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Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
Get PAID Brand Deals on Instagram Even as a Small Creator - 839
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In today’s episode, Brock Johnson provides a complete guide to securing brand deals on Instagram in 2025. He’ll dive into Instagram brand partnerships, exploring how to land deals even with under 100k followers and why engagement rates...
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Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up, we thought we'd bring our prices down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing Mint Mobile Unlimited Premium Wireless how many get 30. 30. Better get 30. Better get 20. 2020. Better get 2020. Better to get 15 15, 15 15. Just 15 bucks a month. Sold. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of network fizzy taxes and fees extra see mintmobile.com 75 to 80% of brand influencer marketing budgets are being spent on accounts with less than 100,000 followers. And that's why today I'm going to give you essentially a free masterclass workshop training on how to actually get paid even if you have less than 10,000 followers on Instagram. Now, in actuality, I shouldn't say if you have less than 10,000 followers on Instagram because this can be applied to YouTube, to TikTok, to basically any social media platform. If you don't have a large following but you want to get paid for posting, then today's episode is going to be applicable to you. I'm gonna share with you my step by step guide to getting paid brand deals. And throughout today's episode I'm going to use various terms to basically describe the same thing. Whether I say paid partnership or influencer marketing or brand deals, it all essentially refers to the same thing. When a brand or company is paying you to make a post about them or for them. Not to get too sidetracked this early on, but this is a little bit different than UGC, but which stands for User Generated Content. The main difference here is that with ugc, brands are paying you to create content for them, which can be a great option, especially when you're first getting started out, because then the brand isn't requiring you to post the content on your page, thus showing it to your audience. They're really just using your skillset as a content creator to basically make ads or make posts for them to use on their own pages. And UGC can definitely be a great way to make money on social media. It does require slightly different skill sets. It requires less of an an audience and more of a just pure skill or talent for creating content. But with that being said, a lot of what I'm going to outline today will also apply if you want to do UGC but let's go back to that stat that I shared at the very beginning of today's episode. The majority of influencer marketing budgets are being spent on smaller and smaller accounts. The head of Instagram, Adam Mozeri, has recently said that follower counts. The number of followers you have doesn't really matter very much. And what matters so much more for determining an account or a person or a brand? Brand's influence, its power and its relevancy is how many views or how much engagement they are getting on each of their posts. And when we think about this, it makes sense. Of course, human nature is to click on someone's profile, click on someone's YouTube channel and see how many subscribers or followers they have. That's the first number we see. That's where our eyes go to first. But increasingly, that's mattering less and less. That's so much less important. I don't care if your brand has 10 million followers. If each of your posts is getting 100 views, you don't have very much social relevancy. On the contrary, if your brand is maybe just getting started and you have 2,000 followers, but you're getting 20,000, 50,000, 100,000, half a million views on every single reel or every single post that you make, well, then you have way more social currency, way more credibility, and way more impact. And brands are starting to recognize this. That's why 15 plus years ago, brands were exclusively working with A list celebrities and the occasional B list celebrity here or there. But then about five to 10 years ago, brands started to expand a little bit. They started working with influencers on social media. They might not have been a list celebrities, but they still had millions or at least hundreds of thousands of followers. And now, more than ever before, brands are looking for smaller and smaller accounts. They're looking for people with less than a hundred thousand, less than 20,000, less than 10,000 followers. And that's because brands, like all the rest of us, have figured something out. They figured out that these smaller, more concentrated niche communities are oftentimes way more highly engaged, paying way more attention attention with way more trust, and they're way more likely to buy something than the Kim Kardashian communities of the world. Don't get me wrong, most of the Kardashians are still getting paid hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars for just one single post. But like that stat that I shared at the beginning of this episode shows brands are increasingly working with smaller and smaller accounts and allocating much more of their budget for those smaller accounts, basically, because smaller accounts usually have higher engagement rates and more attentive and energized and enthusiastic communities. Those smaller accounts can oftentimes generate a higher ROI return on investment than the much larger accounts. All of this should be great news for you, and I hope that as we continue through this episode today and I share with you all of my tricks and tips for getting brand deals, that you have this sense in your mind that you can do it. It is absolutely possible for you, and it has never been easier than right now today. Really quick, I do want to share with you three reasons why you should consider adding brand deals. Now. If you clicked on this episode, maybe this is already something that you're interested in. Maybe this is something that you're already exploring and you want to know if that's the case and you're like, hey, I don't need to be convinced of why I should do this, then go ahead and skip over these next three bullet points. But if you're still on the fence, if you're like, I don't know if I want to add this into my social media presence. I don't know if this will dilute my brand or if this will, you know, challenge my followers or if I'll lose followers because of it. First and foremost, let me say this is a great way to diversify your income. I'm someone who has a brand, who has a business, we have a product, the Insta ClubHub, the number one Instagram course in the world. And yet I still post about other brands, other services on my Instagram because a it's a