420 Sponsor Orientation

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420

Founder
Welcome to 420 Magazine and thank you for supporting our mission.

We want all our valued sponsors to get the very best from their time here. Sponsors who achieve the highest return on their investment are those who interact with our community. So we put this document together to help you navigate through our platform and utilize everything you paid for.

Artwork Briefing
We will feature your brand on our homepage, this image should contain only your company logo and one or more of your best products. Please do not add any text, slogans, urls or ad talk making it look like an advertisement. It should be simple, classy and tasteful to be prominently featured at the top of the 420Magazine.com homepage.

Homepage Intro Image: 972x480 pixels under 100k in file size in .webp format.
Leaderboard Banners: 728x90 pixels under 100k in file size and in .webp format.

If you need help creating banners or images, we're happy to introduce you to our designer, after payment for your ad campaign has been received. He only charges $40 per image, and you can pay him directly.

Registering Your Sponsor Profile
Please register an account, naming it after your business for optimal brand recognition. It's a simple way to start building awareness with our members and guests. Please use your company or brand logo as your avatar, and don't forget to also add a brand image as your profile cover photo. Let me know when this has been done, so we can upgrade your account to "420 Sponsor". This gives you access to post in our dedicated Sponsor Forum, where you post weekly sales, specials & discounts. You'll know when your profile has been approved and upgraded, when you see "420 Sponsor" under your username.

Take a look around the site and get yourself familiarized, before making any posts.

You can change your password and email address anytime via your account details, also accessible by clicking your username at the top of each page.

Introduction
In order to get the best from your sponsorship, we strongly recommend that you start a thread in the Sponsors Forum, even if only initially to introduce your brand to our community.

Take a look at some of the other threads posted by the other sponsors to get ideas on what to post. Most just post a thread entitled something like, "XYZ Corp's LED Light Discussion Thread" or "ABC Nutrients' Support & Discussion Thread". Include your company name and industry category to be specific and start it off with a brief hello with an introduction to your company, what you all are about and what products and/or services you are offering to our members. Then follow it up with a request for members to ask questions about you and your industry category and offerings.

This thread will be used to generate comments, welcomes, subscribers and followers for many years to come. Bumping the thread once a day or once a week are a great way to remind everyone about you and keep you in their eyes and minds at all times. Offering a discount for using code "420MAGAZINE" at checkout is also a great way to gain attention, build credibility and increase ROI.

You can offer discounts, post specials and announce new products up to once per week in the Sponsors Forum, so please make sure to maximize your ROI by taking advantage of this amazing opportunity. Engaging with the members increases attention and builds credibility and their trust in your and your offerings.

When you've done this, we will give you additional exposure by featuring your thread in our Notice appearing on the very top of every page on our website, which will drive additional exposure, traffic and awareness.

Forum Guidelines
The next step is to familiarize yourself with our guidelines, which are designed to keep 420 Magazine free from all kinds of negative energy. As the oldest and most respected Cannabis community on the web, we provide a mature environment in which to showcase brands’ products and services. Our professional and global moderation team work around the clock, ensuring that the website is kept clear of spammers, spambots, minors, trolls, aggressive arguments and non-sponsors so that, unlike on competitive sites, your brand is never lost or tainted. We ask both our members and our sponsors to follow these guidelines to minimize problems and maximize the professional quality of the website and our mission, for everyone's benefit.

Posting Guidelines are designed for our members, however they also apply to all of our sponsors.

Sponsor Guidelines are just that, containing more detailed information for our advertising partners. The Sponsor Guidelines also contain specific information for the LED market sector, which has given us the greatest problems with both non-sponsor and sponsor spammers, flaming and trolling. We have sadly had to restrict the posting privileges of some LED sponsors in the past and even had to part company with a few of them. We put the integrity of our mission above everything and strive to treat both members and sponsors even-handedly.

In our Guidelines FAQs you will find even more detailed explanations of our policies.

Photos & Images
Please upload all photos of your products and logos to your Members Gallery and refer to our Photo Gallery Guide for support.

Things work a little different in forums that on social networking like Facebook and Instagram. In order to provide a strong site to bring you traffic and sales, we have to manage very carefully the content being posted so that it helps, and not hurts us.

Labeling your gallery photos with titles, tags and descriptions helps both of us in regards to SEO. Even naming the filename as descriptive of what it is, helps to get them indexed for us both. All of these things will help you here and elsewhere in the search engines, but without it it's all worthless.

Attachments are easy to post, but they're terrible for SEO. They also do not work in PMs, however gallery photos do.

