Closed First 4-Figure Sponsorship On A Cold Pitch Email

When launching a website business, it becomes a waiting game for display ads to pay off, especially with Google and other search engines. As they need to trust that your site is quality and delivers great value.

And this also means affiliate income doesn't really drive much revenue either, at first.

So what is one to do?

I'm a big fan of sponsorships or brand partnerships. While they are not always consistent, they are a lot of fun (in my opinion, anyway) and can put some healthy income in your pockets while waiting to launch additional revenue streams.

Just recently, I got the confirmation and approval on sponsorship from a cold email pitch I sent out last week.

May not be a big deal to some, but I have limited sales experience and cold outreach is TOUGH to break through. My work email inbox typically has 20-30 sales pitches every weekday.

So for those who are interested in getting paid sponsorships to drive more revenue, here's a bit on how I've done it so far with my past project (which was acquired in 2021) and my current project, Remote Work Junkie (https://remoteworkjunkie.com/)

1. Understand the offering you can provide companies, even if you don't have massive traffic yet. Currently, I hover around 10-12k pageviews per month without much organic help yet. However, that's a decent enough size to make my case. So for me, I get creative between educational sponsored posts, social media partnership announcements, native ad placements on the website, newsletter placements, and even various promotional things (like Reddit, Quora, etc). I even give lifetime job board discounts away or even further content syndication options. All this to say, find unique ways to give value.

2. I pitch those who reach out with affiliate offers. I like affiliate marketing, but the problem is you typically need a bunch of website traffic or a specific post to rank where a lot of people will click that link to get conversions. I still sprinkle some in, but I get limited value compared to the brand right now (which still gets tons of visibility).

So instead, I say "I'm interested but I'm not focusing on affiliates as much quite yet. However, I have this awesome sponsorship package you might be interested in..." I go into the bullet points, my background, and ask what their budget is. This has worked quite effectively. over the years, more than I would have expected. Over half my sponsors from my previous website happened from this exact route.

3. I'm very honest about the amount of traffic and the data I can provide them. I know I won't always send 100s of conversions. I show the value from a brand visibility standpoint and that the sponsored content, for example, lives FOREVER on the site. So as it grows, the post still has the opportunity to drive attention and awareness. And some people rather wait until my site is larger and others see the value right away.

While results matter, not everything in marketing that brands do needs to be super data-driven. People discover brands in so many ways, through various channels. Like communities, videos, podcasts, and not everything are as easily attributable. This also isn't a cop-out, as I do love to drive direct results and traffic to the brand, but I frame it in a way that this is a "brand campaign." What this means is it is a pure awareness play across the Remote Work Junkie community. I never guarantee any specific results, just that I'm going to provide as much value as possible.

4. I have a descriptive "Advertise (https://remoteworkjunkie.com/work-with-us/)" page about the options. It still needs a bit of work/redesign I think but works well for now. But I also get creative in the emails with a potential sponsor, where we may do more than what is listed.

I've been back and forth about listing pricing, but I feel it limits the potential. For SaaS, I would always have a pricing page and numbers. But for website business items, each package can have some unique variation, budgets might vary, etc. I may change my opinion on this, but for now, this seems to work fine.

5. The cold pitch. I never really did this with my previous website, but for Remote Work Junkie, I wanted to give this a shot. So my process was this:

• Identify companies in the remote work/career space that would overlap with my audience. List them all out in a spreadsheet.

• I Keep tabs on sponsors on other related remote work websites/newsletters. Write those down and add them to the list too, because they may have a budget currently to sponsor more places.

• Craft a short email that is personalized to the company or person if you have their direct contact info. I like to make a short intro, a quick reason for my outreach, how our audiences align, bullet points of what we offer, and add a no-pressure ending that they can reach out any time. I only send one follow-up email, about a week later. The sales pitch emails are already overwhelming enough.

• Find the emails of the partnership folks or the marketing/growth person. They typically lead the charge on paid sponsorships. You can use Linkedin to find them or a prospecting tool to get an email. Heck, you can probably guess it too if you know their name. Most companies are firstname@, first.lastname@, lastname@, etc. But many times, if the company is small, I just use the contact form/email provided on the website. Exactly where this current sponsor came from, a contact form I emailed the pitch to.

None of this is really groundbreaking I'm sure, but wanted to share what is possible with a new business where sponsorships are important. And I may even be leaving money on the table by not getting more aggressive with outreach, but it's just not my style (:

My plan once the traffic grows is to start getting five or six-figure partnership deals, but I'm realistic that I have my work cut out for me to get that happening. Gotta build up the traffic and email list!

But this is a start for going into month 7 of the website business as a side hustle currently. A much slower grind to generate revenue but excited about the progress and the compounding income that can happen down the road.

Let me know if you have any questions, happy to answer in the comments below!