639: Avoid the Free Stuff Trap - How to Secure and Execute Well-Paying Brand Deals with Justin Moore

financial, personal or professional. I'm Megan Porta. I have been a food blogger for 13 years, so I understand how isolating food blogging can be. I'm on a mission to motivate, inspire, and, most importantly, let each and every food blogger, including you, know that you are heard and supported. You are going to want to download our bonus super cut that gives you all the information you need to grow your Instagram account. Go to eatblogtalk.com, forward slash Insta growth to download today.

Does sponsored work feel scary to you? Maybe it feels really intimidating, like you don't know how to approach brands, you don't know how to price yourself. You don't know how to

further a connection with the humans behind the brands. If this sounds like you, you are going to love this episode with Justin Moore from creator wizard inside the episode, he talks through some strategies from a recent book that he is publishing about how to go about this as a food content creator, he talks through his sponsorship wheel framework, which goes from pitching all the way to providing analytics at the end. He talks about a lot of myths, like, you need a huge audience

in order to be able to work with brands. Not true, by the way. And he also touches on that whole free stuff trap, which a lot of brands offer content creators. They offer free product in exchange for promoting their content. This is a really good episode if you are looking to diversify your revenue streams in 2025. I hope you love it. It is episode number 639.

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Justin Moore is a sponsorship coach, author and the founder of creator wizard, a school and community that teaches you how to find and negotiate your dream brand partnerships so that you stop leaving 1000s on the table. His latest book, sponsor magnet, offers a succinct distillation of his ideas and frameworks for securing successful brand collaborations. Along with his wife, April, he has been a full time creator since 2014 and he

has personally made over $5 million working with brands. He also ran an influencer marketing agency for seven years that helped other creators earn millions more. Justin brings a very unique perspective, because not only has he been a creator in the trenches doing sponsorships for years, but by running an ad agency, he has insider knowledge behind how big brands choose which influencers to partner with, and why they

pass on others. Justin's mission is to enable creators big and small to land 1 million paid brand partnerships by 2032. Justin, welcome back. It's been a few years, but so happy to have you back.

for those who are OGs. Remember this like, it wasn't like you just hit this criteria, you know, you have to estimate an application to be approved, to be like an AdSense partner and so, and in fun, fact, my wife got rejected three times before she got in. So it was like a badge of honor to actually get accepted in the early days. But back in the beginning, you know, this was just a hobby. It was never something where it was like, Oh, we're gonna make a bunch of money, you know,

creating content on the internet. That really wasn't a thing. We didn't know anyone who had was making money on the internet. And so for my wife, who was like, just trying to find like minded people who were into skincare and cosmetics and beauty, and that was really what, you know, something that she had a passion around. And so she started, you know, making YouTube videos. And brands started reaching out pretty, pretty early on, but it wasn't offering money. It was like,

hey, we'll give you this free thing. And she was stoked. She was like, yes. We were like, in our early 20s, just out of school, no money. And so, you know, makeup is expensive, as you probably know. And she was like, yeah, $30 hair curler. Please send it over. And so that was for years that was just, she was stoked, like, getting a bunch of free stuff. And then by about 2010, I started going to business school at night. And so I started taking these classes around, you know, marketing and

advertising and negotiating and things like that. And the gears kind of started turning, and I would see all these comments on her posts where it was like, oh, April, thanks so much for telling me about this. I just went out and bought it. Or, you know, I just went to their website. Never heard of this brand. I just picked it up and I started, I told April. I told April. I was like, I feel like we're getting kind of, you're getting the short end of the stick here, like a free $30 hair

curler. I don't think is like providing the adequate value that you're delivering to these brands. And so I said, How about the next brand? Ask them if they have a budget to collaborate with you. And she's like, there's no way any brand is gonna be willing to pay me money. I was like, just try it. And so sure enough, the next brand, it was this thing I'll never forget. This is a skincare brand called Imamoko. And she

said, Hey, do you have a budget to collaborate with me? And they said, Sure, if you can include us in two videos a month, we will pay you $700 a month for six months. And we were like, whoa. Like, that is was so much money, and that's still so much money. And for us, who had, we'd only ever been thinking, like, w2 income, nine to five. Income, that's the most we're gonna

