← Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
Brand Deals in 2026: How to Actually Get Paid (Even Without 10K Followers) - 880
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If you want to get paid for posting on Instagram, you're in the right place. Because in today's episode, I'm going to walk you through exactly how you can get paid for posting, also known as brand deals, also known as paid partnerships, also known as sponsored posts, even if you have less than 10,000 followers. And in general, if you're someone who wants to grow on social media, build a personal brand, get more views and engagement, or build a business on Instagram or any other social media platform, make sure to hit that subscribe button, because every single week I put out a new episode walking you through exactly how to do that. But usually when we think about brand deals, paid partnerships, sponsorships, which by the way, for the rest of this episode, I'm just gonna use the term brand deals and it will refer to all of the above. When we think about these terms, usually what comes to mind first is influencers, people who have millions of followers and whose full time income is generated through sponsors, brands, corporations, paying them to post about their products. And if that's you or something that you want to get into, then today's episode will definitely be helpful for you. But I want to propose an alternative method, the method that I use or the approach that I have for, for brand deals on my own Instagram. I am a business owner first and foremost. I have built an audience of over 800,000 followers in order to grow my own personal brand and my own personal business. But what's come along with that, of course, is a lot of attention, a lot of eyeballs. I get over 15 million views every single month. And so oftentimes brands recognize that, hey, this guy's getting a lot of views, he's got a lot of followers. And so we want to get our brand, our product, our service, whatever, in front of his targeted followers. And so I've added brand deals as another stream of income to my social media. I believe I did my first official paid partnership sometime around 2020, and I've continued to do brand deals ever since because, number one, the extra stream of income is absolutely nice. I'm not going to deny it. Number two, there are a lot of great products, softwares and services out there that my audience would really benefit from knowing about. And so I can basically now get paid for recommending these things to my audience. Number three, and not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but these things are actually beneficial to my audience. I don't partner with any brands or products or softwares that I haven't personally used or benefited from or that I know that my audience couldn't benefit from themselves. And then the fourth and final reason that I'm a big fan of brand partnerships, even if you're someone who doesn't consider themselves an influencer and who really wants to build a personal brand or a business on Instagram, is that it's kind of like stealing someone else's credibility. If I partner with a major company, like, let's say, Adobe or Metricool or some major corporation, I now have have their stamp of approval. And so other brands would like to partner with me because they see that this other brand is partnered with me. And people are more likely to follow me because, hey, if Target or Sony or whoever big company that they know and that they've trusted and that they've shopped at for years partnered with me, well, then, hey, if I'm good enough for that company, I'm probably good enough for their follow as well. Now, with all of that being said, I have bad news for those of you with more than 100,000 followers, more than 500,000 followers, more than a million followers, this is arguably the worst time for you to get brand deals so far in the history of social media. And I say that not to scare you, but because, number one, the algorithms have changed. According to Adam Mozeri, follower counts matter less than view and like counts. He's talking about that from an algorithmic perspective. But also brands have started to recognize this as well. In 2016, brands only looked at and only cared about how many followers do you have? That was basically all it took to get brand deals and get paid. If you had less than 10k, less than 100k, forget about it. If you had a million followers, you were going to get paid. But now the brands have wisened up and they recognize that followers aren't everything. And so this is great news for those of you with less than 100k, less than 10k, even less than a thousand followers, you can get paid for posting on Instagram. Basically, what matters less is the quality quantity of followers you have. And what instead matters more is the quality of potential buyers that you have following you. Nowadays, most brands who are looking to sponsor people care way more about conversions than just overall reach. Cool. You can get a million views, but how many of those people are actually going to convert into customers? Similarly, brands care way more about audience trust than vanity metrics. It's awesome that you got 10,000 likes on that one post. It's awesome that you get a ton of views on every reel. But does your audience actually trust you? Are they going to buy based off your recommendations? And number three, big brands are smart. They've looked at the data and what they've learned is that people with less than 100k followers usually have a significantly higher conversion rate than people with more than 100k followers. So from a brand's perspective, they could pay Kim Kardashian a couple million dollars to post a story, or they could pay a couple thousand Nano or micro influencers who are actually going to have a significantly higher conversion rate. They might not reach as many people with that one story as K Kim K. But the people they do reach are way more likely to buy Like I said, I've been doing paid brand partnerships since 2020. I was doing unpaid, also known as gifted brand partnerships as early as 2017 and I've been on all sides of the equation. I've been on the creator side where brands are paying me. I've been on the brand side where us as the Insta ClubHub, we have paid creators. I've been on the advisor side where I've worked with brands as an independent third party to help them vet influencers and pick which creators are best to promote their brand. I've also done brand partnerships on pretty much every channel, YouTube, Instagra, Facebook, email, TikTok, all of the above. And at one point in 2024 I was even doing multiple brand deals every