great way to diversify my income. My income is not solely reliant on my business making money. I can also rely on other businesses pay me to make money for them. Number two, when done correctly, which we'll talk about in a minute, it can be a great way to serve your audience. You could think of brand deals or partners partnerships as recommending your favorite movies or books or TV shows to your friends and family. Oftentimes that's just part of being a good friend is, hey, I saw this great movie. You should go check it out. Hey, I read this awesome book. You should read it too. The same is true with brand partnerships. You are basically recommending something to your audience that would benefit them and the only difference is you're going to now get paid for that recommendation. And then the third reason why you might consider taking on brand partnerships is that it can give you great social credibility or just add trust to your name later. We're going to talk about what brands to work with and what brands not to work with. But think about if you were a running influencer with 10,000 followers, you were somewhat up and coming. You were still trying to make a name for yourself in the running influencer space. And then you did a brand partnership with Nike, one of the biggest apparel brands in the history of the world. That's going to give you great social credibility. People are going to look at your account and say, hey, if Nike was willing to work with this girl, I should follow her. Hey, if Nike was willing to pay her I as another workout brand, another apparel company, maybe I should consider paying her for a post about my brand. So it can give you great clout or social credibility to work with certain brands. But of course, I assume you don't need that much convincing because you are listening to this episode after all. So let me share with you my three steps to getting paid brand deals in 2025. Step number one wait for a really dark, starry night. No clouds in the sky. STEP 2 Go outside, set up a chair and just start looking at the sky. Waiting for a shooting star. Step number three when that star goes flying across the sky, make a wish, close your eyes, cross your fingers, make a wish. And don't know. Of course this is all bs. This is not how it works. You can't just wish upon a star. You can't just pray for it. You can't just sit back and hope that a brand deal is going to magically fall on your lap. We have to work for it. And so let's talk about how you can actually work for it. And I should say I should have said this earlier. My own credibility is that I have done over $1 million in brand deals throughout my careers. And just last year alone I partnered with over 20 different brands on my social media. I've been doing brand partnerships for about seven years now. I've done it by myself solo. I've done it with an agent. I've done it with an agency. I've worked with some of the biggest companies in the world. We're talking top five biggest brands in the entire world. And I've worked with little itty bitty tiny local businesses as well. I've done brand deals in exchange for free product and I've done brand deals where they have PA made five figures for one single Instagram post. I have done everything under the sun with the exception of selling feet pics when it comes to brand deals. And so let me share with you the ins and outs of how to actually make this happen. There are four common misconceptions about brand partnerships that we need to get out of the way, first and foremost. First and foremost. That's kind of a funny pun. Okay, number one, the first myth or misconception, something we've already talked about, is that you need a million followers. That is absolutely not true. It matters so much less the quantity of followers and so much more about the quality of followers. We're going to talk about that in just a second. But the engagement rate and the views, the actual attention that your brand or business or account has matters so much more than the number of pure followers that you've amassed. The second myth or misconception is one that I have also already addressed, which is that they will reach out to you. It is true that when you have a very large audience, people will reach out to you. I probably get a dozen or so reach outs or pitches every single week, but also about 10 out of those dozen are copy and paste AI generated generic, lame, really bad pitches, really bad reach outs. And that's for someone like myself who has over a million combined followers across all of the platforms. For most people, I would say for 98% of brand deals that you actually see taking place on Instagram, they weren't started by the brand reaching out to the person. They were started by the person reaching out to the brand. Which, by the way, stick around to the end and I'm going to give you a free templatized script that you can put into your email or into your AI to help you create this sort of email pitch that you're going to use to reach out to brands. The third miss or misconception is that by doing a brand deal, you are a sellout. That's not true. You deserve to get paid for the great content you can create. You deserve to get paid for the attention and the trust that you have built online. You only become a sellout when literally 100% of your posts become an advertisement and you're willing to take any money to promote any product. It doesn't matter if it aligns with your values. It doesn't matter if it will serve your audience. All that matters is that it's going to put money in your pocket. That's becoming a sellout. But if you follow these steps that I'm going to share with you today and you're working with brands that you believe in, brands that have a similar vibe, brands that have similar values as you, and products that are actually going to benefit your audience. You're not a sellout, you're serving your people. And then the fourth and final misconception is that you need a talent agent or an agency or that you just can't do it alone. And that's absolutely not true. Like I said, I've been doing brand deals and partnerships for about seven or eight years on social media, and I've only had an agent for myself for the last year and a half or so. It hasn't even been two full years with my agent. I love my agent. He's a great guy, he takes great care of me. And I ended up hiring him simply because I didn't want to have to think about and keep track of all my brand deals. You should have seen how many different spreadsheets I had going to try to keep track of what brand paid me and what brand was sending me a PayPal versus what brand was sending me a direct deposit versus what brand was going to write me a check and when was it due and when were the delivery. There was so much to keep track of at a certain point. And so that's why I decided to hire an agent. But when you're first getting started, you absolutely do not