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How I got my first paying sponsor for my community

I posted on IH a few days ago about receiving payment from my first community sponsor, saying I would post again with more details. Here it is :)


BACKSTORY:

I launched Local SEO Community about 4 months ago, and it has grown to 1,050 members.

It's a community for discussing local SEO and Google My Business (GMB) tips and strategies.

Local SEO Community

For anyone curious, Local SEO is the practice of increasing the search visibility of brick-and-mortar businesses.

For example, a restaurant doesn't need to worry about ranking globally for the search term "food".

Rather, that restaurant just wants to show up at the top of the map search results (AKA Map Pack) when people search "food" in their area.



How the sponsorship came to be:

The sponsor is a company called GMB Gorilla (it's a public community, so the sponsorship is public). They offer Google My Business management services, so they are a pretty natural fit.

I originally reached out to GMB Gorilla asking if they would like to be added to the "Members-Only Discounts" section on Local SEO Community, where community members can get exclusive deals on local SEO related tools and services.

They agreed to add a discount for community members.

But then after, they asked if there were any other promotional opportunities:

image

I then explained to them what a sponsor would get (more on that below), and asked what they would be willing to pay for it.

They offered a 3-month deal, at a 3-figure ($XXX) monthly total right off the bat, so I accepted the deal without negotiating. I probably could have gotten $50-$100 more per month if I wanted to play hardball, but I thought it was a pretty fair offer, so I accepted.


What the sponsorship gets:

I want to be very careful and intentional about keeping the community health as my main focus, and not ruining the community by putting ads everywhere.

So the sponsor gets featured at the top of the weekly newsletter (highlights the top posts from the community), which gets emailed out to all community members.

They also get a spot in the "Sponsor" section of Local SEO Community

Local SEO Community

I want them to get ROI on their sponsorship, but I also want to make sure it is not too in-your-face.


What's next?

Since the deal, I have been approached by 2 other companies about potentially sponsoring Local SEO Community, which is pretty cool 😎

No dollar amounts have been mentioned, but ideally the sponsorship deals grow as the community grows. I also want to be very intentional about only working with companies that are a good fit as sponsors.

For now, my main focus will be making sure the community stays high quality. Once we get closer to the end of the 3 month deal with GMB Gorilla, I will take a look at the number of members and engagement rates to determine what the next steps might be for potential sponsors.

  1. 3

    Great post! What did your original cold email for the members-only discount to GMB Gorilla say? I do cold emails and I'm trying to learn what works. Did you reach out to any other companies?

    1. 3

      Here is the original email I sent:

      Hey GMB Gorilla team, I run Local SEO Community (www.localseocommunity.com), a community for discussing local SEO and GMB tips and strategies.

      We launched 3 months ago and already have 860 members.

      We're offering members of Local SEO Community discounts on a few different local SEO tools (you can see them in the "Members-only Discounts" section).

      Would GMB Gorilla be interested in offering any discount to members of the community?

      Hoping for a win-win scenario: Members have additional incentive to join the community, GMB Gorilla gets more branding and clicks from members of the community :)

      -Davis

      Yep, sent the same thing to a few other companies with success :)

      1. 1

        Out of curiosity, what did you build your community in? Are you using one of the community builder platforms out there or did you code it yourself?

    2. 1

      What kind of cold emails are you sending?

      1. 1

        I've been conducting interviews with newsletter creators to learn more about their day to day. So I send out Cold emails asking to schedule a 20 minute phone call. I've sent out about 100 emails, and have about a 30% conversion rate for a phone call.

        1. 1

          I'm no expert, but that seems like a pretty good rate to me!

          What's the reason behind it? Building a newsletter product?

          1. 1

            Yeah, right now I have two products I'm working on CrowdMagnet and CrowdWork (https://getcrowdmagnet.com and https://getcrowdwork.com)

            But I may go in other directions, I've found a lot of Newsletter creators also want to build communities around their newsletters

            1. 1

              Both seem like cool ideas 😎

  2. 2

    Congrats, that is great!

  3. 1

    Thank you for sharing.

  4. 1

    I've been thinking of starting my own community and how it could be leveraged for revenue in the long term. I hadn't thought of sponsorships as a potential option, so this is very inspiring! Great work :)

    1. 1

      Thanks Catrin, glad it was helpful!

  5. 1

    Great news! Are you monetizing the member only discounts through affiliate commissions? I believe that should be a good way to monetize (Or keep the community free)

    1. 1

      Thanks :)

      I am not. A lot of the tools don't have formal affiliate programs, so it would be pretty time-consuming to try to get implemented with each tool.

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