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Our closing keynote speakers are Debbie Bookstaber of Element Associates and Ciaran Blumenfeld of Hashtracking. Both speakers know things from the blogger side and the business side.
Prove Your Value
Showing brands your ROI can be difficult. How can you demonstrate your value?
What’s the Goal?
We’re often excited to work with a brand that we lose sight of the goal as bloggers and for the brand. There can be no success without meeting a goal. What you know your value is can be disconnected from their perceived value. Nail down if the goal is impressions, sales, etc. A Twitter party is a tactic, not a goal in and of itself. The tactics you pitch may not be appropriate for a brand’s goals. You want to get it right so that word of mouth will spread if you deliver the results the brand wants.
Know Your Numbers
Know where your strengths are in your numbers, and know what those numbers mean. It’s not always about UVMs and pageviews. And the brands are not very good about telling the bloggers what metrics they really care about. Bloggers never know if they succeeded or failed. If you don’t have huge numbers, you have to know how to sell yourself. If you have a small but loyal readship of about 2,000 UVMs, you may be able to deliver more sales than a blog with 100,000 UVMs were most of their traffic goes to this one post that went viral a year or two ago.
Tools for Measurement
Screenshot the comments you get about your sponsored posts on Facebook, your RTs, etc. Hashtags can be used to help measure success, too. Have your own hashtag and report on it. There are free hashtag reporting options, but you can also use paid tools like Hashtracking.
Check Yourself
Take an honest self-assessment. If you know what your weaknesses are, you can hire someone who can do that thing for you. You don’t have to be good at everything, and it’s unrealistic to think that you can be. Know what your thing is. Know what your resources are. You can tell potential clients which social networks you’re strongest on to prioritize when their budget isn’t high enough to do all the channels they want to be on. At least not done well.
Don’t Believe the Hype
You don’t have to be a celebrity. Some sites are all flash and no substance. Don’t measure yourself against them. And don’t forget that there are blogging personalities who have built their empires on the backs of people with solid NDAs. It looks like they did it all themselves, they built it alone, they are crushing it all on their own…but they’re actually paying other people $100k+ to do the behind the scenes work for them.
Don’t believe your own hype, either. You may feel insulted by dollar amounts that are offered to you, but the brand has a specific budget. They can only pay X amount of money for a campaign, and they don’t care how much it costs for you to get a babysitter, pay for the gas to get yourself to an event, etc. It’s almost never personal. You can counter with your rates and let them know you can’t work for the amount offered to you, but even if they can’t make that happen this time, your contact may pass your rates along to the brand and negotiate to include you in their next campaign budget.
Plan for Growth
Maybe sponsored posts don’t even fit your long-term goal as a blogger. Know who you are, what you’re good at, and where you want this all to lead. (For me, this blog is only part of the body of work I want to build. My ultimate goal is to make a living writing fiction. But even if I achieve that goal, it’s also important to me to share the information I share here for the portion of the special needs community that can’t always find easy to digest information about obscure health issues. Hey, Maxine Paetro wrote gardening books before she became one of James Patterson’s more popular co-authors. I don’t make money with this blog, I make my money working with corporate blog clients.)
Stay Flexible
If you have a lot of negative energy flowing with a certain brand relationship, you may need to cut those ties and let it go. And if you’re doing something that works but you’re not enjoying it anymore, you probably want to move on there, too.
What’s Your ROI?
Is it the money for you? Is it the experiences you have access to as a blogger? Is it the freedom and joy you get from writing what you want to write about? These are all things that can be valuable to you as a person. Don’t forget that a lot of “successful” people are really unhappy. Consider the balance of time, energy, money, and joy that you need to consider yourself a success.
Notes
Don’t assume that brands are tracking their campaigns. Some of them haven’t even heard of Google Analytics.
Brands need to prove their ROI to you, too. It’s not a one-way street. Just because they’re paying you doesn’t mean they have the right to be horrible to you.
That’s me: Christina Gleason. I’m a writer, editor, and disability advocate. I'm a multiply disabled autistic lady doing my best in this world built for abled people. I’m a geek for grammar, fantasy, and casual gaming. I hate vegetables. I cannot reliably speak, so I’ll happily conduct business over email or messaging instead.