make. The same amount every paycheck. This was the first time in our lives where we're like, wow, there's other ways in which you can make money in this world that is kind of uncapped. There's no ceiling to it, right? And so this was what started And so fast forward, you know, basically a decade, we did 550 everything. sponsorships, personally made over, you know, $5 million doing it. So it was our primary revenue stream as creators. And

so got a ton of experience doing that. And then by about 2015, started thinking, you know, okay, things growing really well for us, but this can't continue forever. There's no way people are going to continue watching us. And we, by that time, we had started multiple YouTube channels. And so we were making content together. I quit my full time job in medical devices in 2014 so this really was kind of the full time income for our family, all the eggs in the one basket. And so I was like, okay,

what can we do? We got the tiger by the tail. What can we do to kind of diversify our income as a family. And so this is when I started trending family, which was an influencer marketing agency to help get deals for other creators. And so I said, Okay, let me parlay all this experience that we had, doing it personally, but now I'm in the boardrooms with these big brands and these big advertisers, where they're saying, Hey, we don't just want to pay you 5k April and Justin, we want to spend a

million dollars now across 200 people. What is the strategy like? What platforms should we be on? What are the types of creators that we should be working with? So it's a totally different conversation. And so ran that business for seven years, paid out millions of dollars to other creators. And so when COVID hit, the business came crumbling down. And so as a lot of you know, businesses, a lot of creators can probably appreciate, who had a really tough time during COVID. So did

my business. I had to lay off all my employees. Was it was like the long, dark night of the soul for me and my family and my business. It was, it was awful. And so I was in this really, really well, just quick side note. The reason that it crumbled was that our biggest clients were like retail, like food and beverage and travel and hospitality, which, if you think back to the pandemic, what are like the three main things that got shut down right around then it was that and so And so it was

terrible. I was in this really low place for quite a while, several months, just I don't know what the next chapter is going to be. And so I started thinking like I kind of have this interesting perspective now, where I've been a creator for many years, doing a bunch of deals, but I also ran this agency, and kind of, you know, understand what the brands are saying behind creators backs, and, like, why they're not hiring them, and why they're hiring other people, but not

those people. And so I was like, let me just make some YouTube videos, you know, to like, kind of scratch this creative edge, right? Like, how do you negotiate? How do you be on a call with a brand? How do you, you know, what are the words that you can use to actually, like, make more money and things like that. And so, you know, Fast forward four years. It led to this really surprising business, which is what I'm called, what I call sponsorship coaching, where I'm not a

manager, I'm not an agent, you can't retain me. I teach you, I educate you, and you keep everything, basically. And so that's where we are today.

following. And then about a year and a half into it, something really interesting started happening was I started having all these kind of non traditional creators reach out, so like people who don't call themselves influencers, like, you know, maybe podcasters, bloggers, course, creators, community operators, newsletter operators, event planners, all these people who are like, I'm not dancing on TikTok, but I still make money through sponsorships. Can you help me?

And so, you know, after this happened enough times, I was like, let me. Let me, let me see if I can serve these people as well. And so, you know, really quickly realized that a lot of the things I teach are universal. And so now I serve these kind of two personas, I would say.

This is one of the biggest challenges and gripes that I hear with, you know, food bloggers and podcasters and any any type of influencers, where, yeah, sponsorships are great when you can get them, but you can never rely on that income, because it's just kind of this one off thing, and then maybe the brand never talks to you again, and that has been the

exact opposite of my wife's and I experience over the years. The vast majority of the deals that we do are these relationships that we built with brands or their advertising agencies, where they just continue to come back to us over and over. And you know, anyone listening to this might be like, oh, yeah, that's easy for you to say you've got zillions of followers, or big, big reach or whatever, and we do not have millions of followers. Yeah, if you added it all up, maybe

we're, you know, just over a million. But like, you know, our individual platforms, we were never the people that had the 10 million followers and the hundreds of 1000s of views all the time, because that wasn't the product that we were selling, the product that we were selling was professionalism, responsiveness. They knew that the assets that we would deliver would hit every talking point with the plum.