need that. And I would say that even to the point where you have over a hundred thousand followers, even to the point where you can be doing one brand deal a week, you still could probably do that on your own without hiring an agent. No shade to agents, no shade to any agencies. Some of them are absolutely wonderful. But I want to be realistic with you that you don't need them. But with all that being said, let's get into it. My actual eight steps to getting brand deals so you can get paid for posting on social media. Number one, you need to build a targeted demographic of engaged followers. We've already talked about how you don't need a million followers, but what you do need is engaged followers. If you have no followers at all, then we're looking at you, ugc, not brand deals. The whole point of a brand deal is that the brand wants your audience to pay attention to them. The brand wants to basically use the stage that you've built to speak to your audience, your community, your group. And so if you don't have anyone following you, if you have no audience, or if you have followers but they're not very engaged, they're not paying attention, you're getting 0 likes, 0 comments, 0 attention on any of your posts. A brand is very unlikely to want to partner with you. Maybe you're a great content Creator. And so the brand might want to do a UGC partnership where you're making posts for them to post on their page. But in order to actually have a brand pay you for your own posts, you need to have engaged followers. And the first part of this tip was not just engaged followers, but a targeted demographic. If you have engaged followers that are all over the place, they are literally everything from 18 to 65 years old, male, female, all over the world, a brand is going to be less likely to want to sponsor you. Because most brands have a target demographic or an ideal customer in mind. So for example, if I had an Instagram account that was all about rock climbing, I was a rock climbing expert myself. All of my posts were about becoming a better rock climber, teaching you how to get started, the gear, all of that sort of stuff, then it would be likely that the majority of my followers were like me. They were getting into rock climbing, they were learning to do it themselves. Most of them would probably be men because I was a man who was teaching other men how to become rock climbers. And so who would want to work with me? Fitness brands who specialize in equipment for rock climbers, maybe a supplement company who has pre workout or energy drinks or vitamin mixes for men who are into outdoorsy activities. Right, this makes sense. Basically, brands usually have a target demographic that they are trying to appeal to. And so when you build an engaged group of followers who fit that target demographic, that's going to make you much more appealing to a brand. This also relates to the topic of niche, which I believe is step number one for growing on social media. You can grow without a niche, but it's going to be very tough to do. So, yes, there are influencers who you could probably think of, who you know and love and you've been following for a decade, and they don't really have a niche. I mean, my mom is kind of in that category where she doesn't really have a niche. She posts about a wide variety of things. Yes. Right now, at the specific time that I'm speaking, she's posting a lot about fitness, but she doesn't have that same niche forever. Right. She's constantly changing and evolving. And you might point to them and be like, well, Brock, they don't have a niche. And I would say, number one, there is oftentimes something very unique or extravagant or attention grabbing about that person's lifestyle that makes them worth following. So even though they don't post about one specific thing, they don't stay in one specific lane. Their overall life is so interesting and engaging that they're worth following. Or I would argue, and this is also the case with Shalene Johnson, my mom, is that that person has amassed their followers over the course of decades, and so they've had a long time to build up this following. And the kind of sub point for that is that they started building their following 10 to 15 to 20 years ago when the algorithms were different, when the follower really mattered and the number of followers you had really mattered, and when it was rare to see people documenting their life and posting about everything that is involved in their life on social media. Where nowadays everyone's posting about everything in their life on social media. And so if you don't have a niche, it's tougher to grow an engaged audience than ever before. But again, all of this is just step number one for getting a brand deal, having a targeted demographic of engaged followers. Of course, we have done literally hundreds of past build you'd tribe episodes about increasing your engagement and getting more views and going viral. So if you want to check out any of those, I'll link up some of the best recent ones down in the show notes below. So if you're someone who's like, hey, I haven't even done step one yet, like, I don't have very much engagement, I'm really just getting started. Check out one of those, spend a few weeks or a few months staying consistent, building up your audience, and then come back to this episode for the rest of the steps. But with all that being said, you might be surprised to learn that your engagement rate is higher than you think. I think oftentimes we're led to believe that everyone's going viral and everyone's having success and everyone has great engagement except for us, when that's not really the case. In fact, according to the most recent data from SocialBook Influencer, here are the average engagement rates for different account sizes for accounts between 10,000 and 50,000 followers. This is specific to Instagram, but it does seem to be relatively similar across most socials. For accounts between 10,000 and 50,000 followers, we see that the average engagement rate is about 3.4%. That means that if you have 100 views on your post, you would expect to see about three to four likes. So if your post has 100 views and you have 17 likes, that would be a 17% engagement rate and that would blow this average out of the water. In fact, for accounts with less than 50,000 followers, the top 10% of accounts are only seeing about a 6.2% engagement rate. So if you have above a 6.2% engagement rate, then you are in the absolute top of the top in terms of engaged audiences. And we see these average engagement rates continue to decrease as the account sizes increase. For example, accounts with between 50,000 and 100,000 followers see an average of 3.1% as their engagement rate. For accounts between 100,000 and 500,000 followers, again, according to SocialBook, they see an average of 2.3% engagement rate. And for accounts with more than half