How to spot a real advertiser?

Every week or so, I get emails from potential advertisers on some of the blogs and forums that I operate. For every 10 inquiries or proposals that I get, just 1 one them pushes thru. Why? Because a whole bunch of these inquiries are sent out blindly or the proposals are outright out of whack (read: one-sided).

Other bloggers have also forwarded me emails they got for ad inquiries. I’d like to share some of the more obvious signs on how to spot a real advertiser.

One way to differentiate a real advertiser from a marketer is to scrutinize how they compose their email inquiries. Here are some items you’d easily spot.

• Generic titles. (They don’t know your name!) IF you have a visible about page and advertise page, I’m sure they would bump into your name while checking out your site or blog. Addressing you like “Dear Sir/Madam” is a dead giveaway that these people are just harvesting email addresses.
• They don’t introduce themselves properly nor their company and the products and services they want to advertise on your site.
• They don’t know what your site or blog is all about. That means they didn’t really checked out your site nor bother to know what niche you are into. How can they be that serious about advertising if they have no clue about the market?
• Commercial email accounts. Unless of course the advertiser is an individual, an email coming from a corporate domain and not Yahoo or GMail would be more credible.
• Most advertisers approach publishers with an affiliate-campaign pitch. That means, you run their banner ads and you only get a cut whenever the ads convert. While that’s not bad either, you’ll have to check if the products or services are more in tuned with your readership. While I seldom do affiliates, my two most successful ones are TLA and Remit2Home. Beware though of some marketers who’ll bait you into this set-up just to get eyeballs and not really convert.

At first, I used to accommodate each one and answer all emails. I later drafted a standard email response and just attach my rate card and order form to send out for each inquiry I get. Those who responded back are the ones who are really interested. It gets easier with practice, actually. :D

There are also softwares that do this. The emails are properly written and address your name or the title of your site (e.g. Dear YugaTech) but the composition just doesn’t sound right. It was too cold (ever gotten cold calls from insurance companies lately?). After 3 successive emails (the next two were follow-ups), I realized the emails were automated and goes thru a system. They were pretty damn good huh?

How about you. How do you respond to ad inquiries?