They knew that if brands had to come back to us with revision requests, a new voice over, hey, can you say this a little bit different? And we said, Sure, no problem. We didn't say, How dare you violate our creative genius. How dare you? You know, because again, I ran the agent, I ran an agency, and I was on the receiving end of a lot of this where people were just so difficult about something that literally would take like, five minutes to revise. Yeah, and so this mindset of understanding

that it's not just about this one deal. It's about, how do you become their favorite person to work with, even if you're the more expensive than other people, constantly, we would do that when I ran the agency, we would go back and hire people again, even though they were twice as expensive, because we knew we absolutely had to have the content live by a certain date. And we knew that every time we worked with them, they would deliver stuff on time. And so again, like brands are

valuing lots of different things than you may realize. It's not just about how many sales you generate, it's not just how many about how many likes you're getting on Instagram or how many impressions you're getting on your on your blog posts. There's a lot of different things that they value, and these are the some of the things I talk about in the book.

collaborate. How much you charge something like this, right? And so the process for most food bloggers is like, okay, yeah, I negotiate. I tell them how much I'm going to charge. They say yes or no. I produce the content. If they say yes, and then I, publish it, collect the income, collect the money, et cetera. And so it's this very kind of simplistic process, but when I go through this, this eight step process, there's a

lot more to it. So yes, of course, step one is a pitch. And I think a lot of people think of a pitch as like an outbound activity where you're actually reaching out, you're sliding in a brand's DM, or you're sending a note on their press, you know, feel, you know, in a contact form on their website, or whatever. But a pitch, when a brand reaches out to you, you still have to pitch them on why you're the best person for the

job. Because they didn't just reach out to you. In all likelihood, they probably reached out to 20 other food bloggers to say, Hey, who's interested, who, you know, has the best idea for how to bring this partnership to life. And so previously, you may have been mailing it in when a brand reached out to you, but the pitching process is very, very critical. And so it's about, who are you, what are you actually saying? And if you are reaching out to a brand, who you actually

sending it to? So that's step one. Step two is negotiate. So there's lots and lots of things that you can do to actually, you know, upsell yourself, where you're not just spitting back a number and being like, sure it's going to be $1,500 for a blog post and social amplification. You're going to say, hey, here's five. I know you didn't ask for this, but here's five different packages. Hey, did you know that I have a newsletter with, you

know, 5000 of my most engaged audience members on there? Oh, you didn't know that. Great. Here. Maybe you should pick package three instead, because we can send out the coupon code for your food. You know your CPG product over here, right? So there's so many different things that you can do. Is, in fact, that's one of my favorite chapters of the book. Is all sorts of things you can learn there. Step three is contract. This one is terrifying for a lot of food bloggers and creators,

which is like, I don't have I'm not a lawyer. Aren't lawyers expensive. I probably don't want to hire them, because I'll, I'll eat up all my profit if I hire them for like, two hours to review this contract and so understanding what are the things that you need to do to protect yourself? Obviously, I'm not a lawyer, but there's just this kind of some high level gotchas, that mistakes that we made along the way, that I help people avoid.

Step four is concept. This one is a really, really critical one that not enough creators, influencers, bloggers, understand. A lot of times, brands won't even ask you for this. They'll hire you. They say, hey, we trust you. Do your thing. It's great. And then you create, create the content. You send it to them for review, and they're like, this wasn't what we had in mind at all, right? And you're like, I thought you gave me creative freedom here. I don't know if you've ever

experienced this. But this happened enough times to my wife and I were like, okay, even if the brand is not asking us for a concept, we're still gonna give them one. We're saying, Hey, this is what our plan is, of like, how we're gonna do this and allow them to provide some feedback on that. It's way better at this stage, before you've produced anything for to allow the brand a little bit of input into how this thing is brought to life. And so once you get a green light on that

concept, then that's step five, which is produce. So this is where you're actually generating the content, containing the promotion, with the sponsor in a way that you're not going off script. So many creators that we hired when I ran the agency, we would get this thing approved the concept, they'd have an approved kind of talking points. And then they would just go off script. They would do something completely different. They would say something completely different. They would

mispronounce the name of the brand. They would illustrate it improperly. They would demonstrate, oh, that's not how you like use the product, or, you know, so many things you name it. I've seen it. And so this is this. There's a whole checklist in the book of like, how do you actually produce something in a way, where you deliver it to the brand and there's no revisions, right? That that is like the gold And then Step six is that process where you are actually standard.