a million followers, we see that the average engagement rate is below 2%. So again, you don't need a high quantity of followers. You need a high quality of followers. These are targeted followers within a certain specific demographic range and that are highly engaged. That's step number one. Step number two for getting brand deals is I want you to make a list of five to 10 products that you use every single day. Now, I find that myself when I was first getting into brand partnerships and doing this practice, I was oftentimes thinking about physical products. But I want you to consider digital products as well. So for me, as someone who creates content online and who teaches other business owners how to grow their following and build their business on social media, my brain might instinctually go to tripods or camera or phone mounts. Things that are physical, right? But as I started to explore the world of brand partnerships more, I realized it was much more beneficial for my audience and made a lot more sense for me to think about the digital products that I was using. So what scheduling tool do I use to schedule all my posts for Instagram? What software do I use to automate my direct messages? What editing tool do I use to edit my photos? Thinking about the digital products in addition to the physical products is a great way to get started. But again, I want you to make a list of five to 10. These should be five to 10 products that ideally meet the three following categories. Number one, a product that you already use. Ideally, you're going to partner with a brand that creates a product that you use often that maybe you've been using for years. It's going to make the partnership so much more authentic and real, because then you avoid promoting something that you've literally never used and have no experience with. It's much easier to talk about something that you love and that you've been using for years than to talk about something that you were just sent for the first time and you just unboxed. The second criteria that I want all of these products to meet is that it's a product that would actually benefit your audience. It's a product that your audience would actually be interested in. It would actually make their life easier. It would actually solve a big problem that they have for me. Almost all of my followers want to make more sales and so I tell them about the DM automation product that I use because that helps them make more sales. Almost all of my followers want to be more consistent and I think that if you use a scheduling tool, you're going to be more consistent. So I recommend my scheduling tool. Almost all of my followers create content on their phone and so I partner with a tripod company because that helps them hold their phone better and create more content with their phone. And then the third criteria to consider is does this brand align with my values, with my mission? Sometimes this is going to be very obvious because the brand is very outspoken about their beliefs and their values and their missions. And sometimes it's going to take a little bit more time and some more research and digging to figure out what the brand is truly about. But some places that you could look are most brands websites nowadays have like an Our Mission or Our Values sort of page where you can read about the brand. You can also look at their own social medias and the things that they do and don't post about. You could look at other influencers who have worked with the brand if you know like what that influencer is all about and you know their beliefs and their values and whether or not those align with your own. But it's just things that you want to consider when you're deciding to partner with a brand. Oh, and then one other pro tip that actually comes from Modern Millie, which by the way, great Instagram account, great friend of mine. She also has an awesome YouTube channel that I would highly recommend checking out. I saw she recently made a post over on TikTok kind of about this topic of getting brand deals and she had a great tip that I wanted to make sure I shared here, which was that you should consider local brands and local small businesses, especially when you have a smaller following. It might be hard to get Nike to want to work with you, but maybe because of that they're also looking for someone with a smaller audience size, but someone who's in the local community like yourself. All of this leads to step number three for getting paid partnerships and that is to do your research. We've already talked a little bit about researching the brand and their values and their background, but I'm going to give you four questions that you need to ask or that I should say you need to answer in order to get paid partnerships. And before I even tell you those four questions, I'm going to tell you the best possible place to do your research. It's a website, and this is not a paid partnership itself. It's a website called FYPM vip. F Y P M stands for the F word. I won't say it, but F U, like F U C K fudge you pay me FYPM vip. It's a really cool service. And FYPM VIP is essentially a glass door. But for brand partnerships and influencer marketing, with most other traditional careers, it is relatively easy. And it has become very common practice to know the industry standard. What are other people getting paid for this job? What's the annual salary? Or what's the hourly wages of someone who is working the role that I am applying for? You could do the specific research to find, hey, what are other data analysts who work at Google getting paid in their first year if they have a college degree? And you could find a realistic starting point. And that would help you judge what companies you wanted to apply for, what jobs or careers you wanted to go into. But in this world of, you know, online digital marketing and brand partnerships for the last really 10 to 15 years, it's been really tough to know exactly what are these people getting paid? How much money are people actually making? What are brands actually paying to work with people? But thanks to FYPM vip, you can see all of that. It's essentially a database that has tens of thousands of people like myself, I've literally done this myself, who have submitted their own brand deals. Here's the brand, here's how much they paid me, here's what they asked for, here's how it went. Like, you can give them a review, you can give them feedback as to like, hey, you know, the brand was really a jerk. Like, working with them was really a pain in the butt. It wasn't worth it. Or, hey, this brand didn't pay me a ton, but they were super lax and they gave me a ton of creative freedom. And so it was a great partnership. Or, hey, this brand asked for way too much. But I pushed back and I was able to get them to increase their rate. Whatever. You can basically read all that. You can read about how many