Sponsored Posts

What Are Sponsored Posts?

Sponsored posts are posts that are created by businesses or individuals who have paid to have their content published on a blog or social media profile.

These posts are typically written by the sponsor, but can also be written by the website or blog owner.

Sponsored Post Benefits

A lot of companies are focusing their efforts on increasing their visibility on organic channels as much as possible as these are seen as more trustworthy by users, but the benefits of using sponsored posts cannot be overlooked.

Increased Reach

Using sponsored posts can be a powerful tool in helping businesses reach a wider audience.

First, sponsored posts allow businesses to target a specific demographic or audience, such as people in a certain geographic location, age group, or with certain interests.

This helps businesses ensure that their content is being seen by the right people.

These posts are also not limited to a business’ actual following, so they allow businesses to reach a much larger audience than they would’ve been able to otherwise.

Improved Brand Awareness And Engagement Opportunities

Increased brand awareness is a direct result of exposing new audiences to your brand and content.

It also opens up opportunities to engage with these new audiences and win over their trust.

Measurable Results and Improved User Behaviour Understanding

Sponsored posts are easily trackable, and so the results of your sponsored initiatives are also easily measurable.

Based on this performance, you can also gain a deeper understanding of your user behaviour, what type of content resonates best with them, and what is better at getting their attention.

Increased Website Traffic

Any sponsored links in your sponsored content are required to be marked as such by Google.

They will also not pass on any PageRank, and won’t directly affect your rankings in any way.

However, that does not mean that sponsored posts can’t be valuable for SEO.

People can still follow the links to your website, increasing its traffic – which is also highly-targeted if you play your cards right.

Reduced Advertising Costs

Compared to some other advertisement methods, such as PPC, placing a sponsored post on a high-quality website can be more cost-effective.

Sponsored Post Example

The following example is a sponsored post by SE Ranking on Search Engine Journal.

How to Get Sponsored Posts?

The way you go about securing sponsor post opportunities will depend on whether you choose to get one on social media or other people’s websites.

When it comes to social media, most platforms have built-in ad platforms like Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, etc.

As for other websites, you will have to rely on blogger outreach to get a hold of the website owners and enquire about the possibility of landing a sponsored post – preferably confirming that they actually accept those prior.

Social Media Ads

As we already mentioned, each major social media network has its own advertising platform – all you have to do is complete your registration and create an ad campaign.

This isn’t the only way to get sponsored posts on social media.

If you operate in a niche in which influencer marketing makes sense to do, finding relevant influencers and reaching out to them for sponsorships, and reviews is also a solid tactic.

Blogger Outreach

Blogger outreach involves four steps – and Respona is designed to speed up and automate each one.

Prospecting

Prospecting is the process of finding relevant opportunities to reach out to.

There are several ways of prospecting for sponsored post opportunities:

• Simply pitching the websites you like in the hopes they accept sponsored posts (least effective and can be viewed as spammy)
• Pitching websites that have a media kit
• Pitching resources that already have content that’s marked as sponsored

Respona comes with a built-in search engine that pulls results directly from Google or Bing, depending on your desired source.

It also gives you an option to do manual searches and hand-pick your prospects, or run an automated search and automatically pull results that fit your criteria directly into your outreach campaigns.

You can even run multiple queries at the same time, greatly saving you time on the prospecting stage.

If you have an Ahrefs or Semrush account, you can also connect it to Respona to utilize additional filters, so that the tool only pull results that fit your desired SEO criteria.

Writing Your Email Sequence

The email sequence is the series of messages that will be sent to your prospects.

Usually, they consist of 2-3 emails – the initial pitch and 1-2 follow-ups.

Respona’s sequence builder allows you to insert variables like @first_name that will automatically populate for each opportunity in your campaign, check your emails for spam words, and even include an unsubscribe link.

Finding Contact Information

Respona takes away all of the hard bits of finding people’s contact information.

All you have to do is tell the tool who to look for – marketing personnel, owner, etc., and the tool will tap into over 24 data sources to find and verify their email addresses in real-time.

Of course, there is also the manual search option – by domain, name, job title, or even LinkedIn URL.

Personalization

Remember the variables from the sequence creation step? All of them will automatically change at this step.

Respona also comes with an AI algorithm that pulls important bits of information from target articles/pages.

You can copy/paste these snippets into your emails to refer to something specific in your prospect’s content to give your pitches that little bit of personalization, giving them the feeling that you actually spent the time to go through their content.

Bottom Line

As long as you have the budget, sponsored posts on relevant, high-quality resources is a great way to boost viability, brand awareness, and tap into new audiences.

Just be prepared that no amount of sponsored posts will help you rank higher in the organic search algorithm.