submitting it to the brand for the feedback, process, right, where they're saying, Hey, we get, you know, one, two rounds of revisions, so to speak, on the blog post or the social media pictures that you generate, the video, whatever. And this is a really difficult moment for a lot of creators, because it's a rude awakening when their the brand comes back to them and says, hey, you need to redo this entire thing. This is not good. It's low quality. How do you respond to that? Do

you charge them more money? Do you do it for free, like I walk through in the book? Kind of this the step by step process of how to kind of understand, how to navigate those scenarios. How do you emerge from that step where the relationship is actually reinforced, rather than there be a bunch of animosity?

Step seven is publish. So, you know, one example here is like, you know, publishing v6 of the asset instead of the proved v7 because sometimes they're like, go back and forth a million times, and then you are like, you kind of mail it in, or, let's say, you know, you publish the blog post and the hyperlink for the brand's website is not clickable. It's just like,

there's no like hyperlink. You can't even click it, or you put the wrong promo code, or, like, there's all these things, you know, that like, people don't think about, but it's like, it could tank the success of the campaign, if you're kind of mailing it in. And then the final step is, step eight is analyze, right? And this is where you're not just sending screenshots of your Instagram insights, or you're not just sending screenshots of the demographic from your blog

dashboard or whatever. You're actually putting together your own reporting, your own kind of slides, of like, how you think the campaign went. Hey, here's some comments I got on the blog post, or here's some responses I got to the email when I sent out an on my newsletter. Or here's some DMs that I got. And this is the big insight, Megan, is you use those insights to pitch the

next campaign. Maybe there was, you know, some negative feedback that you actually got where someone said, Oh, I tried that product two years ago, you know, I didn't like the taste of it, or I didn't, you know, I don't think it's good. It doesn't have good ingredients, right? And and that circling, that feedback to the brand, allows them to say, Oh, well, guess what? We actually have a complete new reformulation of this product that happened six months ago. Maybe we didn't talk about that

enough in in the blog post or in the post. Let's actually make that the next iteration of the partnership. Let's talk about how there's a reformulation, et cetera, et cetera, right? And so this is just an absolute game changer of looking at this process as a wheel, rather than this kind of horizontal step by step approach, and then you literally never talk to the brand again, yeah?

interactions, what you deliver. I love your thing about just analyzing from your perspective, and not just relying on what you know the stats say, and then also relationships, prioritizing creating a relationship with humans, not just the brand, but the humans behind the brand, so that you can continue on.

human, curated, crafted stuff. And I just don't believe this whole thing about AI influencers, and, you know, all this AI content, I think maybe there's going to be a portion of the population who is into that type of thing. But I think that, you know, brands and consumers generally, there's just going to be this segment of people who really look for the human touch on stuff. And so I think this is even more important to

understand. Relationship building and networking and understanding that, because you know, that's how you're going to really weather the storm, I think, as a creator,

there are some brands out there who are like that. However, when you are at the outset of your journey, okay, and you are getting, let's say, you know, hundreds of average views per post on whatever platform that you're on, look at it from the brand's perspective. If you were to reach out to them and say, Hey, let me do an integrated like, blog post for you, or social media posts or something, they're going to look at your platform and they're going to say, You know what, that's

really not going to move the needle for us. Needle for us. And so a much more effective pitch, when you're at the outset, would be to, let's say, for example, do an audit of the brand's social presence. Hey, I'm gonna look at their blog. I'm gonna look at their social media. I'm gonna look Hey, do they have a podcast? Hey, are they on Tiktok? Are they? What is the content that they're posting? Kind of low quality

across those things. Let me reach out to them and say, Hey, I love your brand, but I think you could be telling your brand story in a more compelling way. I would actually love to create some content for you to repurpose on your blog, on your social media, for maybe for paid advertising. I can generate this content for you on autopilot, five to 10 photos, blog posts. Hey, heck, I'll start a podcast for you. I'll be the host. I will interview my friends. I will interview the VP of

