How to Find Sponsors for Your Blog Contests

So you have blog running for some time and now want to host a contest on your blog to get more popularity, traffic and exposure for your blog. But the real question that arises is how to find sponsors for your blog contests? I himself have been running a guest blogging contest on my blog for which I was able to get good amount of sponsors with the little effort I put in. You can give away prizes in the form of cash, products or services to your blog contest winners. But it’s the cash prize which attracts every contender because they can use it the way they wanted and there is no restriction about the usage of particular products or services. But it’s not the case the contests that are giving away prizes in the form of plugins, themes, hosting, free advertising, services does not perform well. So you can decide by yourself the kind of gifts you want to give away to the blog contest winners. And depending upon that, you can decide the  kind of giveaways you will be accepting from advertisers, you can plan out your future strategy accordingly.

So here is my strategy that you can implement to find sponsors for your current or future contests:

1. Accept sponsors though blog post

I would create a post declaring the dates when contest will start, what the contest will be around, invite your blog readers to be sponsors and what benefit they will get by sponsoring your upcoming contest. You can expect some initial sponsors for your blog contest with this kind of promotional blog post which is created specially to attract sponsors for contest which will be commencing in the coming days.

2. Who Sponsored on other blog contests

Draft an email informing about your future contest, what kind of contest it will be, what you are accepting from sponsors and if you have a working link for upcoming bog contest, include that in your email draft. Once you have prepared the draft that you will be sharing with potential advertisers interested in throwing some form of sponsorship for your contest, create a list of advertisers who have sponsored some of earlier blog contests in your niche. Contact them via email or contact form available on their websites. Since they had sponsored other contest in your blog niche, there is every chance; they will show interest in sponsoring your blog contest as well.

3.  Declare it in Discussion Forums

Now it’s time to declare your blog contest in the discussion forum wherever you are active. Discussion forums like DP Forum, SitePoint,myblogguest.com etc can really help you get some quick sponsors for your contest.

4.  Contact website owners, bloggers in your niche

Create a list of top blogs and websites operating in your niche and invite them to be a sponsor for your contest. And please don’t forget to mention the benefits they will be getting by giving away some prizes for your contest. All advertisers want exposure, traffic, branding and search engine benefits for their websites when they decide to sponsor a contest. Are you fulfilling their wishes?

5. Product based websites

Generate a list of product based websites in your niche. Suppose you a blog created around WordPress, so websites selling WordPress related products like plugins, themes, services or ebooks are going to be your target. So contact them for getting additional advertisers for your upcoming contest.

6. Social Media Websites

If you a big Fan Base on Twitter or Facebook kind of social networks, why not start promoting your contest there. I promoted my contest in the form of tweets and status updates on Twitter and Facebook to gain additional sponsors for my contest.

7. Link Love

I would suggest keep on sharing your blog post that was created specially to attract more advertisers in your future blog posts. And in case you are writing guest posts on other blogs in your niche, it will be a great idea to share the link to that post in your Author Bio or within blog post content section.

There are the ways I so far know of and which really worked for me to gain sponsors for my guest blogging contest. Do you know of any other way apart from what I discussed above; please share in the comments section below.

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Tagged as: blog contests, facebook, guest blogging contest, Social Media, sponsor contest, sponsors, twitter