’t accept less than you think you’re worth!

With each pitch, I recommend being open and candid about what you are looking for. You’ll save everyone’s time. I am a fan of offering 2-3 different sponsorship packages. For example, I’d include a full sponsorship which include all of my costs for the conference. For that, I might offer a series of 3 blog posts and ad space in addition to extras. Extra things could include wearing branded apparel for the entire conference, adding the company’s name to your business cards for that conference or a social promotion package that you come up with.

Before you pitch, think of as many things that you can use to secure a sponsor as possible. This doesn’t mean you’ll use them all, but you can pull them out if you need to seal the deal. Here are some ideas:

  • blog post or series of posts
  • sidebar or other advertising on the blog
  • wear branded apparel to conference
  • bring branded business cards to conference
  • laptop sticker/other branded items
  • social promotion
  • live social updates including sponsor thank you

You’ll also want to include a little bit about the conference in each pitch. Not every company or PR person knows the details of every conference. So let them know that the conference is 3 days and that 2,000 people will be attending. If there are other important details about the conference, you’ll want to include those as well.

Important notes

– The most important thing I can mention here is to be 100% honest when you are pitching companies. Don’t write checks you can’t cash. If you say you have 500,000 monthly pageviews, you had better have that many.
– Also remember that hearing “no” should not phase you. You don’t know what was behind the decision to reject your proposal. Perhaps they already work with bloggers and don’t have room in the budget for you. Maybe they don’t have an online strategy in place. There are a number of reasons, so don’t start imagining why. Just move on.
– Keep a list of companies that you’ve pitched with the dates of your pitch. This way, you can send follow-up emails after a couple of weeks have elapsed.
– It should go without saying that you should only pitch companies that you are comfortable with talking favorably about and that fit in line with your content.

Do you have any tips for pitching companies? Share them below!

18 Low Competition Niche Site Ideas with Keywords

by 8 Comments

18 low competition niche site keyword ideas for your to use
This might be a strange post to some of you, but to others, I really hope it’s quite helpful. I think it’s a really unprecedented idea for a post. I have spent the time doing the keyword research for you! This is for those people who think “all of the good ideas are already taken”.

First, let me tell you what I consider to be a niche site for purposes of this post. A niche site is a site that covers a very specific product or need (as you will see with the list below).

low competition niche ideas

The general idea of a niche site is to build it up using SEO (although an aggressive social strategy could also work depending on your existing following and the virality of the content) and to profit from affiliate sources.

Clickbank is a popular place for people to find affiliate offers. Amazon is another great way to monetize a niche site. Others simply monetize a niche site using Google AdSense or by selling private ads.

Niche sites can be very profitable, but I like to use a less drastic approach. I keep it very realistic and just shoot for an extra few bucks a day. I mean hey, if you’ve got 3-4 sites set up and each one is making you $4/day, that’s an extra $360-$480/month with little or no work once you get them going.

Let me stop you right there.

It’s NOT going to be THAT easy. If it were, everyone would be doing it. It takes a lot of work and dedication getting a niche site up and running. This is why, even though this is going to be a secondary site for most, you should choose something that you are interested in. You’re still going to have to create content for the site, so it should bear some interest to you or you’ll give up.

You’ll notice that some of these keywords aren’t exactly going to be a breeze to write about and it’ll take some serious creativity to get the keyword combo together in your content. That’s another challenge of building a niche site and going after good keywords. The thing is, people ARE searching for these terms, so it’s up to you to provide the content they want and wrap it around those keywords in a way that makes sense.

Since I’m only providing the keywords, you really will be well-served to just go through my SEO posts and follow them to the best of your ability. Your site’s overall SEO and on-page SEO will benefit greatly.

Before I reveal the 18 low competition niche site ideas with keywords, I’m going to tell you how I am finding these low competition keywords and lay down my criteria.