marketing from your company. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I will do this for you. And oh, by the way, go take a look at my platforms, because those serve as my portfolio. So this is a very, very different type of pitch. When, when you're in the beginning, okay, and then, yes, let's say that you grow a bit. Now you're getting 1000s of views or impressions or whatever on your post. Maybe it's a combination of consulting

content for the brand to use that you generate. And then, yeah, maybe doing an integration on your platform starts becoming a little bit meaningful. And then, okay, now you're at the far end of the scale, and you're getting, you know, 10s of 1000s of views or hundreds of 1000s, whatever. Yeah, the thrust of what you could pitch now is an integration on exclusively on your platforms. And so I call this the sponsorship continuum.

And so it's very helpful to kind of orient you, of like, wherever I'm at my pitch might need to change so that I can catch the attention to the brand

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So basically, focusing on your strengths and highlighting that in a creative way instead of I feel like the other way is just so old school and maybe not effective anymore. But I love this approach where, what are you good at? What is, what do your platforms show, and what is maybe lacking in the brand that you're looking at?

community. You know you understand the latest trending sound that's happening on Tiktok or Instagram, because you live on those platforms. You know what's doing? Well, brands are not doing this. They don't. Have the bandwidth, oftentimes, especially smaller to medium sized brands, they don't have the bandwidth to pay attention to this stuff. Imagine. What about this pitch Megan? What if you went to a brand and said,

Hey, I will be your extremely online consultant. I will create a Slack room for you, and I will, I will, the moment that I see a sound, a trending thing, like taking off on Instagram reels or tick tock. I will drop it into the slack and I'll say, Hey, here's the angle that I think that you could insert your brand into the into the conversation here, and guess what? I'll make the content for you. I'll do it. I could turn this around in 24 hours. It's gonna be $5,000 a month for me

to be this consultant for you. But don't you think there's a lot of brands would love to have someone you know help them do that because, again, they just, they don't have the bandwidth to do this internally, a lot of brands. So again, like, I love just kind of talking through these creative ideas, because there's just an infinite amount of things that you could potentially pitch to a sponsor.

let me qualify this. Yeah, of course, you loving the product is great, right? But that's table stakes. That's, that's what everyone says when they want to work with brand. Oh my god, I love your brand. I've been using it for three years. That's what everyone says, yeah. However, what they really care about is that you are the conduit for them to access a big pool of prospective customers, ie, your audience. That's what they care about at the end of the day, it's not you, it's your

audience, right? And so if you can have more, if you can have a richer texture of who's in your audience to tell the story of why they're different. If they're holding up two bloggers side by side, you have identical, identical stats, but you over here said, Hey, I've actually done some surveys. I sent out a survey to my newsletter or in my, you know, in my last black blog post, it was a Google form or type form or something, and I asked them questions like, hey, what types

of jobs do you have? Are you married? Do you have kids? Hey, what types of brands and products and services are you using and loving right now? What problems do you have? What's keeping you up at night? When you get this like, deep texture, this tapestry of what is challenging in your audience's life, you may discover something. For example, let's say you're a food blogger, and you do this, like survey, and you realize, like, wow, I didn't realize that 40% of the

respondents of this survey are homeschooling. I didn't realize that that's actually really interesting. Maybe I should go out there and forge a partnership with a company, like, I don't know, ABC, mouse or something. And you might think, Well, I'm a food blogger. Like, how's that relevant? I bet you could probably think of a pretty creative way to integrate a sponsor like that into your into your content, right? And so that now the pitch shifts from, I love you, please pay me brand

to I have. Here's a bunch of people in my audience who already you know are interested in learning about your brand. That is a totally different pitch. Yeah.

the day, they want you to be a conduit to your audience. And that changes everything.

sell my own stuff, right? There's, this is another crowd of sponsor skeptics that I that I talk with a lot, and I want to pull this thread about service, because if it really is about your audience, about your customers, there are things, there are problems that they have that you're never going to be able to solve with your own products. There's just stuff that you're never going to do. And I call it your PSA, your

products, your sponsors and your alliances. It is actually your job to go out there and figure out ways in which you can serve your audience with these three categories. So yes, of course, if you're selling your own things, products, courses, coaching, recipe plans, whatever, that's great, but your audience just told you that they're having marital issues.