Sponsor Posting
Once you've read these guidelines, you are ready to start posting in our message forums. We have a dedicated Sponsors Forum for tastefully promoting specials, discounts and contests. These get extra visibility on the forum home page side navigation. In the past, some sponsors have posted one or two new threads a day. This is not only unfair to other sponsors, but also looks like spam. We therefore ask all our sponsors to post no more than one thread per week in the Sponsors Forum. Within your threads, you may make as many posts as you wish. You can bump it daily with new photos and/or updates about your brand, or questions to the community about your products.

You can be as creative as you wish in the Sponsors Forum, within guidelines of course. You may want to begin by offering a discount code for 420 members, seeking members for sponsored grow journals or offering monthly competitions here on our platform. This is also where you can promote your monthly, holiday and 4/20 specials.

We suggest using code #420MAGAZINE to keep it exclusive to us and easy to remember.

Please note that links in contests and promotions directing our members to other websites and/or social media are prohibited. Please only direct our members to either your product website specifically or a promotional thread here on our own platform.

We highly suggest you create a discussion thread in the Sponsors Forum so our members can engage in questions and answers about your products and services. This can be particularly valuable, not only to announce and launch new products and services, but also to create a dialogue with our members. Good sponsor threads are full of solid information, product announcements and supportive member interaction. Any activity like this will drive members and guests to your website - please remember to put your linked website url in your signature. We attract a more mature and sophisticated member demographic than other sites, members who welcome the positive environment that we actively foster. These mature adults usually have a higher disposable income and are always looking for new tools and techniques to support their work.

Once a brand wins a member's trust, sponsors benefit from the most persuasive form of advertising, word of mouth. A number of our sponsors are particularly skilled at this, and have created huge, long-term threads where members discuss and demonstrate their products and/or services. This in turn leads to thousands of member-to-member generated recommendations, while tens if not hundreds of thousands of followers are watching. In order to achieve maximum results, we highly recommend having an active on-site representative. Past experience shows that this kind of intelligent, continuing dialogue, delivers your return on investment tenfold.

If you are considering or developing a new product or service, please remember that you are welcome to ask our members for their input. Given the mature nature of our membership, this can be an invaluable, pre-launch tool.

We highly suggest utilizing a native English speaking representative for posting in the forums. History shows that poor English and grammar skills, are often treated with scrutiny and skepticism. Your representative should write in a positive attitude and helpful demeanor, which will help your bottom line.

The web is primarily a visually-led medium and our members love 420 related photographs & videos, so posting pictures of your products and/or plants grown with your products, is another great way to share your information and build interactions.

Here are some other forums you can post up to one article per day about a specific product.

Grow Lighting: Share expanded details about your panels featuring one grow light per article
Seeds, Strains & Clones: Post your genetics in highlighted articles about one strain at a time
Pest & Disease Control: Create one article per day about a specific targeted product
420 Glass: Post photos and descriptions of your glass pipes, bongs & dab rigs, one piece at a time

You may also tastefully engage in current threads that are dedicated to or mention a product or solution you have available. Make your best judgements and try your best to only chime in when it's appropriate. The goal is never to come across as spammy, so please make sure you're being mindful of that. Your interactions can both help or hurt your bottom line.

Blogs
In addition to the Sponsors Forum, our blogs function is also a great place to post. You can use blogs for product information, reference material, brand stories - there are dozens of uses. How To Create A Blog & Blog Entries

Grow Journals
Some sponsors have made the mistake of posting uninvited in member grow journals, often simply posting a meaningless "Well Done!" and/or smilies. This is called "fluff posting" and is often unappreciated by the members. This can harm your reputation because they see it as spamming, therefore is also prohibited in our sponsor guidelines. Sponsors who post well in the wider community have built trust and credibility over time, so please make sure that all threads you post in are current and addressing the exact topic at hand, with in depth information. Fluff posting can result in being restricted to posting in your own threads. Further attempts can lead to loss of posting privileges altogether.

Off-Site Links: Sponsored Contests, Journals & Reviews
When it comes to contests and reviews of your products, we ask that you please do not request our members to post for a contest on any other social networking websites but our own. We know of course that it's an inter-connected world, and we don't want to be the last man in the jungle still thinking there's a war going on. However, we have a business to protect. When we relaxed this sponsor contest guideline over the last few years, we lost thousands of members to other social networking websites, to the detriment of all our sponsors and therefore our business. This is all in our legal sponsorship agreement that you signed.

