Where to Find Your First Advertiser
Everybody says the first advertiser is the hardest. It is mostly a research problem, and research problems have methods.
The short version
- Your first advertiser almost always comes from one of three lists: who already advertises in your niche, who is adjacent to it, and who your readers already pay money to.
- The fastest list to build is the one you can see: open five competing sites and write down every advertiser on them.
- A business already buying ads in your niche has a budget and has decided your audience is worth reaching, which removes both hard questions at once.
- Twenty names is enough. Ten will not give you a pattern and fifty will not get written.
- The first email should ask one question and take under a minute to answer, because anything longer gets saved for later and never answered.
Your first advertiser comes from one of three lists: businesses already advertising in your niche, businesses adjacent to it, and businesses your own readers already pay money to.
All three are findable in an afternoon without talking to anybody, and the first one is findable in about twenty minutes because the names are printed on your competitors' websites.
List one: who is already buying
Open five sites that cover what you cover. Scroll each one properly, on a phone as well as a laptop, with your ad blocker switched off. Write down every advertiser you see.
These names are worth more than any other list you will build, because a business advertising on a site like yours has already settled the two questions that kill most pitches. They have a budget for this. They have decided your kind of audience is worth reaching. All that is left is whether they want yours too.
List two: who is adjacent
Take the products and services your readers use to do the thing your site is about, then write down who sells them. Not competitors to your content. Suppliers to your audience.
A site about home espresso has an adjacent list of grinder manufacturers, bean roasters, water filter companies, cafe equipment resellers and the two or three training courses people mention in forums. None of them compete with the site. All of them want exactly its readers.
| Source | Time it takes | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Ads on five competing sites | Twenty minutes | Buyers with a proven budget. The best list. |
| Sponsors of niche newsletters and podcasts | Half an hour | Buyers who already prefer direct deals over networks. |
| Exhibitor lists from your industry trade shows | Twenty minutes | Companies with a marketing budget and a stated interest in the sector. |
| Products your own readers mention in comments | An hour | The warmest names, and the ones nobody else has approached. |
| Search results for your main topic, the ads at the top | Ten minutes | Companies already paying per click. They understand buying media. |
Stop at twenty names. Ten is not enough to see a pattern, and fifty is a list you will not finish emailing.
List three: who your readers already pay
This is the strongest list and the one people skip, because it takes slightly longer than the others.
Ask your readers what they use. A one-question survey, a line at the bottom of a newsletter, or just reading your own comments with a notepad open. You are looking for brand names that come up more than once.
When you approach one of those companies you are not selling advertising space. You are telling them that several hundred of their existing customers read one website, and offering them the obvious next sentence. That is a different conversation and it closes at a much higher rate.
What to do with twenty names
The order matters more than the copy
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1
Put your rate card up first
Before a single email goes out, have a page an interested person can read without replying to you. Half of the responses you get will be somebody who looked at that page and made up their mind. See what belongs on it.
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2
Find the right person
Marketing manager, growth lead, or for a small company the founder. Not the general enquiries inbox, which is where pitches go to be deleted.
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3
Send something short enough to answer from a phone
Who your readers are, one number, and one question. If it takes more than a minute to read and answer, it gets saved for later, and later does not come.
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4
Follow up once, after a week
Once. A second follow up on a first approach reads as pressure from somebody they have no relationship with yet.
The reply rate to expect
Out of twenty well chosen names, expect two or three replies and one conversation that goes somewhere. That sounds discouraging written down and it is actually fine: one advertiser at a real rate is worth more than a month of network revenue on a small site, and the nineteen who did not reply are still on your list for next quarter.
The names also compound. The first advertiser makes the second one easier, because you stop pitching a theory and start pointing at somebody already running. See where the first ten actually come from.
Before you send anything
Know what you are selling. If you cannot say which position, what size and how many views a month, you are not ready to email anybody, and the fix is an hour of counting. That is the inventory audit, and it comes first.
And have an answer ready for the reply you will actually get, which is almost always a request for rates rather than a yes or a no. There is a script for that in what to say when an advertiser emails.
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