What I’m asking from YOU

I will also say that if you use an idea from this list to create a new website, I’d appreciate it if you used to sign up. While it won’t cost you a dime more, I’d get a little kickback for your purchase. Consider it your thank you to me? :) Actually, why don’t I save you some money? Use code MOREFROMYOURBLOG to save 25% on your hosting fees! Already have hosting? You should know that Google recognizes when multiple sites are hosted on the same hosting account, so if you plan on linking between the sites, getting a different plan may be beneficial. Don’t mind combining? Just grab your domain from GoDaddy then and you’re good to go!

Ok, now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk criteria and stuff. First up, I used Long Tail Pro to find these keywords. With LTP, I can very quickly search for keywords with a certain number of monthly searches in addition to sorting by competition. You can find keywords of your own with Long Tail Pro by signing up for a 10-day free trial right here! I’ve been an LTP customer for over a year now and wouldn’t blog without it.

Now, since I’m giving this list away, I am giving very basic stats on these keywords. The rest is up to you. I can assure you though that all of these keywords are very reasonable to go after and to try and rank for.

My criteria for choosing keywords.

The criteria is simple. Every keyword you see below receives at least 2,000 monthly Google searches within the United States and has an average keyword competition of under 35. What does that 35 mean? Well, Long Tail Pro judges keyword competition based on several factors and comes up with a number between 1-100. Anything above 50 is nearly impossible to rank for without monetary investment in link building and SEO services. 40-50 is HARD. 30-35 is possible, 20-30 is a little easier and anything under 20 should be a breeze.

In an effort to steer clear of ranking for these keywords (after all, they’re for YOU), the keyword list below is actually an image, that way Google doesn’t think I’m writing about these topics.
low competition keyword list
BOOM! There it is! All of the potential in the world for creating some passive income of your own! Tip: try one niche site at first – they take some time to get the hang of.

So what you do with these keywords is up to you! Have fun and remember to use (or GoDaddy for the domain only) when signing up for your new domain, it’s the best deal by far! See this post for help getting your new site up and running in about 20 minutes!

How to Block Specific Ads or Categories in AdSense

by 4 Comments

How to block unwanted adsense ads from showing on your blog


If you’re like me, you like to have a little control over the ads that appear on your site. Well, if you give AdSense free reign, you might see an ad on your site one day that you really would rather not appear on your site.

Did you know you can block individual ads, ad networks or ad categories?

Here’s how:

To Block Individual Ads That Showed on Your Site

Head over to your AdSense account and click the “Allow & block ads” tab at the top.
how to block specific ads in adsense

Now, here you might have to apply or enroll for the Ad Review Center. You can do that on the page you’re on. Once you’re in and you click the “ad review” tab, you’ll see something like the screen below:
ad review center
From this screen, you can see every ad that has been displayed on your site(s). Hover your mouse over a specific ad to see some options. You can click anywhere on the ad to block that single ad. Use the dropdown menu while hovering to block the entire AdWords account for that ad. I would say, the majority of the time, if an ad is bad enough to block, you’ll probably want to block the entire account.
blocked ad
Once you’re done blocking the ad or ads that you want, you’re all set.

Now, if you’re really particular as to what type of ads show on your site, you might consider blocking entire categories instead. See how to do that below.

How to Block Entire Ad Categories from Showing on Your Site
We’re going to be in the “allow & block ads” section again.

First of all, you’ll see an “ad serving” tab as a top menu option. I ignore that because I feel that blocking ads with those settings is much too general. You’ll wind up taking away too many ad options and lowering your revenue.

You may want to use the “ad networks” tab if you hear about a network that is producing bad ads or something. Chances are, you’ll only find out through the Ad Review Center and will block ads in there though.

Ok, now here’s where you might want to spend some time. Below is the “sensitive categories” area:
block ads
Above is mine. As you can see, you can easily block ads from categories such as: dating, sex, politics, weight loss and more.

