Sponsorships take time but they don't need to - insights from 100+ publishers

Listen up: I spoke to 100+ publishers. Some of them struggle to get sponsorships, but most of them struggle to actually manage them.

That's how the successful ones solved the sponsorship management problem:

• hire: delegate all the AdOps-related tasks to a dedicated person
• automate: break down your sponsorship flow steps and introduce tooling where you see fit.

Hiring is needed to get work out of your way, your newsletter quality always comes first. No quality = no subscribers = no sponsorships.

When going for automation, don't reinvent the wheel and use a sponsorship management tool like Sponsy (https://www.getsponsy.com/).
Creating a custom automated workflow on your own is also fine, I honestly love the work done at Dense Discovery (https://www.densediscovery.com/notes/DIY-ad-booking-system/). Kai, the founder, made an amazing setup from the advertisement page to the booking (payment included!). The issue I find with that is when you expand your publications (an extra newsletter or podcast is common) it may not fit well anymore. Also onboarding one or more people later may be challenging.