How Should I Pitch and Price Sponsored Posts to Big Brands?

[pluto]

I want to test out advertorials and/or sponsorships for a website I have with around 10k monthly visitors in an entertainment niche. The people visiting are mostly high school and college age girls.

My plan is to cold email 100 companies and organizations and seeing who bites.

I have 2 questions:

• Curious if there is a rule of thumb for pricing. I should be able to get 500-1k views on that in the first month. I'd like to price it "cheaply" to start, but don't even know what a cheap price for an advertorial would be. This is something that could potentially get views for a long time given the way I recommend articles
• Having trouble coming up with 100 brands that I think would bite. I'm avoiding the big consumer brands like Coca Cola because I'm probably too small. Was looking at sponsors for more niche events and conferences, but it's not a lot. Was wondering if anybody had ideas for how to think more creatively about this to find more potential sponsors

 

[darkzerothree]

I want to test out advertorials and/or sponsorships for a website I have with around 10k monthly visitors in

• Curious if there is a rule of thumb for pricing. I should be able to get 500-1k views on that in the first month. I'd like to price it "cheaply" to start, but don't even know what a cheap price for an advertorial would be. This is something that could potentially get views for a long time given the way I recommend articles

As for this, 500-1K views is nothing. You might be doing better by not even mentioning it.
Pricing I have seen is all over the place.

Might take Google pricing as a guideline.
Say a keyword in the niche costs .1$ and CTR is about 5%
That way, 1K views are basically worth 50 clicks or 5$
You want to make money, so you double that and add a fee for article writing and publishing of Idk - 20$
So your price might be 25-30$

Unless someone else has a better perspective, I guess you'll have to experiment with this.

• Having trouble coming up with 100 brands that I think would bite. I'm avoiding the big consumer brands like Coca Cola because I'm probably too small. Was looking at sponsors for more niche events and conferences, but it's not a lot. Was wondering if anybody had ideas for how to think more creatively about this to find more potential sponsors

Don't stay away from the big names. Yes, chances might be low, but they have the budgets.

 

[pluto]

Don't stay away from the big names. Yes, chances might be low, but they have the budgets.

Thank you!! Do you happen to have any experience with this part? For smaller orgs it's fairly easy to tell who I should reach out to. For big, it's definitely a swing for the fences, any thoughts who I should be swinging at? More senior vs. junior vs. where I'm most likely to get somebody to take a flyer