followers the person had. You can read about what industry they're in. Oftentimes you can even go to their exact Instagram profile or social media to see what their engagement rate looks like. You can filter by brand, by industry. It is such such a useful tool and I have had their CEO on Build you'd tribe a few years ago. She's awesome as well. But FYPM VIP highly recommend checking it out and I think you can even get free access if you've done a brand deal yourself in the past. So if you submit a brand deal that you have done, you can get approved and get free access to the site. Otherwise, I think that there's a small fee that you can pay to get access to basically the entire database. But it's super useful for research and for answering the following questions. Number one, we need to start with this. Does the brand already do partnerships? If the brand that you want to work with has never done a partnership before, it's going to be pretty tough for you to be there first. It could happen. There's always gotta be a first, right? But it's gonna be much easier for you to work with a brand that already has a track record of doing brand partnerships. Number two, more specifically, and this one you'll be able to answer using FYPM vip, does the brand do partnerships with accounts of my size? You might find that even though some brands do partnerships, they're still in this old, outdated, antiquated style of thinking where they only partner with people who have a million plus followers. It is of course going to be much easier for someone like your who maybe has a smaller following to get a brand partnership from a company that is already doing brand partnerships with people who also have a smaller following. Besides using fypm, you could also do some hashtag research or even just some keyword research. On Instagram or on TikTok, for example, you could put the name of the brand plus the word partner. Like I oftentimes use hashtag manychat partner or partner with manychat or sponsored by manychat on my posts where I am sponsored by manychat, for example. So if you look up those sorts of keywords or hashtags, you can often find other influencers who have made posts for that brand in the past. Of course, the bigger the brand, the more likely you are to find more brand partnerships. Like if you look up sponsored by Nike or Nike Partner, you're going to find a lot more posts than if you look up some random shoe brand that no one's really ever heard of. Question number three, and this one's going to be really tough to answer for yourself. And so that's why again, I would recommend using fypm, but but how much has the brand paid people like me on fypm, you'll be able to see, oh, hey, here's someone with about the same number of followers as me. The brand asked them to do three posts and the brand paid them $2,000. And then you're gonna be able to judge, is that worth it for me? Is that worth my time, energy and effort? Is that worth me putting my name and my likeness and my credibility behind the brand or vice versa? Or maybe that amount of money wouldn't normally be worth it, but because it's a really big brand and it's gonna give you great social credibility, or it's a brand that you just love and it' a dream of yours to work with them. Maybe you'll accept a lower budget, but it's of course totally up to you. And we'll talk more about rates and fees a little bit later. But just at this stage you'll get to do your research to see realistically what are other people getting paid and what would make sense for me. And then the fourth question that you should research and answer is who should I reach out to? You could potentially find the name or contact of the person you should reach out to on fypm. Alternatively, you could look at the brand's websites and sometimes they will have have a little note in the footer or in the contact section about partnerships or brand inquiries and you could reach out to that person. If neither of those options work, you could resort to direct messaging the brand on Instagram. And oftentimes the person who is running the social media for the brand will either be the person who's in charge of brand partnerships, or they'll be able to connect you and give you the email address of the person who you need to speak with. Or if all else fails, you could look for past partners, people who have worked with the brand or been sponsored by the brand in the past. And then you could reach out to them them directly and see if they would be willing to share who they contacted or who got in contact with them to set up that brand partnership. But it is really important to make sure that you are reaching out to the right person. If you reach out to the wrong email address, you might get filtered to spam, you might never get responded to, you might get ignored. And so it's important that you spend the time to make sure that you are actually having your email land in the correct inbox. Alrighty, let's get into arguably the most important step of all, which is the actual reach out. What do you actually say? Number one, before you say Anything make that you're following the brand. I cannot tell you how many emails I receive a week. I guess I can tell you it's probably like three or four emails every single week and probably a dozen or so direct messages every single week from people who are like, hey Brock, such a big fan of the podcast. I would love to be a guest on the show. I think you should interview me for blah blah blah, I did this cool thing, here's all about me, and then I click on their Instagram and they're not following me. Like, how can you be such a big fan if you're not even following me in the first place? No, I'm not going to have you on the podcast just because you claim to be a big fan. If you're not going to at least take the bare minimum step of pressing follow. This is not meant to be shade or disrespect to anyone who has reached out to me in the past, but it is meant to be a learning lesson for all of y' all. Before you reach out to a brand, make sure that you're at least following them. Oftentimes, brands will check. They'll check to see if you've followed them. They'll check to see if you've engaged with their posts before saying yeah, heck yeah, let's let's partner. Sometimes they'll even check to see if you're already a customer of the brand because they want to verify. Hey, if you're saying you love the brand or you love X, Y and Z product, are you legit? Or are you starting this entire collaboration off with a lie? The second tip for reaching out is to keep it brief. There is no reason to write a three page essay double spaced MLA format in order to pitch a brand. Sometimes just two or three paragraphs with a couple sentences in each paragraph is enough to do the trick. Think about this. Brands are getting likely dozens, if not hundreds, sometimes even thousands of messages or reach outs or pitches on a