single week on my Instagram, which led me to my first ever six figure year in just brand deals alone. So yes, if you take it seriously, it can absolutely be a pretty substantial stream of income. But step number one out of my eight steps to getting brand deals, even if you have less than 10,000 followers, is that you need to stop positioning yourself as an influencer. Like I've already said, brands aren't looking for influencers. They aren't looking for people who post about 75 different topics and have a ginormous following. Instead, they want people who have a targeted following. They want people who have possibly less followers but whose followers all fit into one demographic or they all fit into one buyer category. So instead of considering yourself an influencer, position yourself as a content creator who focuses on one specific area. Position yourself as a niche educator, as I have someone who educates and creates informational tutorials, contents, tips and strategies about growing on Instagram. By the way, don't forget to subscribe. I know I already said it, but I'm going to say it again because I always get in trouble for not saying it enough. Position yourself as a community leader, someone who is posting inspirational or motivational content that all relates to the same topic so that people can all relate and connect over that shared experience or challenge or upcoming difficulty that they're going to have. If you need help niching down, I did an entire masterclass walking you through the steps of niching down, as well as the pros and cons of doing so, and even answering the question as to whether or not it's still necessary in 2026. Now, I think I might have spoiled my answer to that question a little bit already, but like I've already said, brands care a lot less about the quantity of followers and way more about the quality or the type of followers that you have. So step number one is to attract those targeted followers to your Instagram account by consistently posting about one topic over and over and over again. Step number two is to build what I'm going to call brand Deal readiness. And you don't have to reach a certain number of followers before starting this. Even when you have 34 followers, you can start building your deal readiness. And let me explain what I mean by that. Number one, you need to make sure that your profile is set up to create a great first impression for these brands when they are searching, reviewing and finding your account. That includes having a username that is either your personal name, your business name, or even including some keywords in your username that relate to your niche. Number two, Arguably the most important line of your entire profile is your Instagram name line. And this should not just be a repeat of your business name or your personal name. This should instead include searchable keywords so that brands can find you. When I worked with an upstate New York glamping resort to find influencers to promote them, one of the main ways that we searched for and found these influencers was by searching Upstate New York Influencer, Upstate New York Travel, New York City Travel Guide, all of these different terms and there was probably some great influencers out there who we completely missed because they didn't have these searchable keywords and phrases in their Instagram name. So definitely make sure to include these sorts of keyword SEO friendly words and phrases in your Instagram name section of your bio. Speaking of your bio, your bio should be clear and concise. It shouldn't be redundant. It shouldn't be lengthy. It shouldn't include cliches. It should clearly tell me what you're going to be posting about and whom you are trying to attract or whom you are going to be serving and helping with your Instagram account in order to make that great first impression and increase the likelihood that you actually land the brand deal. You also want to have three pinned posts on your Instagram and the first one should be kind of like a start here or an about me giving background into who you are and what people can expect from following you. The second one should be a great example of your content, not necessarily the one that's going to get the most views, but essentially you want something that is a great demonstration of the quality of content or the type of content that you really excel at making. And then the third pin post can vary. It could be an example of a past partnership, it could be an example of a post that you made to promote your own business. It could be a quick win that your followers can experience before even leaving the post. Basically something of value for that third pinned post. Additionally, in order to make a great first impression, you want to have a consistent visual style and content rhythm. What I don't mean by this is that everything has to match esthetically. I don't need every single post to have like the same pretty pink filter and pink font and cursive writing on it. But what I do want to see if I'm playing the role of the brand is somewhat of a predictable visual style or somewhat of a predictable appearance for your content. If every single post looks like a hodgepodge and it doesn't really fit together and you got like one really blurry video and then one really highly produced video and then you got one meme, then you got one screenshot, I don't know what I'm going to get if I partner with you, and I don't want to end up with one of these low quality or random off brand videos. I want to make sure that I can predict what kind of video or what kind of post I'm going to get if I partner with you. It also needs to be clear that there is a consistent intended audience for your posts. If one of your posts is a date night selfie and then another one is three tips for losing weight after your third child and then another one is about peptides and then another one is like a meal, a recipe, and then another one is like your kid on his first day of school and then another one is how to carve your pumpkins, I as the brand am not going to want to work with you because there isn't a clear audience for all of your posts. Now I do want to note that even though I said view counts matter and engagement matters, brands at least the smart brands, they don't expect that every single one of your posts has super high or even super consistent engagement. In fact, that can actually be a little bit of a red flag if they're too consistent. Like if every single one of your last 40 posts has about 1200 likes and about 13 comments as a brand, I'm going to question how has there been no variance? How have there been no outliers, no