Monetizing Your Blog with a “Posts From Our Sponsors” Section

When I wrote 28 Ways to Make Money with Your Website, one of the mentioned methods to make money from a website was the “Posts from our sponsors” section on the sidebar or somewhere else on a site.
Techmeme, the famous tech news aggregator, bases its monetization strategy almost exclusively on this method. If you visit the site you will notice a prominent “Techmeme Sponsor Posts” section on the sidebar, where posts from the sponsors get featured.
Techmeme charges $5,000 monthly for each sponsor spot. Most of the times they have 6 sponsors, so you make the math.
What always made me curious was the fact that virtually no other website was leveraging this monetization method, despite the success that it has on Techmeme. One could argue that a news aggregator is particularly favorable for such type of “post based” advertising. That is true, but what about blogs?
Blogs also work around posts and articles, and most designs include sections on the sidebar that highlight the “Most popular posts” or “Recent posts.” That means that the model could work just as efficiently on them.
I can’t say for sure though, and that is why I decided to make a small experiment. If you take look at our sidebar, right below the “Popular Articles” section you will see a new one called “Articles from our Sponsors.” Basically that section will feature posts from other blogs that decide to sponsor Daily Blog Tips. I am not sure about the rate yet, but I will kick start it at $100 monthly.

Benefits for the sponsoring blogs

Most advertising on blogs today is either Google Adsense or banners. These formats work well for online companies that want to promote products, services, and to create brand recognition at the same time. For other blogs, however, placing a banner on a website will not be a very effective promotion strategy.
Having your posts featured on the sidebar of a popular blog on your niche, however, might be a better investment. First of all because there will be an endorsement factor in place. That is, the readers of that blog might get encouraged to check your post because they feel that the author of the blog is recommending it.
Secondly, the quality of the traffic should be higher. The visitor will only click on the article if he is interested on the topic, and should he find good quality and useful content on the other side there is a higher chance (when compared to a banner click) that he will end up becoming an RSS subscriber.

Benefits for the hosting blog

The “Posts from our sponsors” section could be used in parallel with other banners or Adsense units that you might already have in place, so it is another revenue source.
Secondly, if you accept posts and articles only from sponsors that have high quality content and are relevant to your niche your readers might find that new section useful as well.

Technical aspects

If I am not wrong Techmeme pulls the posts from its sponsors directly from their RSS feed. Every time a sponsor publishes new content the section gets updated, therefore.
On this blog I will try to do something different. That is, each sponsor will be able to select what post he wants featured, and he can also switch the featured post anytime he desires. The reason is quite simple, if the sponsor wants to maximize the number of clicks that he will get and the conversion rate into RSS subscribers, probably he should showcase only his best articles, and not necessarily the most recent ones.
The links will carry a no-follow tag because we all love Google, right?
If you are interested in getting your posts featured on the sidebar of Daily Blog Tips (on all the pages) for $100 monthly, therefore, just contact me through the Contact Form and we’ll talk about it.
I will also keep you guys updated on how effective this monetization strategy turns out to be.