What is really nice about this screen, is you are shown some vital performance stats of the categories. Right on this screen, you can see which % of total ad impressions the individual categories provided. Additionally, you can also see which % of earnings those categories provided.

So if you’re on the fence about blocking a category and you see that it’s not performing, then just block it!

Next to the “sensitive categories” tab is one for general categories. There, you can block a variety of other categories. Here, I don’t have any blocked.

Farthest to the left is a tab named “advertiser URLs”. Here, you can manually enter URLs of sites that you don’t want to advertise for.
how to block individual ads
This is important to know if you find out that a competitor has started advertising through AdSense. How terrible would it be to be advertising for your direct competition?!

A few notes:
- Don’t go too crazy blocking categories. The more possible ads AdSense has to choose from to show on your site, the higher your CPC will be.
– Remember that ads show based on your browsing history, so ads you see, others may not.
- Never click your own ads.

So there you go! Now you can block those nasty toe fungus ads from your lovely blog!

How to Sell a Product Directly with Paypal Through Your Blog

by 7 Comments

how to sell a product directly with Paypal on your blog




There are a ton of ways you can sell your product through your blog. I (at the time of this post) sell my 10-day course through Paypal on this site.

While it is not the most visually appealing way to sell products, I like the directness about it. I also like that I only have to pay a small Paypal fee and nothing else. Also, people are fairly comfortable with a Paypal checkout, so I don’t think I am losing very many sales due to lack of option.

Please note, there are pros and cons to doing it this way.
The good part is that delivery of your product will be fully automated. The bad part is that someone could purchase your book and share the URL. Other people would then have free access to your digital product. I like it for its simplicity and think it is good to use until you have the time to invest in figuring out another sales platform.

Paypal is much, much cheaper than Amazon. After spending dozens of hours on the course, I just couldn’t let Amazon take 70% of every sale. It didn’t seem right to me. So Paypal is was!

So, before I start this tutorial, it should go without saying that you must have an active Paypal account to do this.

There are some things you will need before you start:
– a product to sell
– a landing page for people who purchase your product
– a page on your site where people can download what they purchased.

First up, login to your Paypal account.
Note: I am using the classic version of Paypal. On January 14th, they switched me to a new account layout and I clicked the option to switch back to the old one.

Then click the “merchant services” menu option:
paypal 1

Then click on on the option to “create payment buttons for your website”
paypal 2

At this screen, note what each button looks like. On the next screen, you’ll have a dropdown menu where you will select the button that you will be creating. Most likely, you’ll be creating a BUY NOW button. Click the “Create a button” button.
paypal 3

On the next screen, you’ll be able to set things like the item title, item price, applicable tax and more. Most buttons will have only one price/product option, although you can create a button with dropdown price levels.

At this point, you can choose to use Paypal’s designed button or use one of your own. I won’t get into designing a button, that is another post in and of itself. You can also get one done on fiverr pretty easily I bet. Once you have your own image, click the options to use your own, upload it to a website and paste the image URL into the box provided.
paypal 6
You’ll also be able to customize the Paypal button a bit more if you decide to use that one. You can include or exclude the credit card logos, change the wording a bit and choose to use a small or large button.

You will also see a place to select the following options:
paypal 4
If you select the email option, your email address will be visible in the widget code and will be visible to spammers. Not sure why you would want to pick this option, but don’t.

For Step 2: Track inventory…., you can probably just ignore that. I am assuming you are selling a digital product, for which inventory is unlimited.

In step 3, you will be able to customize some more button functions. Do what you like for the first few options here, it’s pretty self-explanatory. I recommend adding a little message in the “special instructions” box.

Here’s the important part – if you want to automate, you will want to fill in this box with the URL of a pre-created page on your site with a download prompt.
paypal 5
People will get that link upon paying. Make the page very clear that it is where they need to be and make the download link/button very large.

The next screen will supply you with the button code. Wherever you put this on your post, the button will appear.

That’s it! Your button will take visitors right to a Paypal purchase page where they will be able to buy your product!