daily basis. And usually it's a pretty thin department if not just one single person who's having to read through all of those. So make it brief. Do that person a favor by being concise and succinct in your pitch. When it comes to what should you actually be concise and succinct with? First and foremost, I find it very helpful to be concise with my specific experience with the product. Not just saying I love this product, it's changed my life, but the specific problem that it solved, the specific use case that I have for it maybe how many years I've been using it or the results that gotten with the product. This shows the brand that this is not just a generic pitch but it is a specific reach out from a customer. Next, it's important to clearly show the brand your UVP or your unique value proposition. Your unique value proposition is likely going to include one of the following three things. Number one, what do you offer that other people can't? Like, what's unique about you? What's so special about you? What's so unique about your page or your followers or the content that you make make? Do you have a super high engagement rate? Do you have a super unique approach? Do you have a super unique use case for the product? Like what is it that is so special about you? And this is something that first of all, let me say you do probably have. You likely have something unique about you, something that is special, some reason that a brand would love to work with you. If not, if there is absolutely nothing, then either figure out what that thing is or don't work with that specific brand. The second part of your UVP is what's in it for them because that's what brands care about, right? Brands are businesses. They want to make money. They care about the bottom line. They care about the return on investment. So what sort of return on investment can you give to them? What is the specific benefit that the brand is going to have from working with you over working with anyone else? What's in it for them? And then the third part of your UVP is why should they want to work with you? Like what is the real difference maker? What's the real secret sauce here? What's the real magic sparkle pixie D that you offer that makes you special that no one else can bring to the table? These are not necessarily easy questions to answer, but these are questions that once you can answer, you're going to get way more brand deals, you're going to get paid way more by these brands and you're going to really stand out for any company that you want to work with. The third thing that I recommend adding to any pitch email is past case studies or examples. If you can not just tell the brand, but you can show the brand what it's like to work with you that is golden in their eyes. If you've already done brand partnerships in the past, this is the time and place where you highlight the most successful campaigns. If you haven't done brand partnerships in the past, which I would assume is many of you, you can do one of Three things you can either number one, share with the brand, your own products or services that you have sold. Because even though you're not selling for another brand, just the fact that you are proving that you are able to sell and get conversions from your social media, that's a great thing. The second thing you could consider sharing with the brand is past affiliate marketing success. Affiliate marketing is a great stepping stone towards brand partnerships. Before I ever did my first brand partnership, I did a ton of affiliate marketing. I shared this in a recent episode of Build you'd Tribe. But when I was in college, when I was a freshman in college, one of my good friends had a reusable water bottle company and so I became an affiliate for his company. I would promote the water bottles on my Instagram stories and then for every sale that I made I would get a 20% kickback. It was a nice way to generate some extra income to help out my friend with his company. And his company was for a good cause. So it was all around a win win. But when it eventually came time for me to level up my income, diversify my income and expand my income potential AKA start doing brand partnerships and influencer marketing rather than just affiliate marketing, I had this past affiliate marketing as a success story to point to. I could say look, I posted about my friend's water bottle company on my Instagram stories. When I did that, I got X number of views, I got X number of link clicks, and from those link clicks I got X number of conversions and I generated this much money for the water bottle company. So if you're someone who has never sold anything on social media before, it can be very advantageous to start with affiliate marketing because then you have something to show as proof of concept, show the brand that you are capable of selling. And of course it also helps you get comfortable selling to your audience. And then third and least effective is if you don't have your own products that you've sold. If you don't have affiliate marketing case studies that you can share with the brand, you could just share with them engagement rates and other click through rates. Maybe you get people to click and listen to your podcast, maybe you get people to to visit some website that's not necessarily selling them but you're just directing them to some page, just something that is actually numerical, something that is statistically proving to the brand that there is going to be a potential of success from working with you. The final thing that you could include in your pitch email is what's called a pitch deck or a Media kit. And this is what most people think they need to get started when the reality is I got got probably my first 70% of brand deals before I ever made a media kit. And then I had a media kit professionally made and I don't think I've touched it since. Media kits are like super pretty polished PowerPoints usually or slideshows that are like, hey brand, here's how many followers I have. Here's what's really cool about working with me. It's kind of like taking all of the ingredients of this pitch email but making it look pretty. And the reality is, like I said, these brand partnerships are usually run by one person or a really small team. And so they don't have time to flip through your pretty infographics in your pretty slideshow. They just want to read some concise bullet points or some concise sentences in an email. And so you could include a media kit. Some brands will ask for a media kit. There are plenty of templates on Canva and that you can just find online that you can basically plug in your own info into. But it's not super important now. As you know, I'm a big fan of not just teaching Amanda Fish, but also giving Amana Fish. And so now that you know know what goes into your pitch email, now that you know how to reach out, I have a template for you and it's going