posts that have outperformed or underperformed? How are you getting almost the exact same numbers on every single post? That's usually a red flag that people are buying their likes or engagement, which of course you should not be doing. It's actually illegal in some countries to purchase views and likes and followers and then turn around and use those purchased engagement as a metric to get paid more for brand deals. So definitely do not do that. But I'd say all this to say it's okay if you have some posts that do really well and some posts that don't do well as a brand. I just want to make sure that there are some posts that are performing well. If every single one of your posts is not performing well, if every single one of your posts has super low views, super low engagement, super low likes, then I'm going to be concerned that when you post about my brand, it's not going to get very much engagement and it's not going to reach very many potential customers. Even if it converts 100% of the customers. If your post only got 17 views, that's not going to be very many customers generated from that post. So if you're watching this right now and you don't have a lot of followers, and you also don't have a lot of views, likes and engagement on any of your posts, then definitely hit subscribe and definitely go back after this episode and watch some of the past episodes that I've done about getting more views, getting more engagement, better hooks, better carousel ideas, real ideas. I post an episode every single week. So there's plenty of episodes that you could go back and binge watch about increasing your engagement on Instagram, because again, while you don't need a million followers, you gotta have something. You gotta have some engagement, some views and some followers. I do want to note the exception to this, which is something that we're not focusing on today, which is UGC or user generated content. That is a style of brand promotion or brand partnership where it doesn't matter how many followers you have, because brands are not paying for your audience's attention, they're not paying for you to post the post on your own account. They're paying for simply your creative skills. They're paying for you to make a video for them and then they're going to use it in their own ads or on their own social media. You don't have to have any followers for that. Instead, and not to go too far off on a side tangent, what you need for that is a great portfolio of great content that you've made in the past. Now, usually if you're someone who's making great content and you're posting that great content, you're going to grow your following. So it's not very common that someone makes really great videos, really great UGC content and brains would want to partner with them, but they don't ever post that content, so they don't have any followers. That's pretty rare. But if you're someone who does fit that exception, if you are someone who just, you know, you make really great videos, but maybe you don't post them on your own Instagram because you're scared to, maybe you don't post them online because you know, you have family and friends and you're worried about what they're going to say. Or maybe you do post them online, but you just haven't popped off yet. You haven't really grown yet. Then you could consider UGC as an alternative to brand deals. But enough about that UGC sidebar. Let's get back into the steps. Step number three for getting paid for posting even with less than 10,000 followers is that you need to monetize before the brands will start paying you. As I've said numerous times, brands are smart. It ain't 2016 where they just look at, oh, she's got a million followers, let's pay her a bunch of money. They want to know if you can convert. They want proof, they want screenshots, they want data. So here are some ways that you can monetize your Instagram so you have data for the future. Number one is what I started with, which is affiliate links. Affiliate links is basically where you promote someone's business or product. And then when your followers buy using your discount code or your special affiliate link, you. You get credit. The true story about my first affiliate venture was actually with reusable water bottles. It was before Hydro Flask was super popular, which this is a hydro flask, by the way. Not a paid partnership. But one of my buddies had his own reusable water bottle company called Sip Wellness. And there was like a good mission behind it there was like 20% of every purchase went to building wells in Africa. And so I would promote these water bottles all the time. They were the reasonable water bottles that I used. And whenever my audience purchased them, I would get 20% in referral commission. And I was promoting these way back in the day. Even had an Instagram when I was just posting on Snapchat stories. And from that I made a few hundred, if not maybe even a few thousand sales. And that was proof of concept, right? So if I then went to Hydro Flask and I was like, hey, Hydro Flask, I want you to sponsor my Snapchat stories. Here's the proof of what I've done for a similar brand, I could do something for you. And now I have leverage. Now I have past proof in order to negotiate that deal. I can almost guarantee you that every single product that you use on a daily basis has some sort of affiliate. The easiest way to find it and get signed up is usually just by by going to Google, Googling the name of the product plus the word affiliate. And then usually they will have some sort of easy setup flow where you maybe just put in your PayPal email address, sign up with a username and password, and you're done. Now, if you just can't find an affiliate program for that product, there's also an Amazon Storefront or Amazon Associates or Amazon Affiliates. They change names all the time. But essentially every product on the planet is available on Amazon. And you can set it up so that when people purchase through your Amazon link, you get credit. The upside of this is, number one, everything is on Amazon, and number two, you actually will get credit for everything that's in their cart. So if all that they are actually doing is using your Amazon Affiliate link to purchase a Hydro Flask, but they have a bunch of other stuff in their Amazon cart at the time, you will get credit for everything in their cart. The downside of Amazon Associates is that it usually pays a much lower fee compared to direct affiliate programs. Like in that example I gave earlier, the Sip Wellness affiliate paid me 20%, whereas if I was to sell a Hydro Flask on Amazon, the affiliate percentage would probably be