When our members enter a contest via these other websites they get pulled away from 420 Magazine. Sponsors lose click-throughs: as a consequence everyone loses income, which derails our purpose, vision and mission. Our members and readers create accounts at these websites just for the contest, then get a bunch of likes and friend requests from the contests, then they get lost in the amazing world that Facebook & Instagram have created with billions of dollars. We simply cannot compete with that, therefore we keep our members and sponsors all in house. Many sponsors successfully run dedicated 420 Magazine contests, please feel free to check the sponsor forum for ideas and let me know if you have any questions.

Contests
420 Magazine contests are very popular, we highly recommend getting involved in sponsoring some, if not all of them. This is the fastest way to gain member attention, gratitude and respect, with optimal exposure. Each month we host the Plant, Nug & Member of the Month, Grow Journal of the Month and Photo of the Month contests. Each of these also has an annual contest, where sponsors often donate more than they do for monthly contests. All contests are voted by the members, except for the Photo and Grow Journal of the Month contests, which are voted for by the 420 Magazine staff. Winning members often post pictures and write about their prizes. It's another great way of generating awareness and merchandising your products, resulting in more sales.

Please contact renee@420magazine.com or let me know if you would like to get involved.

Complaints About Sponsors
We work hard not only at protecting our sponsors - without whom 420 Magazine would not exist - but also at representing our members. If there is a complaint against a sponsor, then we recommend the member's first course of action should be to contact the sponsor directly. If complaints are posted on site, are expressed with reason and rationale and do not in any other way contravene our Guidelines, (for example, no name-calling, immature language or multiple posts), then we will contact the sponsor in question and invite them to post in the thread. Inappropriate posts which are clearly 'sponsor bashing' will be deleted.

The smartest sponsors deal clearly and directly with such complaints, if necessary moderated by ourselves; the result invariably turns a problem into a positive outcome. Members understand that mistakes can happen in business and not only forgive but credit sponsors for a problem well-handled.

Social Networking Platforms
We’ve worked very hard over the last thirty years building this platform for the cannabis industry. Please do not ask our members to join other social networking platforms to create reviews or journals away from 420Magazine.com. This hurts us and you as well, by diluting our pool of growers to get lost on other sites.

We respectfully ask that you do not request, discuss or promote any other social networking platform to our members or staff. Doing so would violate our Sponsor Guidelines, Sponsorship Agreement & Forum Guidelines. Violations in this area can result in termination of our agreements.

Sometimes sponsors direct our members to their social media, (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, blogs etc) and ask them to promote their products outside of 420 Magazine. This is against our Sponsor Guidelines, Sponsorship Agreement and Forum Guidelines.

Unfortunately we cannot compete with billion dollar budgets like Instagram, so we have to be smart and creative in how we retain our members. We work very hard to keep our growers here: sending them to other sites to get lost hurts both 420 Magazine and all our sponsors in the long run, if they never come back.

We ask that you please:

1. Keep all contests and special offers restricted to 420Magazine.com
2. Not ask our members for their social networking channels
3. Not ask our members to promote you anywhere but on 420Magazine.com

All member photos uploaded to our website give us ownership rights to use them for whatever we want. If you want to use a photo on other social networking platforms like Instagram & Facebook, that our member uploaded on our website using your product, you don't need to tag the member specifically. Just tag @420Magazine and hashtag #420magazine with the member's name, and ask followers to visit 420Magazine.com to see more of their grow journals, etc.

Posting these images on other social networking platforms is fine. However, we ask that you please not post our photos on other cannabis forums, because it hurts our SEO by diluting our traffic to those forums when searching for 420 Magazine.

We are always mindful of proper ethics and sourcing, however the last thing we want to do is jeopardize our member's security by exposing them outside of 420Magazine.com. Promoting our members on other social networking sites builds their identity elsewhere, historically causing them to leave us and never return. With that said, we feel this is the best overall solution to achieve our goal, without inconveniencing anyone.

Partnership
Our gratitude for your support is not just in words: we are always happy to work with our sponsors to iron out any problems they may have. From putting sponsors in touch with our best growers, to helping get your signature links working, we are here to help you get the most productive result from your presence here. We want all our sponsors to have a happy and profitable time on 420 Magazine, and truly hope that we have a long and positive relationship. Please don’t hesitate to email or PM me with any ideas, questions or problems.

We work hard here to keep 420 Magazine full of positive energy and free from those who seek to exploit, disturb or tarnish our community. Our team of Moderators are always busy enforcing our guidelines, so please help us and yourselves by adhering to them.

Please feel free to contact me at anytime for questions.

Thank you for your support, we are truly grateful.

Source: 420 Sponsor Orientation
 
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