to be easy for you to find. You don't even have to put in your email or go to some website. I'll just put it in the show notes. So down below this podcast, wherever you're listening, you'll find a copy and pasteable kind of like template that you can use as a starting point for your pitch email. I'm not saying that this is like a guaranteed email that's going to get you every brand deal 100% of the time. But if nothing else, it is a starting point point for you to plug in your own information, your own demographics and make reaching out to brands just a little bit easier. Moving on to tip number five for getting paid partnerships on social media is follow up. The fortune is in the follow up. If you don't get a response, follow up and then follow up again and then look for a different email, someone else to reach out to so you can actually get a response. If you don't hear back from a brand, don't be pessimistic, be irrationally optimistic and assume, oh hey, it probably just got filtered to spam or maybe that email just doesn't work anymore or Maybe there's some turnover at the company, or maybe they're super busy right now so they haven't had time to respond. Keep following up and keep reaching out until you do get a response. You'll be so surprised at how many brand deals you can land by just sending a second or a third email. The worst that could possibly happen is the brand says no. That's fine. Now you're one step closer to finding a brand that you could work with. If a brand does say no, I do recommend asking them why. Not in an accusatory way, not in an angry or defensive way, but just genuinely asking what things you could improve or what you should change before reaching out to that brand again in the future. And if you do this, then every no that you receive turns from a no into a not yet, and every no turns into a lesson that you can use to get more yeses in the future. Step number six in getting brand deals is getting paid, or rather negotiating rates and figuring out what you would be will to accept as payment in exchange for posting. There is no perfect equation because there's so much subjectivity in determining what you think is fair. And there are also so many different opinions on this topic. Some people absolutely believe that you should never take free product in exchange for posting. Some people believe that when you're first getting started, you should only take free product for posting. There are lots of different schools of thought and lots of different ways of determining what your fee is going to be, but I find that a helpful 1 is the AIL times number of followers. This is an equation that has been gaining popularity over the last few years as a replacement to just looking at the number of followers you have to determine what your brand deal rate should be. I find that for most Instagram posts this equation works pretty well. AIL stands for average impact level. And here's how you can determine what your average impact level is and then how you can plug that into the rest of the equation. Equation. Your average impact level is Your score from 0 to 5 in the four following categories. Category number 1 engagement rate. Category number 2, past brand deal experience. Category number 3 industry impact or basically how well known are you in your field? And category number four, expertise. So basically you take these four categories. You assign yourself a grade between zero being the worst and five being the best. Then you average out those four numbers and that's your ail, your average impact level. For example, if I was a rock climbing coach with pretty solid engagement, above average engagement, I would give myself a four out of Five for that first category. Maybe for that second category, past brand deal experience, I'm only going to give myself a one out of five because I haven't really done very many yet. I've done some affiliate stuff and I've done some free product stuff, but I haven't done any paid brand deals yet. So one out of five. For the third category, industry impact, I'm going to give myself a three out of five in this example because maybe, maybe I was a former professional and so maybe I don't have a ton of followers yet, but just because of my own credibility, because I was a former pro and because some people, you know, look up to me and I have some fans, I'm going to give myself a three out of five. Kind of middle of the road. And then for expertise, I'm going to give myself a five out of five. Because in this hypothetical, like I said, I was a former pro, so I have a ton of expertise in this area. So I'm a five out of five. Then I add up those four numbers, four plus one plus three plus five for a total of 14. I divide that by four for an average score of 3.25. Then I'm just going to move the decimal over two places to change it from a number into a percentage. So instead of 3.25, it would be 0325. And then you just take that number and you multiply it by the number of followers you have. So let's say Hypothetically, I have 2700 followers. That would equate to $87.75 for a single post. And for someone with that ail and that number of followers, I think that's a pretty fair rate. Now, of course, this is just a baseline. Maybe you'd be happy with $50. Maybe it takes you a really long time to create content and you create super high quality content. So you're going to charge 100 or 150 or $200. This equation is not meant to be a rule. It's just meant to be a general guideline or a starting point for getting brand deals. Like I mentioned earlier, I would also highly suggest checking out FYPM VIP to see what other people are getting paid so that when you're negotiating, you're able to get the most possible money from these brands and that you're able to to actually get paid what you deserve by these companies. And the last thing I'll say about pricing is I'll throw out my two cents, which is that when you're first getting started when you have a very small audience, when you've never done brand deals before, it's okay to accept free product, especially when it's free product that you would otherwise have to buy or have to use to stick with the same hypothetical. If I was in the rock climbing niche and I was starting to do brand partnerships and companies were offering me free rock climbing equipment that I would otherwise have to buy, well then that might be worth it to me because sure, I can't use free stuff to pay the bills, but I would have spent a hundred dollars on that equipment anyways. And so by getting it for free, I saved the hundred dollars and I can use the hundred dollars I saved to pay my bills. But again, rates and fees and pricing is very subjective. It's up to you. And also, I think it's really wise to do your research and to figure out what you would be comfortable with. With step number seven in brand deals, once you've reached out, you've negotiated price, you've even