Sponsored Posts are where your product or service gets reviewed or detailed in the form of a blog post (or social media post) by an influencer or popular website for a fee. It is a form of native digital advertising where your brand is showcased in a natural way without disruptive ads.
Sponsored posts have been around for years now and can be seen on blogs and social media platforms alike.
They can be seen and found in just about every and any industry you can think of from digital marketing to food blogging and everything in between.
They have recently gained more traction as the influencer marketing trend has exploded, giving room for popular influencers to review and showcase a business.
Even platforms like Instagram and Twitter have similar results.
This makes it tricky to reach audiences on social media without paying big money.
Even so, people are becoming less and less receptive to ads. It’s why tools like ad blocker have skyrocketed in usage.
Sponsored posts allow you to circumvent bad organic reach and ad blocking tools by producing a native advertisement on a popular website.
By paying for a sponsored post, your brand gets showcased to all viewers of the site without it feeling like a direct ad.
Sponsored posting aids in building brand awareness and establishing your company as a solution to common problems in a given niche.
Since it’s coming from third parties and not being written by your own company, it comes off as more trustworthy and genuine than simply self-promotion junk that users click off immediately.
For instance, if your company sells SEO tools and services, getting a sponsored post on a popular SEO blog can help you reach a new audience that is primed for your services and tools. Otherwise reaching them would be harder and less direct than social media and PPC.
Sponsored posts have the benefit of allowing you to hand-pick audience targets whereas ads produce more ambiguous audiences.
But, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Sponsored Posts are native advertising. They are essentially detailed blog posts on a given website that explain your product or service from top to bottom. They show use-cases, case studies, reviews, and more.
But guest posting is simply writing a blog post for another website. And websites often pay people to write guest posts.
On top of that, guest posts aren’t native ads and they aren’t promotional. Guest posting is a blog featuring experts in their niche to write content that helps customers, not to showcase the ins and outs of a product or service.
Guest posts can actually be penalized by Google for being overly promotional or utilizing link-building tactics.
But that’s not true. Sponsored posts are best done on niche sites where the audience directly matches to your buyer personas.
For instance if you sell beginner SEO tools, you shouldn’t be paying for a sponsored post on expert SEO blogs. Despite being in the same category, that’s a major audience mismatch and a recipe for zero sales.
Sponsored posts aren’t mass market ads. They are highly specific and should only target sites that match your audience targets.
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