The process of engaging with a website or blog as you are building your network will require a lot of upfront work. The majority of this effort really focuses on understanding the marketplace, what sites are in the market, and where there is a real opportunity for a vertical ad network to exist and be very profitable. Spending time up front on analysis and reading the market will ensure long term success, while also providing immeasurable leverage when working on building your business with potential partner publishers.
The measurement of an opportunity usually is driven from a detailed supply and demand analysis within a specific category, niche, vertical, etc… Calculating supply and demand investigates measures that include, but are not limited to: number of sites, curve of the visitor behavior within the category, reach into the target audience or share of category voice, scale and size of advertisers, and overall fragmentation of the market.
The goal of selecting an effective vertical network is to build a niche market that is considered a marketing requirement or tier one budget choice for advertisers focused within the category. For example, building a vertical network of high quality blogs and websites in the online music and video category would be considered a primary marketing solution for Apple and iTunes and would be locked into their marketing budget year after year.
Beyond looking at the direct target advertisers as a measure of potential success, you should continue to add metrics that drive towards the sweet spot for your network. This is identified by isolating the niches where there is enough scale in national brands playing within the given category, to ensure the niche is big enough.
The best way to measure this is by looking at the types of visitors to these content sites, and really understanding what types of advertisers (non-endemic) are focused on these demographics/cognographics in their brand marketing. For example, the digital music network you built has a high concentration of university students, thus national credit card brands are very interested in reaching this audience with a very well targeted message.
Beyond understanding the types and scale of advertisers in the given space, it is also important to attempt to understand the level of fragmentation of the given category. Measurement of the total size of the market in this category; the total number of sites in your category and niches; and calculating the cross over (duplicated reach) of the market across the sites in the network.
Each of these strategies will be analyzed in much more detail in a future analysis, but once you have a good grasp into the market you will focus on, it is critical to map out the market at a very detailed and tactical level. Understanding each of the sites that are contributors to the category, the size and reach of these sites, the engagement of their visitors, and the overlap of users across the different sites in the category online gives you a roadmap to recruitment success.
To understand the vertical and potential value of this network at an even more granular level will also ensure you are focused on the right recruitment strategy. The knowledge of your marketplace, and the players in this space, will give you a huge advantage when building the network. Knowing how important any given site is to the success of your network, based on the many achievement metrics, will give you the upper hand in all negotiations with these potential partners.
Your recruitment strategy for the bigger and/or more important sites to the success of your network will be direct and personal. You will engage via phone, direct mail, and even traveling to meetings with your anchor partners. The only way to really know who to focus on will be through a comprehensive market analysis.
Too many times people get caught up in chasing their tails and just trying to sign-up anyone they can or spending too much time and money on really small sites or sites that have so much overlap there is not any incremental reach. This is a waste of time and money, and with the right planning you will never run into this situation.
The smaller sites, or less important to your success, will be recruited via less costly tactics. As the sites become less and less critical to your ownership of the market and the ability to lock in share of category voice, the less you will engage with these sites directly. Many of the smaller tail sites, under 20-30K visitors per month will join via your online network application. 
Finally, when you do engage with the sites that are interested in joining your network, there are a few steps that are very important to follow. Though the steps are usually the same regardless of the importance of the site to your success, the approach or components of the process will change. For example, for more important sites you might have multiple terms and conditions that you can offer depending on their needs and requirements to partner with you.
Once you have actually started to recruit sits, the first step is the initial pitch or discussion with the potential partner. For the top tier sites you will meet with them in person or on the phone and have a business discussion on how to work together. Depending on the size of these players and how much leverage they have, you may have to negotiate more favorable terms, such as content deals, higher rev-shares, or even guaranteed revenue.
The discussions between you as the network operator/brand and the potential partner will usually end up with them either joining the network or not joining. There are cases where a site or blog will not join under your terms and will want to trial the relationship for a shorter time period or even with no legal commitment. These situations will be rarer, but you should be prepared for them.
When you have the publisher interested in joining, you have them sign-off on the network contract. This contract can be a formal paper contract or as simple as an online set of terms and conditions. This is a formal relationship between you and your network partner, and in many cases this is a tremendous asset to your business. Locking in many sites for long term agreements has been the primary measurement source of value for many of the vertical ad networks in the past.
The most important part of the recruitment process is owning and managing the establishment of terms with your partners. The more you are able to lock in, the better. Other considerations you may look for are highlighted in this post of terms and conditions.
Once you have established terms with your network members, you can point them to your system to set-up their ad tags and site details. Providing support throughout this process is important and as the first few ad campaigns are pushed out on the network.
Overall, the contact between you and your partner sites is what makes this a valuable asset. Spend the time to ensure it is done right and own it from discussion to actual set-up and selling.