signed the contract and it's finally time to make the actual post for the brand. Use DM Automation, but clear it with them first. Oftentimes brands will want you to use a specific link, right? They'll want you to promote their website forward slash your name. It's like the custom tracking link that they provide you with before you actually post post. Ask them if they would be okay with you using DM Automation. DM Automation, which stands for Direct Message Automation, is that thing and I'm sure you've seen it where I do it all the time where someone will say comment this word and I will send you this thing. Comment the word guide and I will send you my free guide. Comment the word rock climb and I will send you 10% off my favorite rock climbing shoes for example. DM Automation is a win for you and it's a win for the brand. And here's how you will get more engagement. Because instead of telling people, hey, leave this post, go to my link in bio and click away. You're telling people to engage. You're telling people to interact with the post, specifically through commenting. By getting more engagement and more interaction, you're going to get more views. That's a win for you. It's a win for the brand. Because now your post is going to reach more people, it's going to be seen by more eyeballs and it is most likely going to get more clicks and more interaction AKA more conversions, more sales, more return on investment for them. If you have never used DIEM Automation before It's going to be tough to make this argument to the brand because you're pretty much going to have to just say, hey, listen to what this guy brock on this YouTube video said. So instead, again, starting with affiliate marketing or starting with your own product sales is a great way to show proof of concept for DM automation. But I have found that thanks to diem automation, I'm able to land more brand deals and I'm able to get paid a higher rate by the brands because even though I might not get as many views as this other person, even though I might not have as many followers as this other influencer, I'm able to get a better CTR click through rate, I'm able to get better conversion rates, I'm basically able to make more sales for the brand even with less views or less followers because of this specific strategy. Going back to the whole idea of UVP unique value proposition and the actual reach out or pitching of the brand, this can absolutely be a part of your uvp. I'm a firm believer that direct message automation is the future of doing business on Instagram. And so while some brands and businesses are super outdated and they want you to put the link in your caption even though it's not clickable when it's in the caption, some brands will recognize the power of a tool like DM Automation. They'll recognize that it's going to get them more clicks, it's going to make them more money, it's going to provide a better return on investment from working with you. And when you can clearly spell that out to them, it makes you look so much more attractive as someone to work with. So reference DM automation case studies and past examples of DM Automation in your initial reach out or pitch to the brand. Number two, make sure that the brand is cool with you using DM Automation in this brand partnership. And then third is just make sure that you're actually using diem Automation. Make sure that instead of telling people to click the link in your bio, or even worse, putting a link in your caption, tell them to comment the specific keyword and then they'll automatically receive whatever it is, the discount code, the link, the website, whatever, if you'd never heard of, or you've never used, or you're still trying to figure out how to set up and the advantages of DM Automate. I did an entire video about it on YouTube about a year ago. It was called Get Way More Leads and Sales on Instagram with DM Automation. We'll link that down in the show notes as well. So that if that's a strategy you want to learn more about, which I highly recommend that you do, if you don't already know about it, definitely go check out that video. And then finally, last but not least, once the post has gone live, once it's been a week or two, follow up, report back to the brand. Sometimes this will be baked into the contract. Sometimes they'll require you to get give like a 30 day update on stats and insights, sometimes they won't. But don't let that partnership just be a one off deal. If you enjoyed working with the brand, if you enjoyed the process, if you thought the compensation was fair and worth it for you, follow up, maybe you could do a second deal with them. Maybe you could parlay this into a monthly deal where you're going to make a post for them every single month for the next 12 months. Which of course is going to pay a lot more than just one single brand deal. If nothing else, thank the brand for their time, their energy and their trust. There have now been numerous times where I have worked with a brand because their brand partnership manager used to work at a different brand that I had previously partnered with a few years earlier and then they just changed companies. But I'm still in their Rolodex of influencers so to speak. So be kind, treat people like people, thank people, show that gratitude and it can go a really long way way. Speaking of gratitude, thank you so much for listening today. Again, don't forget to check out all those free resources down in the show notes below. And I finally want to end by saying this. Today's episode actually came about because a few weeks back I did an entire podcast about how to make $10,000 on Instagram in 2025 and I briefly mentioned brand deals as a possible revenue stream or income opportunity. And I asked y' all to let me know in the comments if that was something that you wanted me to go deeper on and do an updated podcast about out and a bunch of people responded saying yes. And so here we are. And I say that to say I am reading every single comment that is left on every single YouTube video we have ever put out. So please, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, suggestions, future episodes, topics you want to see covered. If you hate talking about Instagram and you want to Hear more about TikTok, let me know. If you want more podcasts that are just full of ideas rather than full of tips, let me know. Know any feedback, any suggestions, any questions, comments, concerns please put them in the comments. I love hearing from y' all and thank you so much for the support. We are over 50, 000 subscribers now. It is so awesome to continue to see this podcast grow, and it is my commitment to you to continue to improve this show. We're working on some really exciting updates for the remainder of 2025, and some big plans, some big guests, some big episodes coming for 2026. So thank you so much for being here and as always, happy networking.