How to Start an Advertising Co-op

Interested in advertising your business but don’t have the funds to do so? Discover how an advertising co-op can help you achieve both your advertising goals and bring you new clients. Starting a co-op is really easy. Get an idea of the simple steps and some starter ideas for ads.

How to Start an Advertising Co-op

First, you need to decide where you would like to advertise. It can be online or offline - you will just need to keep a record of where you’re advertising if you are doing so in more than one place.  Once you’ve decided where you want to advertise you will need to request a media kit so you know what the ad requirements are: sizing, amounts of characters allowed, pricing, etc. After you’ve reviewed the information you need to put together an ad. And lastly, you need to decide how many people you would like to include in your advertising efforts and figure out pricing for each.

For instance, let’s say an ad costs $100, and you are going to have 4 people go in with you to help you pay for the ad. This is a co-op. You would put together a brief email with the details of the co-op. Then, you would want to forward the email to your enroller and your teammates the information about the co-op; ask him or her if they’ll send it out to a bunch of your other business partners or teammates.

A sample of what you can can say is:

I will be organizing an advertising co-op and am in need of filling a few rotating advertising slots. This will be a banner ad on babies.com. It will be up for 1 month. The site gets 30,000 unique pageviews each day. Upon completed payment for your ad slot I will need a copy of the url you would like your lead forwarded to. I will then insert your url into an ad rotator. There are 5 slots at $20 each. I cannot guarantee the success of or give an idea as to what to expect from the campaign as this is the first time that I will be advertising with them. (please note those are made up numbers for example purposes)

If you have any questions at all, please contact me at — [insert contact info]. Ad slots will be reserved on a first come first serve basis. Once you’ve let me know you would like to reserve a slot I will contact you with payment info. Slots will be reserved in the order that payment is received. If you would like to purchase more than one ad slot, please note that upon contact.

The teammates that are interested will email you. Keep track of the names and email addresses of those that want to take part. You can do this for free with Google Docs. These people need to send you their payment - and keep track of the ones that do. Do not send leads to people that don’t pay you. The easiest way to send and receive money online is through Paypal or Revolution Money Exchange. You can set up your own account with both for free.