Yes, right? That's not as something that you're going to create as a food blogger, but you know it would be really helpful is if you went out there and forged a partnership with Better Help, or you went out and forged a partnership with some brand who helps with this. I'm making up examples here, but you went out there because, again, it's about service. Because guess what, when that person improves their life, improves their marriage, improves their relationships with their

children, they're going to look more favorably to you. So the next time that they're feeling like I need a, you know, busy weeknight meal ideas, I'm going to go out there and I'm going to buy Megan meal plan ideas, because I just have this trust with her, because she introduced me to this. And that last category, the alliances, you better go out there and forge a partnership with your friend who's a coach, who's a marriage and family therapist, or your friend, who's you know, doing

whatever. I'm just, this is an example, but, like, it is your job as a creator, as a blogger, to forge these types of partnerships. And so again, I just, it's this whole mindset shift around it's not about you, it's about how you can help your audience improve their lives.

bit? I know you had your story about your wife and except, and we've all done it. I remember being super excited, too. In the beginning, I was like, what? They're gonna send me a box of potato chips. That's awesome, yeah. But at some point, I felt like, this just feels icky and a little weird, like you pointed out to your wife. Are you sure you shouldn't be getting paid for that. So what do you feel? I mean, is it okay in the beginning? Is it ever okay?

with the brand had offered free product credit. It was like 1000 or two. It was like a clothing site, and my wife was like $2,000 a whole new wardrobe for me. Like, hell yeah, let's go and and then the, you know, they sent over this like, agreement, which, of course, we didn't read, because we were idiots. And so when we saw this commercial, we went back to the contract. We're like, did we agree to let the brand do this?

Sure enough, right there in black and white, broadcast TV rights we had signed away, wow, that to the brand in exchange for Product Credit, basically. And so that was a really tough lesson that we had to learn, because, you know, there's

dangers in accepting free stuff that you may not realize. You may think it's harmless, but, I mean, a lot of these, there's a lot of these platforms now where you may not realize it, but they're saying they're sending you a link to say, hey, just fill out your information here, fill out your shipping address. We'll send you the free thing. And then just, you know, check these two boxes here that you're agreeing to the terms of this gifting opportunity. And you open, a lot of people don't open

the end. Look, read this stuff, but it says in there you're giving them paid usage rights. You're given in perpetuity, sometimes forever, to like, use this content however they want. So there's like consequences to not really understanding the free product stuff. And so one of the things I talk about in the book, I have a whole section of these, basically these scripts. I have 15 scripts in the book where I say, hey, if the brand says this

to you, here's what you should say in response to that. So you shouldn't say, Oh, I'm only focusing on paid partnerships right now. Let me know if you have a budget, which is what a lot of people say. You're actually saying different things. So for example, if the brand is saying, Hey, join our affiliate program or join our ambassador program, you'll make 20% you know, commission whatever when you drive sales,

is a common one. So here's what you say to them. You say, hey, yeah, super excited to you know, learn more about your affiliate program. Gonna check it out? Just out of curiosity, do your affiliates also grant you the rights to repurpose their content for ads, because that's what I specialize in. Let me know if you'd like me to send over a few investment options for what that might look like and so, well, Oh, hold on a

second. Here, we're pivoting a little bit here. Maybe the brand had never, no, they think to themselves, they're questioning their strategy. No, we're actually not getting the rights to repurpose the content that our affiliates are generating. In fact, we have very little control over the content that the affiliates generate or the ambassadors generate, right? Let's actually talk with Megan, because this is interesting. I

never, never, never considered this. And so again, now you're differentiating yourself from the, you know, 100 other food bloggers that are being like, Oh yeah, sure, sounds good. I'll join your affiliate program. And of course, this is it going to work in every situation. But again, there's, there's so many different ways that brands are going to say, we're not going to pay you, like, Oh, our product is expensive, so that should be

compensation enough. Or, Oh, how about we do a trial, and if it goes well, maybe we'll consider paying you down the line. There's all these various ways that. And so instead of tuning all that stuff out, you have to be saying different things. And so this is a lot of what it. Talk about in the book.

