Event sponsorship for Eroticon: how we can help (and how we can’t!)

Coming to a live event like Eroticon is a great way to network and boost your reach – you meet a tonne of other writers, can cross-promote your work, and also get tips and advice on how to make money from your writing.

There’s also the opportunity to work with companies on your event attendance – getting support to cover travel or ticket cost, in exchange for blog posts, links, social media, etc. If you’re interested in this, we have a longer guide covering event sponsorship and commissions if you’d like some specific tips.

Eroticon sponsorship

If you don’t already have companies you work with who’d like to sponsor you to attend Eroticon, we may be able to give you a helping hand. Our primary focus throughout the year has to be getting event sponsorship itself – the companies that pay for stands, or contribute to the social events, are our headline sponsors. Their money goes towards venue costs, catering, making goody bags etc etc, and all the things that help us actually put Eroticon on. These are the ones we work extremely closely with, and dedicate most of our time to, because without them the event just wouldn’t happen.

But there are other companies who either can’t afford to be a full sponsor or who would rather work one-on-one with a blogger or writer, and they occasionally ask us to recommend people who might be suitable. Last year, we recommended some fab bloggers to them, but these recommendations were based on a combination of people putting forward their own names, and us approaching people we/the company thought might be suitable.

It’s great, because it helps people establish relationships, but it’s not as transparent as we’d like and it takes a huge amount of time for us. As we’re running Eroticon in our spare time, individually matching bloggers and companies is a big stretch. So this year we wanted to come up with a more transparent system which would be easy for writers, companies, and us as well.

Blogger sponsorship matching

If you’d like to be matched with a company, you can now put your name and a pitch forward for sponsorship. Fill out the form with your information, and we will collate the pitches and send them to companies when they approach us about individual sponsorship. There’s space for things like your blog url and traffic, as well as a longer space for a pitch. Feel free to leave blank any form elements you aren’t comfortable with, but I can’t stress enough how important it is to fill in the pitch section. This is where you explain what you can offer to a company that might support you – tell them why you’re amazing, and why you’d be a great choice for them to sponsor.

What this is: an opportunity for you to put your name forward, and show yourself off.

What this isn’t: a guarantee of any kind that you will get sponsorship. Think of it as a resource, not an agency. We do lots of things to try and encourage companies to sponsor individuals (I’ve written articles for places like ETO, and bigged it up on my blog and on Twitter, all that stuff), but when it comes to a return on our time, it’s so much better for us to do broad outreach to companies and then step aside to give you the space to sell yourself. We will never sell your work as well as you do, because we can never know all the intricate details of what makes you so amazing. What we can do, though, is give you a platform for your pitch and make sure everyone has access to that same platform.

If you want to get sponsorship for an event, it isn’t just a question of asking, it does involve a lot of work. Personally, I always prefer to pay for my event tickets by pitching articles about the events and then writing up whatever has been commissioned (some tips here), because it is so much easier than gathering sponsorship, but obviously your mileage may vary and you may prefer the sponsorship route. What I can tell you is that if you come to Eroticon there will always be plenty of sessions that discuss monetising your work, and every single year I have gone home with advice or contacts that have paid for the cost of my ticket many times over.

FAQs about event sponsorship

Can everyone get event sponsorship?

In theory: yes. In practice: no. There are few companies that have the budget to sponsor people and – especially if you’re coming from overseas – it is very unlikely that you’ll be able to get all of your costs paid for. That’s not to say it’s impossible, but you will need to offer a lot to the company to make sure they get a great return on their investment in you.

If you fill out your details in the database, we can promise that we will include yours in a spreadsheet that we’ll send to any company who asks about this. We can’t promise that they’ll decide to sponsor a blogger, or that if they do they’ll choose you. You can maximise your chances with a really good pitch.

Who will see my pitch?

The Eroticon team (that’s me, @GirlontheNet, @mollysdailykiss and @Domsigns) as well as any companies that ask us for writers to sponsor. We won’t publish this information anywhere, and will stress to companies that they shouldn’t share your pitches more widely.

But I don’t get much traffic/have many Twitter followers! How can I get sponsorship?

The boring truth is that it is much harder to get sponsorship if you’re relatively new and your blog has low traffic. You’re less likely to be sponsored by a company, because they are usually measuring things in terms of how much reach they can get and how many products they can sell off the back of your relationship with them.

Have a think about what you might be able to offer, if your web traffic is fairly low: if you don’t get many visits per month, could you offer them a long-term advertising deal to make up lots more visits? Do you have any other blogger friends who’d be willing to give them ad space/a link if they supported you? Could you offer amazing guest content for their site, or pitch an Eroticon-focused article to another publication with high traffic that includes a link to your sponsor? There are lots of creative options.

What if I want to arrange sponsorship separately?

Go for it! If you absolutely need a sponsor in order to attend Eroticon, we’d strongly advise you try and arrange it yourself first. If you have a company you’re already working with, or any other you particularly love, and you think they might be able to help you out with ticket cost, please do talk to them/pitch them directly. Our aim with the database is to make it easy for great writers to put their names forward, even if they don’t personally have contacts with lots of companies. But we don’t want to be a barrier to your own work – if you have contacts already, use them if you can!

Is there a difference between sponsorship via Eroticon and sponsorship via me?

Yes, slightly: firstly there’s a bit of work involved for us in matching people with bloggers – sending the info to relevant companies, putting people in touch, doing some basic checks to make sure that everyone involved knows what the deal is, etc. To reflect this extra work, companies which come via us are asked to buy a business ticket (slightly more expensive) for the blogger they’re sponsoring. This is to reflect the time it takes for us to match people, and the money made from this goes into the ticket pool. The companies also get a link on the delegate sponsors page to say thank you.

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