Hi all:

This week I added a new “ToddTip” to the Playbook that is part of my coaching bag of tricks, especially when talking to a publisher about advertising and/or sponsorship revenue.

I call it “The Sticky on the Wall.”

ToddTip: The Sticky on the Wall

I encourage publishers to consider their revenue in terms of what you need to bring in weekly and monthly. To make $240,000 next year, you plan for $20,000 monthly. Since there are 52 weeks per year, that's $4,600 per week.

How do you get to $4,600? Ideally, you start with a baseline. That's your recurring revenue from VIP donors, monthly subscribers, or advertisers you have on contract. (If you offer agency services and that's part of your regular revenue, that also goes here.)

Let's say you can count on getting $2,000 each week in recurring revenue. That's $2,600 per week you've got to generate in advertising and sponsorship sales. How do you do that?

One of my coaching suggestions is what I cleverly call "The Sticky on the Wall."

At the JFP, we regularly got one of those wall-sized sticky notes and wrote the issue date (of our weekly publication) at the top, along with a monetary goal.

We then stuck it up on the wall and started listing the clients we would contact. Next to each, we put an educated guess of the dollar amount of advertising we could sell them. It served to do two things — it visually showed that we had a set of prospects that would help us meet our goal, and it reminded us who they were so we could gauge whether we were succeeding.

If someone said no, we struck them from the list. If they said yes, we wrote in the actual dollar amount and substracted it from the goal.

Two other hints here -- you'll probably want more than one week's goal on the sticky at a time, and you'll probably never hit your goal if you don't start working on it about a month in advance. Always plan ahead and reach out to clients weeks before you think their ads will run.

Here’s a link to the rest of this card in the Digital Revenue Playbook if you’d like to see the sample “sticky” I create and walk through.