like 1 or 2%. This is some of the best data for brands because it is proof that you have taken someone else's brand, promoted it on your Instagram, and your followers have purchased it. Now, you could also use your own data, let's say, if you have your own business, your own products or services, but there is a little bit of an asterisk on those because you are selling something that you created. And so it's just a little bit different than selling someone else's product or service. But as you're doing this, I want you to track the data when you make these posts about the affiliate product. Track how many views you're getting, track how many link clicks you're getting, track how many sales you're making, track how many people are responding with the keyword in manychat, and then how many people are actually clicking through and visiting the link. The more specific and detailed your data, the better. I generated 42 sales from this one reel. This one Instagram story got 827views. And from that I generated 37 link clicks. And 14 of those 37 people ended up purchasing the product. That sort of data will put you light years ahead of every other creator who is at your size and also looking for brand deals. Something that I think is overrated and a little bit outdated is having a pitch deck. Because oftentimes they're super lengthy and brands just kind of flip through them and they don't actually look at them. It's kind of like having a really pretty resume when most people are just kind of skimming your resume. But if you are going to collect some data, step number four is to focus on the right metrics again, rather than focusing on the number of followers you have. Here are some stats that you should focus on and compile a list of. So you can have these in your back pocket when we actually start pitching brands. Number one, if you use DM automation, the average story replies per promotional story, or if you don't use DM automation and you still rely on the link sticker, you could include a average link clicks per promotional Instagram story. Number two is actual conversion screenshots. If you use ManyChat, it's very easy to see this data because ManyChat will tell you how many people clicked and then if you hover your mouse over it, it will tell you the percentage of who clicked. And then I also find it's helpful to track total sales numbers. And this is again, is something that's much easier if you have like a direct affiliate portal. So again, if I was selling something that was like the Sip Wellness water bottles, sure I could see that I made $827 this month from promoting them, but the brand cares a lot more that I sold 217 units and I generated X revenue for the company 217 times. Maybe the bottles are 20 bucks. That would tell me the total revenue that I generated for the company. I'm sure you've heard the term work smarter, not harder. Well, step number five is to pitch smarter, not harder. The recommendation that I'm not going to give you is to email 100 brands every single day for the next year. Of course there is a certain amount of volume that is at play here. And of course if you do email more brands, you're likely to get more responses. You'll get a lot of no's, but maybe you'll get a few yeses. But that's not the best method and I don't think that's the best use of your time. Instead of sending out a massive quantity of I love your brand, let's partner, let's collaborate, let's work together emails. Here's what you should do. Number one, make a list of brands that you already use and love. Think about the softwares that you're constantly interacting with. The products, the services, the gadgets, the gizmos, the things that you're always buying and the things that you're always recommending to your friends and family or always recommending already on your Instagram stories and to the people who follow you. Oh, you got to check out this cleaning supply. You got to check out this thing at Target. You got to buy this for your next road trip. Whatever those sorts of products products are, start there. Then number two, do a little bit of digging to find the right person to reach out to. Usually if you go to these companies websites or if you Google brand partnerships or community partnerships or paid partnerships, again use all the different synonyms and the name of the company, you might find the actual email address of the right person to reach out to. If you do all the digging. You use ChatGPT, you do all the research and you can't quite find an email address. You can also go directly to LinkedIn or Instagram, go to the products page and then see if they have a social media manager. See if they have someone who runs their accounts. Or at a bare minimum you can DM the accounts directly on those social networks that is usually going to have the lowest response rate. But at a certain point you're going to have to just do what you got to do. Are you ready to take your business marketing to the next level? Meet Brevo, the all in one marketing and CRM platform built to connect you with your customers, boost engagement and grow your business smarter. 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Just head to www.brevo.com tribe and take your marketing further with Brevo and Aura for the last few years I've been using Notion to basically organize my entire life. It's so much more than just a to do list app. It's truly one stop shop for organizing any area of your life or business. And it's not just great at organization, it's also great at automations as well. There's so many complex things that you can do and build that can happen automatically and instantly within Notion. And now for the first time, they are introducing Notion AI agents. The new Notion Custom Agents will allow you to automatically perform advanced tasks without you even having to lift a finger. For example, I built a Notion custom agent that automatically pulls the link to any reel that I have posted and then it pulls out the text that I say or the text on the screen in the first few seconds of the reel. Basically it pulls out my hook and then it's able to look at how that post performed and compare it to the hook, which allows me to see which hooks are actually working so that I can reuse them and tweak them for future reels. Notion is an AI powered connected workspace for teams. Notion brings all of your notes, docs and projects into one space that just works. It's seamless, flexible, powerful and with AI built in, you spend less time switching between different apps and tools and more time creating great work. Now with Notion's custom agents, busy work that used to take hours or let's be honest, didn't