vent. Go vent. To your group chat. Hello, private group chat of with your friends. No brainer. No brain, because brands are watching even if it's not a brand that even if it's not that brand. One of the things that we had to do Megan, when I ran the agency, is we worked with a lot of kind of traditional fan, you know, very brand friendly, brand safe

brands, and they were very averse to any sort of risk. And so one of the exercises that we had to do is we had to go and audit people's platforms to ensure that they were family friendly. And so even if you were spic and span, squeaky clean on Instagram, if you're talking crazy on Twitter, that could still blow back to the brand, and there'd be a PR, crisis. You've seen people get canceled. You've seen the brands

get pulled into this. This happened, actually, Megan, where a create, we had done a deal with a creator, and then maybe a year later, they had gotten embroiled in some crazy crisis. PR, you know, national news was like, you know, influencers gone bad, this type of idea. And then people went into like, you know, the last 100 posts that this, you know, partner, this influencer had done on Instagram, and found the

partnership that the brand had done a year ago. And then now they're contacting the brand, their customer service, and they're blowing them up. How dare you. Is this the type of person that you like, want to partner with, and this type of thing? And so this is a real danger for brands. And so you just have to think twice in terms of how you behave on the internet.

little guy or gal. And I've done 1000s of deals, literally between myself and the agency, and I could count on like, one hand the number of deals that truly went south. And I just didn't see anyone saying out there on the internet, no, like, brand deals can be awesome. Sponsorships can be awesome, but again, you have to be professional. You have to like,

you know, be kind, you know, all these things. And so writing the book was as much about introducing this alternative perspective around sponsorships.

best at. I just want to get someone to handle the business details for me, and I'll just pay them a cut 20, 25% whatever. That seems like the best scenario. And so what they do is they completely check out of the process. They put their manager's email address in their bio for business inquiries. They don't have any like, they really don't. They're just kind of checked out left field. They don't know what's happening. So when my agency would reach out, we say, Oh, this creator looks

good. It would be a perfect fit. We see their managers email in their bio. We reach out to the manager and say, hey, we'd love to collaborate with your client, basically. And the manager would said, Oh yeah, you know, she's probably interested. But hey, are you looking for additional creators to partner with? Because I've also got this roster of like 19 other food bloggers. Are any of these people interesting? And of

course, I never did that. I thought that was so unethical, because it's like, you know what happens is a brand who doesn't have those moral qualms, they would say, Oh yeah, those three other food bloggers are better and cheaper. I'd actually like to go work with them instead. And so you were the one who sourced the opportunity, and you had no idea. You just lost the deal, because, again, your manager doesn't care where the 20% comes from. They don't care whether it's you or someone else

on their roster. And so that is one story that was just like, it's a microcosm of, like, there's a lot of unscrupulous people in this industry, and of course, there's some great managers out there. But again, if sponsorships is one of the major ways in which you're driving revenue as a creator, as a blogger, I think there's no one else that's ever going to care about this stuff more than you do, which is why I think you have to be your own advocate. You have to learn this stuff.

What I'm not saying is, don't have a team. I have a team. But what I'm saying is it makes way more sense to hire a VA, train them up. Hire an ops person, train them up in your methodology. You own that expertise in house, because, again, the brand wants to work with you. They don't want to

work with your manager. So if you can get on a 30 minute phone call and just like, hash out some ideas that is such a high ROI, a high return on investment activity for you as a blogger, as a creator, and it's going to lead to these kind of recurring partnerships I was talking about,

sign up for. Is great, new latest, latest, newfangled thing. And I would just be like, sure sign up. I'm gonna sign up. Sounds good, whatever, kind of annoying, but sure sign up. And so there was this one platform that we signed up for. Didn't hear anything, no opportunities for like, six months, and then they sent us a $30,000 opportunity after six months, because it was like, it was just that campaign we happened to be the perfect fit for, and all the other ones that they had

previous to that weren't. And so my perspective is, like, beyond them all, you do have to be careful, though, because sometimes, again, those predatory terms in the agreements, you're not reading them, you're just clicking a bunch of boxes and not boxes and not reading it. You do have to

be careful, and sometimes they're negotiable. Like a lot of people don't think that they are, but you you know you're not gonna lose by saying, hey, yes, I'm interested, but we need to cap the usage rights to three months instead of forever or something like that. Like, a lot of times brands would be like, okay, like, it's never, it's never hurts to ask. So I am a fan of being on them, but you just need to protect yourself.

