Tapping existing audiences is all about leveraging someone else's influence over a warm audience to get exposure to your brand.

The goal is to target highly relevant resources that you can either sponsor at a reasonable cost, or form organic partnerships with.

Here are the steps:

1. Determine your budget
2. Generate list of potential resources
3. Reach out via email to gather information
4. Negotiate
5. Run the campaign

Ultimately, we’re going to create a spreadsheet that looks like this. (Note: numbers, placements, and demographics are fake.)

Phase 1: Determine your budget

If you have a budget, how much can you afford to spend? (Worst-case scenario: you sponsor something and no one buys from it).

You can get away with spending as little as $1,000 total if you’re strapped for cash, but your results won’t be quite as reliable. Regardless…

Write your budget down.

If you have no money and can’t afford anything, that’s fine. Stick to organic partnerships and focus on resources that share your target audience, and ideally, get quality engagement.

Phase 2: Generate a list of resources

Brainstorm a list of all the different places your ideal customers spend their time online and in the real world. Use your market and competitor research as a starting point and expand from there.

Remember, you want to choose relevant resources that share your same audience—people who may actually buy from you.

Phase 2a: Make the spreadsheet

Make a copy of this template.

Read through the rest of this phase to get a sense of what you’re doing, then come back to phase 2b.

Phase 2b: Outsource the research (optional)

Generating this list is going to be time-consuming. If you have $200-300 to spend, you’ll want to hire a Virtual Assistant (a “VA”) through a site like Upwork to do the research for you. Make sure to choose the Web Research category.

Check out Tapping Existing Audiences– Additional Resources > Template: VA Email for a template of the instructions you can send to the VA.

Work off of those. Tailor them to the specific person or company you’re reaching out to — poke around their site and do some research.

You’ll still want to research a few of the initial resources yourself so you know what to tell the VA.

The “Cost”, “Cost Per Thousand Impressions,” “Placement Type,” and “Open to pay for performance?” columns may stay empty once they’re done. That’s fine — we’ll fill them in later.

Phase 2c: Do the work

Fill in the first four columns with at least 50 resources that you could reach out to sponsor or partner with.

Only look for resources that have enough volume to make it worth reaching out; a rule of thumb is that you should be able to reach at least 5,000 people.

Need directions? Good news. They’re the same as what you’d give the VA. You can find this in Additional Resources > Template: VA Email.

If you have trouble finding email addresses, reference our section on cold emailing.

Bonus: for direct sponsorship opportunities, there are sites that aggregate resources and save you time. Here are a few:

• Commission Junction
• Paved
• Coopertize
• Tribe
• Captiv8

If you Google "sponsored content marketplace," you can find more.

Phase 3: Pick your first batch

Pick 10 initial resources to reach out to. This will be your test batch. Don’t reach out to them yet!

Pick a bunch of different estimated reaches — some with larger audiences and some with smaller ones. By taking a larger sample, you’ll get a sense of what sponsorship costs, and you’ll occasionally find incredible deals.

Add an extra column to the spreadsheet called “Emailed?” to keep track of who you’ve emailed

Phase 4: Draft email copy

Phase 4a: Create new email account

Make a separate email account from your main one on your company’s domain. For example, if your usual email is morrisjohnson@company.com, make a new email for morrisj@company.com.

This will:

• Keep your real inbox from getting flooded with emails you don’t want to respond to
• Let another member of your team respond to emails if you don’t have the time. Without giving up your personal password.

Phase 4b: Figure out what you can offer

If you have a budget, this will likely be cash.

If you don’t have a budget, you’ll offer one of these things:

• Your product. For free. Ask for a review.
• A discount for their subscribers.
• A joint webinar where you can share your audiences. (They access yours, you access theirs.)
• A free article on a relevant topic that you write yourself. Write it before you reach out through email. This is how journalists make a name for themselves.
• Yourself, your stories, and remarkable things you can say about your product. This will help you get interviewed on podcasts that want to entertain their listeners.

In short: without a budget, you want to offer anything that helps them grow.

Phase 4c: Craft initial emails

Why does cold outreach usually fail?

• Your intended recipient never reads your message. You contact the wrong person or your message lands in the spam or junk folder. Or, your recipient ignores your message.
• Your message isn’t compelling. It doesn’t make a strong case for why your content matters.
• Your message isn’t personalized. It uses generic template language.

There’s a strategy here.

Unless there’s a rigid process on the company’s website, you want your first email to be light and high-level. We’ll be asking for more details in the followup.

Check out Tapping Existing Audiences– Additional Resources > Template: Initial Email for a few examples of emails we've sent in the past. Work off of those. Tailor them to the specific person or company you’re reaching out to — poke around their site and do some research.

Phase 5: Send

Send out the cold emails from your alternate email account!

Set a reminder to check back on them in two or three days.

Phase 6: Followup and negotiation

Phase 6a: Get details

Once you get email responses back, you’ll want to start figuring out details and filling in the rest of the spreadsheet.

If they respond with options for multiple types of placements (e.g., a sponsored article vs. a real ad on the site, vs. an email they blast out), add an extra line in the spreadsheet for each one.

Here are some questions you’ll definitely want to ask as followup:

• What's the reach? (How many people will view the ad/listen to the podcast/read the article?)
• How does your audience break down? What are the rough demographics?
• Are you open to performance-based arrangements? For example, if we gave you a referral link and paid you for each purchase that comes from you?

This is something you’ll always want to ask for, since it means you never waste money and only pay for what’s profitable.

• This is what goes in the “Open to pay for performance?” column.
• What's the CPC? (Cost per click?)
• What's the CPM? (Cost per thousand people who view it? — ask about a pay-per-click or pay-per-purchase arrangement.)
• Do you mind sharing an example of one of your best performing sponsored posts? That way we know what resonates with your audience.
• What does the process for submitting copy, creatives, etc., look like?

Here’s a template:

Hi _____,Thanks for all this information! Before we hop on a call, I had a few more questions: XYZ.

-#{Your Name}

Deflect from getting on calls. Keep conversations to email. You don’t want to be burdened with phone conversations unless they’re super important and you need to build trust.

As you get answers to your questions, update the “Estimated Reach” and “Cost” columns on your spreadsheet.

Phase 6b: Determine cost (if applicable)

Once you have a sense of the cost, ask if they’re flexible on price. (Nicely.)

You can literally say: “We’re on a limited budget — how flexible are you on price?”

You can often get discounts, especially if they don’t get approached for sponsorship very often.

Once you have a definite cost, make sure to add in the cost of creating the ad, shipping a product, or writing an article. For example, making a design is more expensive than just having text at the top of a newsletter.

Add that cost to the “Cost” column of the spreadsheet.

Let them know that you have a limited budget and are choosing between a few different sponsors, so ask if you can circle back with them in a week or two.

Phase 7: Pick your next batches

Run steps 3 through 6 for more and more resources.

Phase 8: Pick Winners

Pick the ones that you expect to convert best at the lowest cost, within your budget.

Pick at least three resources with audiences that are as different as possible. We want to take big swings and scale up what works.

Then: Make the promo! Write the article! Do the interview! It’s go time.