really get done at all runs itself the easiest way to think about the difference between a custom agent and normal AI is that normal AI requires you as the human to prompt it. But custom agents work for you 24, seven behind the scenes without you having to lift a finger. But don't Just take my word for it. Notion is used by more than half of Fortune 500 companies and some of the fastest growing companies in the world, like OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Try custom agents now at notion.com forward/BYT that's all lowercase notion n O-T-I-O-N.com by T to try custom agents today. And when you use my link, you're supporting our show again. Notion.com byt as someone who cooks about 95% of their meals at home. And no, that's not an exaggeration. Usually the only meal that Tay and I eat out each week is our Sushi Saturday. What we eat, what we prepare, it matters a lot to us. And that's why I'm so excited to introduce you to our newest sponsor, HelloFresh. HelloFresh allows you to choose between more than 100 recipes every single week, including cuisines from all around the world and bigger portions that satisfy everyone. Over 35 of those weekly recipes are high protein recipes, which fires me up and it allows me to feel great because I know that I'm eating wholesome ingredients like sustainably sourced seafood and 100% antibiotic and hormone free chicken. Chicken. And of course, most important of all is how it tastes. And let me tell you, it actually tastes really good. This helps me be a better business owner because I'm able to eat meals that taste good and help me feel satisfied. I don't have to spend as much time thinking or prepping each meal and I can make sure that I'm hitting my protein goals in the process. Go to hellofresh.com byt10fm to get 10 free meals plus a free Zwilling knife which is 144.99 value on your third box. This offer is only valid while supplies last. Free meals applied at discount on your first box for new subscribers only and varies by plan. But then step number three of pitching smarter is to send them a specific content idea. Not I love your brand. Let's partner together, but give them a specific pitch. Tell them your idea, tell them how you want to promote them. Tell them what would be in the campaign, what the video or the post would look like, give them specific angles and specific deliverables. I plan on posting three Instagram stories over a one week period. I want to post one Instagram reel and one dedicated YouTube video. Also in that pitch include an audience breakdown. Not here's how many followers I have, but I have this kind of follower. My average engagement rate is this high. My target audience is this. I estimate that 78% of my audience is a perfect fit for your product. And this is also where you can include the data that we talked about earlier. Here are my conversion rates. Here's my average link click clicks per Instagram story. Here's a campaign that I did in the past with an affiliate link and how similar it would work to your brand. Now, I know that sounds like a lot and it could be, but I want you to try to make it as concise as possible. Do not write a 17 paragraph email. Try to keep it to 2 to 3 paragraphs maximum so that can open the conversation, right? Basically, you want to look appealing as concisely as you possibly can. You want to make your argument and you want to stand out in a relatively short window because oftentimes the person who is running brand partnerships, that's not their sole responsibility. Maybe for Target there's like an entire team dedicated to this, but for most brands and businesses it's someone in the media department or it's the social media manager who also runs brand partnerships. It's somebody who's wearing multiple hats just like you probably are. And so don't overwhelm them with a super long email. Keep it short, keep it concise, but make sure to deliver how you uniquely have value in that email. And then what I usually find best, instead of saying what's your rates? Or let's partner or just like stamping something right there where they have to respond yes or no. I think it's more beneficial to invite them to hop on a call. Maybe just a 15 minute discussion. Maybe you're going to hop on Zoom and you're just going to talk about what this could potentially look like. That way you'll get more responses and people will be more open to exploring it, even if they're leaning towards saying no. Step number six in this process is to offer what brands actually want. So whether it's in that initial reach out or it's in your conversation via Zoom or any follow up emails, here are six things that brands are looking for more than just total number of followers. Number one Brands love short form content that they can use as UGC content. I briefly talked about this earlier, but again you're creating a video that then they can use. So if you can tack that onto your brand partnership, hey Target, I will post this Instagram reel for you. But then you can use this reel on your own social media. That is a huge win for them because then they can turn into an ad. They can boost it. They just basically have more content. Two birds with one stone situation. Number two, brands love raw assets because yes, they're hiring you for your creativity, your skill set, your editing, your vision. But sometimes it's nice as a brand to have the raw content, the actual, like, unedited video files so that they can then chop them up and reuse them in their own style in the future. Number three, brands love already tested, if not already proven, concepts or hooks or video styles. So if you can say to a brand, hey, I partnered with this similar brand in the past or I did an affiliate promotion for this similar product in the past and I used this hook, or I did this video style and it performed really well and now I want to just slightly tweak it to fit your brand. That is going to appeal to them so much more than just an idea that's fresh out of your mind. Number four, brands love exact scripts. Now, I don't know about you, but I'm not someone who loves scripting every word of my content. I rarely do. So the exception is when I'm partnering with a brand. When I'm partnering with a brand, I will write out an entire script that includes a shot list, that includes angles, that includes music and sound effects. Basically, I will detail the entire vision of the post prior to making it. That way, the brand can sign off, they can edit, they can make their adjustments before I even hit record, which they love because they now have more control. But I actually like that as well because it's a lot easier to record something different