is, can be frustrating. There is a hair that we need to split here about platforms, though, is that sometimes the brand, the person reaching out to you, is actually from the platform. The brand has actually hired them and said, hey, they have like, this VIP tier where, hey, you pay us 100k and we'll actually handle the campaign for you. This is what the platform is saying. And so the person reaching out to you is works at

the platform. And so yes, those are harder to negotiate because they have no incentive to, like, you know, really deal with you. But a lot of times it's actually the brand man, like the influencer marketing manager directly at the brand, and they're using the kind of self serve software feature that the

brand has to actually reach out to creators. And so don't, don't, like, you know, dismiss these platform inquiries because we've done deals where they were, like, five figure deals where, yeah, it was through one of the platforms, but it was actually the directly, the person from the brand reaching out, just using the software tool to help organize the campaign.

campaign report. What does that mean? So at the end of the campaign, what most people are used to doing is just sending in screenshots to the brand. And maybe the brand was cool with that. They were like, Okay, thanks. You know, send your invoice, send your tax paperwork, we'll pay you now,

and that's all they asked for. And so you're thinking, like, Justin, this seems like a lot of work, but again, going back to this, understanding the qualitative aspects, if they're measuring you against the five or six or 10 or 50 other people that they worked with, if you're the only person that is submitting this report and saying, like, here's how I think the campaign went. Here's how I think there was some like, additional opportunities. Here's some things that I could have

done better. Having that humility, having that low ego, is. Watch a change, a game changer. Here's another thing that's going to be in your post campaign, report your testimonial for the brand. You're going to record a 30 second or 60 second video where it'd be like, Oh my gosh, I loved working with your brand. It was so great. You know,

here's my audience. Loved it for these three reasons. Can't wait to work together on the next, next idea, when they have their all hands marketing meeting talking about this campaign. What do you think they're gonna do? They're gonna play your video in front of their entire team, and the VP of Marketing is gonna see that video. And then the next quarter, when they're running their next campaign, they're gonna tell the marketing manager, Hey, make sure we get Megan, that person did that

video for us. She was good. This is how it happened. This is how it works. I'm telling you like it's it could be something as simple as that, just like differentiating yourself, you know, from from everyone else that they're working with,

sometimes it's just a simple exercise. I can't tell you how Just something short and sweet that makes you stand out to the many people have gone through my course or gone through my coaching program, who have said that the post campaign report is gold brands will often offer a second campaign from that alone. visual connection to people, remember that right? 100% Yeah, so game important, don't neglect the post campaign is your message.

understand this theory. Okay, but I'm going to give you, you, you, I know you usually ask for a quote, and here's my quote to wrap this up. Okay? Nelson Mandela famously said, I never lose. I either win or learn. And this is what you do when you ask the brand this question, you say, Hey, how'd it go? They're either gonna say, hey, it was awesome. And then Now is your turn to, like, pitch them again for the next campaign. Oh, great

to hear. Was awesome. Let's work together again, right? Or if they say, well, it was just okay, like, when average, you know, because they're almost never gonna say it sucked. They're gonna probably say it we're like, when average. And so that's great. That's great info. Okay, great. Like, let's talk about, why do you think that is? I have some ideas for why I think, you know, it could have, you know, some improvements I could have made. And that's so much better than sugar coating

it. It's so much better than being like, it was awesome. It was great. You know, the brand is going to appreciate the fact that you're being objective about this, because they're being measured objectively by their boss or their client. If it's an agency, you better believe it. So if you can be objective about it, it makes their job so much easier. It makes it seem so much you you, it makes you seem so much more

credible. And so I just, I love this quote, because if you can have that perspective with during these relationships with brands, it's going to totally set you apart.

free bonus when you purchase the book. I've got all those scripts that I was talking about. I've got tons of checklists, like you name it. There's lots of juicy stuff in there. So yeah, sponsormagnet.com.