MBA1141 Should You Have Sponsors?

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 NBA Show. Because your business gets better when you get better with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a company business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn should you have sponsors? Whether you're having sponsors on your blog posts, in your YouTube videos, on your podcast, at your live event, is it a good idea to have sponsors? Does it affect the content? Does it help your audience, and is it really worth it when it comes to your bottom line? In today's episode we talk about when sponsorship works and when it doesn't, and what are some of the challenges that come with sponsorship. I'll be sharing everything I know that I learned along the way. Having sponsorships on our show, in our events, and a whole lot more. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. There are two things we need to understand before we get started with answering the question is, is it a good idea to have sponsors? Number one, sponsorship is a transaction. It's an agreement between you and another company. They want to get in front of your audience so they can promote and sell their products and in exchange you're going to get a sponsorship fee. So this really only works when both parties get a win. You can't just have these sponsors on your materials, whether it's at an event or in your podcast or in your videos, and not give your sponsors a return on investment. They want to see that they're actually getting conversions. So this only works when you actually have a good fit for your audience. When these sponsors are a good fit. If I run a men's health blog and I focus on helping men be better with their fitness as well as their mental health, getting a sponsor like a dog food company may not be the best fit. It's not saying that, hey, my readers don't have dogs, but my conversions are going to be less than stellar, and then I'm going to disappoint my sponsors and the cycle will not continue. What you want to do is you want to give your sponsors a win so they can continue to sponsor you, but you also want to give your audience a win. You want to make sure that you're actually talking about things that interest them that they can actually use. So point one, it has to be a win win for both parties. Number two, it has to be win for the audience, like I just mentioned, but not only because you want the conversions, but because you. You don't want it to dilute from the content. You want to make sure your sponsorships are a good match with your content, whether it's your podcast, your videos, your blog. You want to make sure it complements, it supplements the information that you're giving. Otherwise, it's just a nuisance and it's taking away from the attention of your audience. They're going to lose their attention and they're going to leave your site or your podcast. So these are the two golden rules. Got to be a win win for you and your sponsor, as well as it has to make sense for your audience so you can actually get the conversions, but also so it doesn't dilute the actual experience. Now, I'm a believer that sponsorship, when it's done right, is a good idea. Why? Because it costs money for you to produce great material, great content, and you want to make sure that you can cover those costs through some good partnerships. Let's take podcasting, for example. When Cereal launched its podcast, it's one of the most popular podcasts ever. Ever. Their sponsor, mailchimp, was more than happy to shell out some big bucks for those spots. We're talking six figures here. Now, why so expensive? Well, because it takes a lot of money to create A great show, you need a whole team to make it happen. And if it's done right, it's going to again, complement the show and not hurt it. Now, the one thing to note here is that podcasts are free. The content itself is free. When you watch YouTube, those things are free as well. Those videos are free. So if there's a sponsor at the start of the video, or in your podcast or your blog for that matter, people see this as the price to pay to get some really good content. And if it's done right, it's not a big price, especially if you're recommending things that they can actually use. But what about things that are not free, like a live event? When you go to conferences, there are plenty of sponsors there. Gold and platinum and diamond sponsors. You paid for admission. Why do you see sponsors out there? Well, that's a good question. And you need to make sure it's clear to your audience. If you're the event organizer, you have to make sure it's super clear that, hey, we have these sponsors, these people, these companies are helping make this event happen. They're really subsidizing the price of the ticket. Most live events don't make money on ticket sales. If you go to a conference, you might pay 3, 4, $500 for a ticket, but the cost to run these events costs way more than the total sales of tickets. So to subsidize and not make the price of the tickets so high, they make money otherwise with sponsorships. And again, making sure that they have the right people in the sponsorship area that are a good match for the audience, same thing applies. It has to be a win win for you and the sponsor. And of course the audience needs to feel like this makes sense. Again, if I'm at a public speaking conference and I walk by the sponsorship booths and I see dog food, doesn't make much sense. What are you talking about? Yeah, I might have a dog, but doesn't look really like a good fit. And the sponsor is just not going to make the impact that they would want to if they don't have a good fit. Now, when you get started with sponsorships, this is my opinion, you need to have a solid audience before you start considering sponsorships. When it came to this podcast and getting sponsorship on this show, we actually never reached out to any sponsors. We actually ran our first 320 odd episodes with no sponsors. After we got some traction, grew our audience and had a solid show on our hands, sponsors started reaching out to us. They started to notice, they started to see that, hey, this show is really popular and people really love it. We want to be associated with that and get in front of this audience. It's a lot easier to get the sponsors you're looking for when you're in this position rather than going to sponsors hat in hand. The party that has the audience is the one that has the leverage. We literally get pitched hundreds of sponsors a month and the vast, vast majority of them get rejected. We just say no because it's just not a good fit for our audience. But we have that luxury because we waited until we have an audience before we started working with sponsors.

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Wayfair, Every style, every home. The mistake that people make when it comes to sponsorship is that they accept any and all sponsors. They think it's like TV or something like that. It's like a TV commercial. You know, you see commercials about all different kinds of things. Well, number one, you know, TV is a very general audience. But even with tv, they air specific types of commercials at specific times. Sunday morning cartoons, they're gonna put toy commercials there for the kids. But when it comes to your blog, when it comes to your video channel, when it comes to your podcast, this is a very niche audience. So you need to have niche sponsors. The other mistake people make is that they don't have a long term relationship with their sponsors. And in fact, when we work with our sponsors, we make sure that they are kind of locked in for a certain amount of time. We want them to be on the show or be featured on the show more than a few times. In fact, we like at least five to 10 times because it takes some repetition for them to see some conversions. Not everybody listens to every single episode of the Hundred Dollar MBA show. It's a daily show. So to ensure that they're getting the best conversions, we want to make sure that people hear them more than once and learn about their product more than once. The other mistake that people make is that they don't understand that, hey, when you're doing sponsorships, you need to work with your sponsor to make sure the message is is cater to your audience. For this podcast, we get notes from the sponsor about some of the things they want us to cover. But I modify and customize the actual sponsor read to make sure it makes sense for my audience that it's in my own voice so it sounds natural and it makes sense, period. The reason why sponsors want to work with you specifically and your audience is that they really want your voice. They want to associate their product with your brand because, hey, your listeners, your followers, your readers, they like you. And sponsors want to leverage that. That's just the reality. So make sure that you give them the opportunity to work with you so you can deliver the best reads or the best sponsorship spots. Well, there you go. There you have it. That wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening. Don't forget, tomorrow is free ride Friday. If you want to win a free ride to one of our programs, just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Just listen out on Friday and see if you won. That wraps up today's lesson. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the reasons why I like working with sponsors is that I love great products. And if a product is great, I want to talk about it. I want to tell people about it. And this allows me to be enthusiastic when it comes to talking about these sponsors. So choose sponsors you think are cool that you believe in. It's going to be better for you, the sponsor, and your audience. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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