based off an edit to a script than it is to edit a video and change the words you said after you already recorded. It's a pain in the ass when I'm like, hey, Brand, here's the script. And they're like, good to go. And then I film it. And then a few weeks later, they're like, actually, you said these words this way. And I'm like, yeah, I said them this way because that's what it says in the script. They're like, actually, can you say it this way? And now I have to like go back and re record. Maybe I have to get another haircut. So my hair's the same length and I'm wearing the same T shirt at the same time. It's a headache. So script things out. The fifth thing that brands love is repurposing rights. Now, this is similar to ugc. The slight difference here is that usually this is just allowing them to collaborate on the post or promote the post onto their own Instagram stories, sharing the post onto their own Instagram stories, that sort of thing. It's not always included and it's good to just communicate these things. And then the sixth thing that brands love is minimums or guarantees. This isn't something that I necessarily do with every brand that I work with with, but especially those brands who have very clear goals. They want to hit 200 conversions from my post or they want my post to have a total reach of 100,000 people. I will set that as a guarantee. That puts a little pressure on me to make sure that the video does well and performs, but it also protects the brand so that they know if this post doesn't reach 100k or if it doesn't get 200 conversions, then Brock, as the creator, will make a second video in order to reach that threshold. This gives the brand a lot more peace of mind because they know that no matter what, they're going to hit the numbers that they want. Whether it takes one video or four videos to get there is up to the kind of content that you make. Step number seven is to actually get paid. Now, how much should you charge? What should your rates be? I'm sure you've heard this a million times, but there is no universal number. There are so many different variables at play. And I've come up with a little bit of an equation. It is actually quite a complex equation, so stick with me for a second. But if you can fill out this equation, it should hopefully give you a pretty good rate that you can then judge. Hey, does this feel right? Ultimately, a lot of it will come back to feel. If you get to a rate at the end of this equation and you're like, whoa, that's way high, you need to ask yourself, does that feel way high because I just set my expectations low, or does that feel way high because it's just not an accurate representation of the kind of content I can make? Similarly, ask yourself the same questions. If the rate feels really low, if that's something where it's like, like, hey, you know, 50 bucks, really, I. It's just not worth my time. Okay, well, then maybe you're going to raise the rates. Ultimately, there's always got to be some nuance and some feelings involved. But let's look at this equation and I'll break it down for you. The equation to determine your cost per reel is V times ER times CV divided by a thousand. And then you multiply all of that by U X and you add B. Now, I know this is. This feels like algebra. I know we're going back to, you know, middle school, high school, algebra 2, but let me break down what these different variables mean because it's actually not that complex. V is your average views per reel. I do not want you to look at any reels that you've posted in the last 30 days because oftentimes reels can pick up steam even a month or so later. So I want you to look at reels that you have posted at least 30 days ago, up to 90 days ago. That'll give you a good two month window where you can look at how are your reels actually performing. How many views on average is each of my posts getting? ER stands for engagement rate. An engagement rate is another equation within an equation where it's essentially the total amount of engagement that you are getting per post divided by the number of views that you got on that post. So simple numbers. Let's say you got 17 likes, three comments and five saves. You add that up, that's 25. Let's say on that post you got 100 views, then 25 pieces of engagement divided by 100 views, that would be a 25%, which would be extremely high. 25% engagement rate. And when you're plugging this number into the equation, of course you have to plug it in as a percentage. So 25% would be 0.25. CV is your conversion value multiplier. Now, this isn't an exact number. You can't just take your conversion rate and plug it in here. But basically I want you to give yourself a grade on a scale from 0 to 150, where 0 is I literally can't get anyone to buy anything from me. When I post about any sort of product or service or whatever, there's crickets and 150, 50 being if I just say the word of a product, I'm getting hundreds of messages asking me what it is and where do I buy it. If you give yourself a score of 20 to 40, you're someone who maybe gets a couple conversions, maybe a couple people buy from you, but it's really like pulling teeth. If you give yourself a score from 40 to 75, you're someone who can make sales, but it's not the easiest thing. You get some conversions, but ultimately it's not your strength. If you give yourself a score from 75 to 100, then you're good at making sales. When you make a promotional post, you are going to get conversions. It might not always be gangbusters, it might not always go viral. And get a ton of conversions, but you're going to make sales for sure. And then if you give yourself a score of above 100, 100 to 150, then you're someone who definitely makes sales. Like whenever you make a promotional post, you know it's going to be a good day. You're going to make a very high percentage, let's say above 10% conversion rate on your posts. And then again, those first three variables that we mentioned, V, which stands for average views per reel, er, which is your engagement rate, and cv, which is your conversion value multiplier. All of those things are going to be multiplied together and then divided by a thousand. Stick with me here, I know we're getting mathematical. I'll give you an example in just a minute. But you're going to take all of those numbers and you're going to multiply them by U. And U stands for usage rights. Usage rights isn't something that we've explicitly talked about today, but it's basically, are you going to allow the brand to use your content? And for usage rights, I want you to grade yourself on a scale of 1 to 3. One being I'm only posting this organically and the brand cannot use it. 1.25 would be I'm going to post this organically and the brand can use it for up to one month. 