Nov 28 2007
Initial Contact with Potential Advertisers
I’m a bit busy with a whole bunch of annoying things in the offline world so I haven’t had a chance to compile my super duper huge list of potential advertisers. In the meantime, I thought I’d address a comment made on my last post about making that first contact with possible advertisers.
Lea pointed out that sending off bulk emails to addresses I find in magazines might not be the best approach as they’re meant to be for customers, not for random incoming sales pitches. I totally agree with this but the problem I have is that I’m both lazy and completely crap at sales. Because of this, phoning is out of the question. I love the anonymity and simplicity of just shooting off a bunch of emails and hoping for the best but I acknowledge that it’s probably not going to have the results that a phonecall might have. I’ve had luck finding advertisers in the past but I put that down to being able to speak directly to the marketing person. This has either been because they’ve contacted me previously about something else or just because the company is a small one and the people who work there have to be a Jack of all trades.
So I have a semi evil plan and have decided to comprimise a bit. I’m going to stick to emailing, but instead of being totally lazy and jumping straight into my pitch, I’m going to send out pre-ad pitch emails to try to find out who holds the marketing purse strings. Sort of a little reconnosance mission where I get to be all sneaky and stuff. I’m not sure yet what I’ll write but I’ll draft something up (I’ll let you know what I come up with) and then send it from one of my many email addresses. I’m going to avoid using my main email address so that I can still attempt to get in touch with anyone who ignores me without coming across as too stalkerish.
This whole thing is an experiment and I’m not really expecting much, to be honest. If it works that’s great, if not then I’ll know not to waste my time approaching people out of the blue in the future. Just another step in what has become a massive trial and error process for me!
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I've been travelling since January 2008 living off earnings from the web. Follow me as I bum around Asia and beyond, getting up to mischief and working online as I go. 
Hi Kirsty,
How about sending regular snail mail ? Something that would catch the attention…
This is if you find out the address of the advertisers but if you find it may be good to try…
I’m just enjoying the fact thhat Kirsty is giving us a step by step plan “with numbers I hope” as to how this all works out.
Something along the lines of find 100 potential advertisers send 100 eMails make 25 phone calls = 5 sales. This is what I would deem as old school buisness on the web “safe & sure not hyper tech” just straight forward standard Buisness princaples applied to a web site. I truly believe she will suceed in geting a small number of advertisers that will make her website a very profitable proposition. And continue to highlight the residual factor that is obtained after spending many hrs devolping a site.
Yep Neale, that’s the idea. I’ll be giving numbers and examples of the emails I send out but the problem at the moment is a lack of time to get it done so I’m hoping it’ll be worth the wait. I’m as interested as you are to see how it all works out!
Ah, I was a downer - sorry, i feared as much
)
The revised plan sounds really good - sending off emails saying ‘I was wondering if you could give me information on…’ is much, much less spamish than ‘can I have some money for adverts?’
Good luck! Looking forward to following your progress (because I can see I need to do similar for some of my sites