Running a digital marketing campaign can be challenging. Nowadays the Internet is filled with commercials, and people are tired of seeing them everywhere. What does it mean for marketers? They need to find new solutions for banner blindness and go through marketing clutter to reach their audience. There are many ways, but many consumers also use Adblock software. There’s a great way which can boost your marketing – try out sponsored content.
What are sponsored articles?
It’s nothing new in marketing. We know promoted content from Public Relations techniques. What are the advantages? It’s also called native advertising which means that it’s supposed t match the usual content on the website. Choose a publisher which audience is also your audience. Moreover, don’t focus only on the product (or almost ignore your products and services). What’s important is to bring value to your customers. Answer their needs and solve their problems in your texts. Many influencers and publishers which gathered a broad group of monthly visitors want to monetise their websites. And sharing sponsored content is an awesome idea in these cases.
Before you create a content marketing strategy, do your research. Find out what kind of information seek your audience, what’s in trends right now. You have to be aware of your competitors’ activities – don’t copy but get inspired. Valuable content is the one that’s unique and helpful for a particular group. Think of your customers a few groups that you can identify and fulfil the needs of every one of those groups.
Why are sponsored articles one of the best ways to link building activities?
In link building, what’s matter is not the quantity of backlinks, but quality. Many low-quality links won’t cause you any good. Acquiring high-quality backlinks is actually very time-consuming, and it’s not an easy task. Why you need those links though? Link building is one of the SEO activities. Its goal is to place links to your website on other websites. The more value has a website – the better. Every high-quality link is a kind of a „vote of confidence” for your site. Search engines algorithm shows in the rankings higher pages which are trust-worthy (which brings actual value to the Internet users). Being in the first page of search results is every marketer dream. Unfortunately, the number of those pages is limited, and that’s why the competition is very high.
There are two types of links: dofollow and nofollow. First one is every link places in the code of a page. The second one has information in the code that the search engines’ crawlers shouldn’t follow it. That means that nofollow links don’t pass the „link juice” to your website. It’s only a connection to your site. It still can be helpful – because that way you can get more traffic by redirection, but it won’t boost your rankings.
Sponsored content marketplaces
Such platforms let advertisers find the best publishers to share their ads in the form suitable for the website (blog posts, checklists, infographics, charts, white papers or e-books). Manually it would be tough to find accurate pages as you should take under consideration many factors, like page’s theme, language, traffic, trust flow etc., and sometimes also localisation matters.
Marketplaces have a database of publishers and a search box with at least a few filters thanks to which you can browse libraries. The most important is that only high-quality websites can be listed in the marketplaces so you don’t have to worry about it and there are all the metrics and statistics that you need to make a reasonable decision. The process is hassle-free and takes only a few minutes.
Some marketplaces also offer content creation so you can get a professional article, infographic and so on. But if you’d prefer to do it on your own, you can also provide the content t with the publisher.
Why it’s worth to use sponsored content marketplaces?
The transparency – you get all the needed measurements and fixed prices, so the process of making a decision is faster and easier.
Effortless searching – all you need to do is to put factors that matter for you and wait a few seconds for the results. You can filter the websites regarding what’s the most significant for your brand.
Focus on the bigger picture – you can skip this long process of manually looking for the best sites to publish your content. Do what you really want to do.
Saving costs and time – you don’t need to hire an employee especially for searching for publishers and contacting them, negotiating and so on. Via marketplaces it’s far more automated.
Best link building marketplaces
Below we present a list of platforms where you can find the best publishers. The final decision is still on your side, but it can be helpful for you to get a brief overview of features that are provided by the given marketplaces so you can check out directly ones that seem to meet your expectations.
On the other hand, if you’re a publisher, blogger, influencer or you have any other site that you’d like to monetise – this list is also for you. Don’t hesitate to try out some of them (or preferably all of them if you have enough time). You can also sign up to a few platforms so you’ll have more chances to get clients.
Choosing the right platform, as well as a partner for cooperation later is crucial for achieving success in the content marketing and link building. Here we go with the first step – our recommendations:
PRNews.io – is one of the biggest marketplaces in the market. You can find there a fixed price for articles, and over 13 thousand publications, 146 countries and 63 countries they work on. That gives a wide range of opportunities. The prices start from only $15, so it’s worth trying, don’t you think?
Whitepress.net – on this platform there are offers of over 5,100 websites, 4,900 influencers and 60 journalists. The most troubling in acquiring links could be reaching journalists – that’s why it’s profitable to use Whitepress.net to connect with them. It links everyone in the market: websites owners, marketers, journalists, influencers. It’s relatively new, yet already provides a lot of publishers you can cooperate with. Moreover, the system offers advanced analytics, as well as preparing content (texts or visuals – they’re excellent in designing infographics).
Nudge – The most significant advantage of this platform is an ability to track your content performance real-time. Therefore, you can react to what happens. By monitoring content’s performance, you can allocate a budget from one campaign to another basing on which piece of content perform better. You can do it on your own or ask for a bit of help from specialists accessible on the platform.
When you consider influencer marketing you might be interested in checking out those platforms:
Tap influence – you can find their perfect influencers – they have over 50,000+ opt-in influencers. With Influencer Discovery you get a 360-degree view of the influencer so you can find the best match for your brand. Hard-Core Analytics delivers multi-channel tracking beyond blogs – Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter – and analytics that makes quantifying true engagement, Total Media Value, and ROI easy.
Influenster – it’s a product discovery platform and review site to help customers make better decisions during shopping. The community gathers over four million active members, including social media influencers and micro-influencers. The extraordinary idea of Influenster is VoxBox, which is a path of products (from one or many brands) which are sent to targeted influencer groups matched with buyer persona of a specific product.
Grapevine – it’s an „authenticated, human vetted, brand-safe network of creators on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook”. Thanks to it you can improve your campaigns’ effectiveness and boost workflow as cooperation with an influencer can be tricky. The system takes care of many aspects of these processes. You can also analyse influencer performance in real time to adjust spend and messaging.
Best affiliate networks
You can acquire high-quality links also by affiliate programs when publishers and marketers promote your business and get paid in return. There are a few payment models; most companies pay per results (for example, for every purchasing or click). These platforms are dedicated to affiliate programs:
PeerFly – There are over 2000 offers that you can choose. It’s an award-winning, international, and custom build system which allows an affiliate to get paid only when the desired by a company action was taken by a customer (cost per action model – i.e. getting a lead). The platform provides payouts and free training and tools. It has already gathered thousands of less experienced affiliates as well as top-notch professionals from all over the world. It takes about three days to review an affiliate publisher.
Clickbank – it’s a huge affiliate marketplace (more than 17 years of experience). You can choose from over 6 millions of products to promote and more than 20 categories (among others: arts and entertainment, as seen on TV, business, computers, cooking, games, fiction, languages, parenting, home, sport, travel). The most important is to cooperate with people who know what they’re writing about. Affiliates get dedicated links so you’ll always know from which source you have traffic so you can measure the effectiveness of your partners.
Above you could get familiar with examples of good sponsored content marketplaces. Nevertheless, there are many more on the market, and you should choose the most suitable for you. First of all, decide what do you want to focus on (websites, blogs, visuals). You need to double-check if the medium is perfect for you because, in the end, you’re responsible for your brand’s marketing activities. But sponsors content marketplaces Han simply make your job easier and save you a lot of time and money.