1.5 would be I'm going to post it organically and the brand can use it for up to 90 days. Give yourself a score of 2 if you're going to post it organically and allow the brand to use it for up to a year. And give yourself a score of 3 if you're willing to post it organically and allow the brand to use it in perpetuity forever, they can do whatever they want with it. They can basically have the content and run it to any ads or post it however many times they want, it's theirs. And that's something that's totally up to you. Personally, I usually stick to about a six month window, anything after that. And I worry, what if the brand changes? What if the brand tarnishes their reputation? What if I no longer want to approve of and vet and stamp my own face onto that brand? So for me, six months is usually good, but it's your own personal preference based off how long you want your name to be tied to that brand and how long you want the brand to have access to to using your face. The X in this equation is what I'm going to call the X factor. And this is something again, where there's a lot of nuance and it's going to include your own personal opinion. For this, I want you to grade yourself on a scale of 0 to 1.5. Where 0 is I am a horrible content creator. I do not make good posts, my reels suck, and I'm not unique at all. Hopefully none of you are a 0 and 1.5. Being I'm legit, I create really good content. I have a lot of authority within my niche. I can turn around my content super fast. If I partner with the brand today, I could give them the content by tomorrow. I want you to think about your production quality. I want you to think about how simple or complex the video it is that you're going to make. All these different little nuances are going to play into how you grade yourself for this variable. And then again, once you multiply all those numbers together, you are going to add B and B is your base production value. Basically, how much do you estimate this is going to cost you? If this is something where you're going to have to fly to another country and you're going to have to film a super high production value video and hire a production crew, well, then your production budget is going to need to be quite high. If you're filming this just on your phone in your home, then maybe the production value is going to be a lot lower because the only equipment you need is a ring light and a microphone. And I know you might be thinking, well, Brock, I already have a ring light and a microphone, so do I really need to charge the brand for that? You might not need to charge them 100% of the cost of the microphone in the ring light, but you should factor that in just a little bit because that is part of your production budget. Sure, you spent that money months or years ago, but the brand is getting access to it today and so they should pay for it at least to some degree. All right, I know that was quite a lengthy scientific mathematical equation, but let's plug in some actual real world numbers into these variables and I'll give you an example of what we could come up with as a fee for your cost per reel. Again, starting with variable V, your average views per reel, let's say that you average 15,000 views per reel and your average ER or engagement rate is about 3%, which numerically would be represented as 0.03. And then for your conversion multiplier, you gave yourself a score of 85 because you're pretty good at making sales, but you're not like Elite. So you're going to multiply those three numbers together and then divide them by a thousand. If I did my math correctly, this should give you 38.25. We're going to take that number and multiply it by U. For usage rights. For usage rights, you gave yourself a score of 2 because you plan on allowing the brand to use your content for up to a year, but no longer. And then we're going to multiply that by your X factor score, which let's say you gave yourself a score of 1.25 because you create some pretty good content and you're proud of your creative skills. When you're done multiplying all these numbers together, you end up with a number around 100, aka $100. And then when you add in your production budget, which, let's say rough estimate, $150 of production value, then you end up with a total of $250 per reel. Now, of course, like I said, there are so many other factors that I could have added into this equation, but I just figured we would start there. And then if you feel like that number is below where it should be, go ahead and raise it. If you feel like it's above where it should be, go ahead and raise it. With all this being said, I do have a tool that I want to recommend for you that's kind of like a glass door for brand partnerships. And it's FYPM VIP. It stands for fudge. You payme.vip. and this website will basically show you how much are brands actually paying people? So you can search for individual brands that you might want to partner with, you can look up individual creators, and you can see how much are these brands actually paying. So, for example, if I'm on FYPM and I look up a brand like Nike, I can see all of the brand deals that Nike has recently done. As long as they have been reported to FYPM, they have, I believe, over 100,000 total brand deals that have now been submitted and verified. And so you can see how much is Nike paying creators with a million followers, how much is Nike paying people with 10,000 followers was included? Are they getting just money? Are they getting a pair of shoes? Did they include usage rights for Nike? And you can basically create a much more fair marketplace by knowing verifiably what other people are getting paid, especially other people who are of your same size and working with brands that you want to work with. Step 8. Last but not least, you have now signed the deal You've made the post, you've shared the content. Number one, even if the brand doesn't ask for it, make sure to send them the data. Make sure to send them the performance insights as to how many views you got, how many conversions you got, and any other metrics that you can include. And don't just leave it there. Follow up with a let's keep working together. Brands love being able to work with people on 3 month, 6 month or even 12 month retainers. And you should love it too, because now you know that you're not going to constantly have to keep pitching new brands. You're not going to have to constantly be looking for new people to work with and new companies to partner with. Instead, you know that for the