5 Reasons Why I Won’t Sponsor Your Contest
Aug 31, 2008 Blog, Blogging, Earning Blog, Make money in blogging, Money blog, Money making mission
It seems that people are contacting me more and more to become a sponsor in their upcoming contests. Now, I don’t mind sponsoring an ad spot (on one of my many blogs), text link, and a custom made banner design or whatever, but more and more people are asking and I only have a certain amount I can give away. So, I’m going to pick and choose who I sponsor.
Below are some reasons why I won’t sponsor your contest:
1. Not asking me personally and sending me a generic spam-type message. Again, I’m getting more and more requests to sponsor people’s contests so if you’re not going to even address me then you probably won’t even get a response back.
Not to sound like an ass or anything but you came to me to get a sponsor for your contest not the other way around. And if you look at any posts, it says my name right there. So when I receive a message like:
“To whom it may concern (or hi):
My name is XYZ of this site. My site is growing very fast and receiving XXX amount of visitors daily.
I am looking for sponsors for my contest that would be willing to contribute XYZ prizes.
If you are interested, please reply to me before this particular date.
Best,
Their name”
90%-95% of the time this message is either a copy and paste method or a bot. If you were to take 2 seconds to replace “to whom it may concern (or hi)” to “Jay” then I might have fell for your trick.
Though, sometimes it’s even worse. There are people who put “Dear Webmaster or Blog Owner” and you obviously know what that answer is going to be.
2. No benefits for sponsors, no rewards… literally. If there are no benefits for me, as the potential sponsor, then there is no real point in me sponsoring, is there? Yeah I can be a good person and donate XYZ prizes but when it comes down to it, shouldn’t sponsors get some sort of reward in return?
When people approach me, one of my questions will be “how will sponsors benefit for your contest?” And if people don’t have an answer or not a good enough one, then more than likely I’ll pass.
Most people make it a requirement for contestants to write a blog post and include links to all the sponsors. See, that’s fine with me. We all love backlinks.
On the other hand, people use their daily traffic and RSS Feed count as a valid reward. Don’t get me wrong, having 500+ unique visitors daily is good and all but when you have 50+ sponsors, that traffic means absolutely nothing to me anymore. Not many will search through every single contestants’ site, trust me.
3. You’re really, really pushy and annoying about it. Just like anyone else, I’m pretty busy so if I don’t get a chance to e-mail you back on the same day you sent me a message then be patient. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t hurt to send me a follow-up message but sending me a few within a couple days is annoying.
Honestly, if you don’t get a reply back within a few days about sponsoring your contest, you probably fall under one of these reasons I’m listing now. Again, don’t mean to sound like an ass but please take a hint.
4. You have no readers or traffic. I remember when I asked people to sponsor my contest before, a few big names asked me how my traffic was and RSS Feed count, well, now I know where they’re coming from. Again, this should really go under #2 because this isn’t going to give the sponsors much benefit.
If a blog has 3 subscribers and gets 10 visitors daily, there’s no point in someone sponsoring a laptop or a big prize, is there? What’s worse, there are people who ask me to sponsor and their blogs have been around for a few months and they still have 3 subscribers. That just tells me this person isn’t too good at marketing themselves so marketing a contest should almost be out the question as well.
5. I just don’t like you. Yup, I said it. If I don’t like you, there has to be a pretty good reason behind it. For instance, if you were an ass to me when I was just starting out and all of a sudden you come around asking me for help, do you think I should help? Let me ask, would you?
Probably not. If they would’ve helped me when I first started then there should be no problem. I love networking and I’m always up for helping people out when I have time but if you were or are rude, disrespectful, etc then you shouldn’t even talk to me let alone ask me to sponsor your contest.
But then again, it was probably a spam-type message from your bot in the first place. 
If you fall under any of these categories, I probably won’t sponsor anything and more than likely I’m not the only one.
And if you don’t fall into one of these categories, then you should be good. Just let me know and I’ll consider it. Though, you also have to remember I do get a handful of requests sporadically so if I say no, more than likely I have nothing worthy or sponsoring at the time.
Oh, and speaking of contests, my Nintendo Wii contest ends this Friday ! So, go enter, I added a few additional ways of entering and added additional points for certain ways of entering.
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