Working at Home on the Internet

Sponsorship Needs Communication to Work

New Here? You may want to Subscribe to my RSS feed for daily updates. Or if you prefer, Subscribe by Email What is RSS? Thanks for visiting!

 

Not long ago I was offered sponsorship for the blog with certain stipulations on placement of the link.  The offer also had the possibility to sponsor the Working at Home Blog Carnival.  I took a couple of days to think about it a little.

Since I thought he had a useful product and it did fit with the theme of my Blog, I looked around a little bit.  I saw an ad for the same advertiser on another site and inquired about his reliability and compensation.  No numbers were mentioned, but I was assured that the advertiser seemed upfront.

 I contacted the advertiser with my offer of a placement where I thought it would be appropriate on my site and inquired about monetary compensation.  I still haven’t heard back from the advertiser after a few inquires by email.  My guess is that he is not that interested in being a sponsor here.  That is a little bit of a surprise with the way he promoted the fit of his product to my Blog.

 

The opposite happened with a different advertiser.

He is just starting out in promoting his product.  We communicated back and forth for about a week.  He sent me a sample of it to show how it works and how it could be useful in working at home.  He had no problem with placement of his link to the product, but compensation would have to be negotiated at a later date.

I know what it’s like to be a start-up.  It takes someone who believes enough in your product to promote it and work with you.  When that happens, it is possible to get the word out and still have wiggle room for improvement of the product and the way it’s presented.

 

The major difference between the two companies wasn’t the fit with the Blog, it was the communication with the Blog owner (me).  The former made me an offer of sponsorship, and then disappeared when money was mentioned.  The latter communicated with me through the whole process and I decided to run his link with no compensation temporarily, until things get rolling for him.

 

The key for me in picking a sponsor or an affiliate for any of my sites is communication.  If they talk to me, if can feel more comfortable in recommending them to my readers.

October 28th, 2006 at 03:24pm | Posted by Joe | Advertising, Affiliates | reader remarks | Print This Post