How to monetize a blog with direct sponsorships
Selling blog ad space directly, without a network: which placements are worth selling, what they earn against programmatic, and how to price them.
Most blogs get monetized backwards. The owner installs an ad network, watches it return a few dollars per thousand pageviews, concludes the audience is not worth much, and stops. Direct sponsorship on the same traffic routinely pays three to five times more, because the advertiser is buying a specific audience rather than bidding into an auction against everyone else.
The catch is that direct deals need inventory a sponsor can understand. A blog with no defined ad slots is hard to buy; the same blog with two named placements, a price and a description sells without a conversation. Most of the work in monetizing a blog is turning vague space into specific, purchasable things.
How it works for a blog
- Define slots before you sell them
- Give each placement a name, a position, a size and a price - 'sidebar, above the fold, 300x250, $200/month' beats 'ad space available'. Sponsors buy defined things; they negotiate about undefined ones.
- Your best inventory is rarely a banner
- In-content placements on your highest-traffic evergreen posts, and sponsored articles on subjects a brand cares about, both outperform sidebar banners by a wide margin - and price accordingly.
- Evergreen traffic is worth more than spikes
- A post that pulls steady search traffic for two years is inventory a sponsor can rely on. Identify your top few evergreen pages and sell placements on those specifically rather than sitewide.
What you can actually sell
- In-content placements, sold per page rather than sitewide
- Sponsored articles and product reviews, clearly labelled
- Sidebar and header banners, sold monthly
- Resource-page and tool round-up placements, which convert unusually well
What to charge
Blog placements price on traffic and subject far more than on design. Use the calculator for your niche to get a flat monthly figure per spot, then adjust: sponsored articles usually carry two to three times a banner's price, and placements on a single high-intent page can be worth more than sitewide inventory.
| If your subject is | Benchmark CPM | Flat rate at 10K | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tech & SaaS | $8.00 | $180 / spot / month | Full rates |
| Finance & Investing | $12.00 | $270 / spot / month | Full rates |
| Health & Fitness | $5.00 | $110 / spot / month | Full rates |
| Travel & Lifestyle | $3.00 | $65 / spot / month | Full rates |
Benchmarks for a site at 10,000 monthly visitors with 2 ad spots. Run your own numbers to adjust for your traffic.
What these placements sell for on Adsly
Live prices from listings currently offering the formats above.
| Format | Listed spots | From | Median | Up to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Banner Ad | 17 | $3 | $50 | $499 |
| Sponsored Content | 11 | $10 | $50 | $499 |
| Guest Post | 5 | $2 | $29 | $150 |
| Product Review | 5 | $1 | $39 | $129 |
| Text Ad | 3 | $1 | $60 | $100 |
What to have ready before you pitch
Nearly every sponsor asks for the same handful of things. Having them written down turns a two-week email thread into one message.
- 1 Monthly pageviews, and separately the traffic of your top five pages
- 2 Where your traffic comes from - search, social or newsletter changes what a sponsor will pay
- 3 Screenshots or mockups of each placement, so a sponsor can see what they are buying
- 4 A short audience description: who reads this, and what do they do for a living
Platforms like yours on Adsly
Worth a look for how other owners describe their audience and structure their offer.
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Questions about monetizing a blog
Is direct sponsorship really better than an ad network?
On the same traffic, usually by a large multiple - but it costs you sales effort that a network does not. The honest answer is that networks pay less and require nothing, direct deals pay more and require you to find and manage sponsors. Most blogs end up running both.
How much traffic do I need before anyone will sponsor a blog?
For a general blog, roughly five to ten thousand monthly visitors makes the conversation easy. For a tightly-focused one - a niche a specific advertiser needs - a couple of thousand can be enough, because there is nowhere else for that sponsor to buy.
Should I let sponsors write the article?
Take their brief, write it yourself, and keep editorial control over claims. Sponsor-written copy reads like sponsor-written copy, performs worse, and costs you audience trust you cannot buy back.
Does Adsly take a commission on sponsorship deals?
No. Adsly charges nothing on the deals you close - you agree terms directly with the sponsor and keep 100% of what they pay. The business model is listing fees, and publishing is free if you run the Adsly badge on your site.
Do I need to set prices before listing?
No. Plenty of listings go live with no priced opportunities at all - the listing itself is a profile brands can find. You can add opportunities with your own prices later, whenever you have decided what to charge.
Run something else too?
Let sponsors come to you
List a blog on Adsly and brands browsing for your kind of audience can find and message you directly. Free to publish with the Adsly badge, 0% commission on every deal, and you add priced opportunities whenever you are ready.
List a blog