next 12 months you're going to post one reel per month about X company. And so when you reach out to the brand with this sort of longer term deal, you can maybe discount your rates a little bit because they're signing a contract and agreeing up front. You now have the security and the peace of mind. And so maybe you're willing to offer a little bit of a discount on your normal cost per reel or cost per story or cost per post because you want to sweeten the pot for them. When you're coming up with these long term partnerships, I also want you to consider things like revenue share agreements. Oftentimes when brands partner with you, they will start by paying you a flat fee for one post. But if you know you're crushing it for that brand, if you know that a lot of people are converting, then you might want to work out some sort of revenue share where you get paid a flat fee. But then for every single person who converts, you make 10% of that conversion cost. So it's kind of like a brand deal with an affiliate commission layered on top of. In the same way that earlier I talked about how you could have performance guarantees, you could also consider performance bonuses in this long term contract. So Maybe you average 15,000 views per reel, but if you have a reel that reaches more than 30,000 more than double your average, then there's a certain bonus that the brand will have to pay you for that. This is also where you could consider layering in other social media channels. Maybe you have less followers or less engaged followers on TikTok or on YouTube or on your email list, but you're going to add these into the long term deal for a little bit of extra fee. But even if your first post for the brand performed poorly, even if they say no, they don't want to work with you anymore. Make sure that you express generosity and that positive mindset. Make sure that you're very thankful because you never know if the brand's going to change their mind in the future or if the person who is in charge of communicating with you on the brand's behalf is going to leave that brand and start working for someone else. And then when they work for that other company, they're going to think, oh yeah, Cheryl was really easy to work with. She was such a kind, bright light in my day. I loved receiving emails from her. And so they're going to want to partner with you from this new brand in the future. Before I let you go, the five biggest mistakes that I want you to avoid are, number one, forgetting to give this video a thumbs up. I'm just kidding. That's not one of the mistakes. But please consider giving this video a thumbs up. If you've watched this far, I'm going to assume that you enjoy what you're watching. So hit that thumbs up. It really helps the video a lot. But the actual first mistake that I want you to avoid is waiting. Waiting till you hit a thousand followers, waiting till you hit 10k, waiting to hit 100k, shoot your shot, send that email, send that message, send that pitch. Because you would be surprised how many brands are actually thankful that you are reaching out to them. It makes their job so much easier. So hit send. Similarly, the second mistake is waiting for them to reach out. I should have talked about this earlier, but that's one of the biggest misconceptions that people have with brand partnerships, is that you should just sit back and wait for them to email you. You should sit back and wait for them to find you. There are some awesome brands out there who would be a perfect fit for you. You would be a perfect fit for them, but you're never going to work with them if you're just sitting on your thumbs waiting for them to reach out to you, waiting for them to discover you. The reality is there's 3.5 billion people who use Instagram every single month. And so while we can do things like SEO and our Instagram profile and we can try to get on the brand's radar, the best way to actually get a brand deal from any specific brand is by reaching out to them directly. The third mistake that creators make is accepting too many free or gifted partnerships. Now, I'm not anti free or gifted partnership. I think early on especially it can be helpful to accept free product or to promote a brand in Exchange for exposure. I am not anti that. I think that you can definitely do work that builds your portfolio. I definitely think that if you are accepting free product, you could then leverage that in the future into an actual paid promotion with the brand. But the mistake, the third mistake, is never asking for payment. I know it's scary to give people a raid. I know it's challenging to give a fee. I know that it feels icky and awkward and uncomfortable to ask for money. But ultimately they are a business and you are doing business here as well. So eventually you need to start asking for actual money in return for the content you are producing. Mistake number four is not considering usage rights. This is absolutely key. And whether it's something that you're going to give them usage rights in perpetuity or you're going to give them zero usage rights at all, it's something that you need to be aware of. Oftentimes, when people first get into brand partnerships, they don't really know what this term is. They don't really know the value of it and what it means. And so when a brand's like, oh, hey, by the way, can we use your video? You're like, yeah, sure, go for it. But you don't realize that you just willingly signed off on them having access to your content with full permission and rights to do whatever they want with it forever. And that could put you in some really tricky, if not downright dangerous or harmful situations in the future. So before you start reaching out to brands and actually signing these brand deals, I want you to consider where your line is in terms of how much or how little you want the brand to be able to use your content. And then, like I've talked about quite a bit today, one of the biggest mistakes is just not tracking your data and not knowing your numbers. It's not just about followers, it's about conversion rates. It's about engagement rates. It's about the unique intangibles that you can bring to the equation. That is what matters so much more than just the vanity metrics. And remember, you do not need a million, 100,000, 10,000, or even 1,000 followers in order to get paid for posting. You need a unique value or offer that you can bring to the table. And you need a specific targeted group of followers. Don't be scared to reach out to these brands and shoot your shot. You'll be surprised who might say yes. Thank you so much for listening. And as always, happy networking. Sam.