Tips and advice for you, especially if you're a minor influencer

 

Tips and advice for you, especially if you're a minor influencer

WORDBND.COM - Wordlife. Asking what type of content you want to see here on my channel. Specifically, a common request that I always get is for me to talk about brand deals and sponsorships and as someone who has been on both sides of the table, meaning I've been the influencer who's worked with brands and who has been contacted by brands and also as someone who's worked in corporate, having PR experience and working with influencers and choosing which influencers to partner with myself, I know a thing or two when it comes to landing brand deals. 

That's why if you want to learn the five tips and pieces of advice that I have for you, especially if you're a smaller influencer wanting to work with bigger brands and getting Paid for it. Now, the first piece of advice that I have for you is going to sound a little bit elementary, but bear with me because it's so important and that is focus on building a real audience First. Now, I hate to start the video with some tough love here, but I think it has to be said because I cannot count the amount of times that people have reached out to me asking for advice on how they can make money, how they can get paid by these big companies when they themselves do not even have a real audience or community that is willing to stick Around for their free content. 

Because think about it, what makes you think that you have the right to demand money from these brands when you yourself have not made the effort Or put in the time to cultivate a true tribe yourself? Read too: Here are 6 habits that can damage a laptop, do you do? Because at the end of the day, these companies want to work with you, not because they like you, not because of how passionate you are, not because how much you love their products, but they want to work with you to access your audience. 

They want your audience to buy their products and if your audience doesn't even trust you enough or doesn't even like you enough to engage with your own free content, what makes you think that they're going to support the company that you promote? Beyond this, companies nowadays are getting smarter and smarter, especially in the world where everyone can buy followers. Everyone can buy fake engagement. They are starting to do their due diligence in ensuring that the influencers that they're working with is truly going to generate them an ROI and return on investment. That's why if you truly want to be successful in landing paid brand deals and paid sponsorships and build a strong reputation for yourself as a valued influencer or a content creator, you need to focus your time and energy on building a real audience. So, don't go thinking that you need to go buy followers, go buy you know, whatever or use a bot because at the end of the day the trend is going towards quality over quantity. That's why even as a small influencer, as long as your tribe is real and loyal, brands are still willing to pay for that. And the reason why if you're a small or mid level influencer, you're still going to get a good advantage over the larger influencers is because data has shown time and time again that the larger influencers as they grow, their engagement rates drop and also their audience becomes diluted as well.

And what I mean by the audience being diluted is no longer do you have 100% of your following only in North America, but you're going to have an international audience, are going to have audience members from France, from Sweden, from Africa, all these different places because now you are internationally known. However, a lot of the brands in North America, they want to work with influencers that have a very strong following in North America that is eligible to buy their products. If you're in North America, but 30% of your audience comes from France and then the other 20% comes from Russia, then you're going to be less attractive to those brands because half of the people in your audience aren't even eligible to buy their products. Now, of course, brands are still willing to work with bigger internationally known influencers because they have the brand exposure, but when it actually comes to converting sales, it is beneficial to be a smaller or mid size influencer that has a way more targeted audience. So, please don't be discouraged if you don't have 200,000 followers. You're still going to be able to leverage your value with these brands. And we're going to talk about that a little later in this video. But for now, let's hop into the second piece of advice that I have for you, and that is to have a clear niche. Now on this channel, I've already hammered in the fact on why having a niche is important and if you miss the videos, I talk a lot about it in this video right here and also in this video right here, so make sure you check it out to get the full scope, but I'm going to say it again. Having a niche really does come to your advantage, especially when it comes to landing page, brand sponsorships. Like I said earlier in this video, brands want to work with you, not really because of you, but because of your audience and if you can guarantee that your audience is the perfect fit for that brand, they're going to be willing to partner with you again and they're also going to be willing to compensate you. Let me give you an example. My channel or my brand has a very clear niche. I do things centered around entrepreneurship, starting a business, social media and all of that and because I'm very consistent with the content that I deliver, I'm naturally going to attract that type of audience who is also interested in entrepreneurship, starting a business and leveraging social media. As a result, about 80% or even almost 90 to 100% of my audience members I know are guaranteed to enjoy these type of topics and that's going to allow me to leverage myself a lot better with brands that are looking for this type of demographic. This is why on my channel you'll see me recommending a lot of business software companies, a lot of services that are actually beneficial to entrepreneurs because these companies like to work with me cause it's pretty much guaranteed that I have their ideal customer. 

On the flip side, if I didn't have a clear niche and let's say I'm posting fashion videos and beauty videos, then health videos, then relationship videos, I'm not going to look as attractive to these brands because I'm not going to be able to guarantee that 100% 80% or even 70% of my audience is going to convert or be interested in whatever I have to promote for this particular company because like I said earlier, the more that you can guarantee that there is a very good fit between all of your audience members plus this brand, the more chances that they're going to say yes to partnering with you, to compensating you and to working with you. That's why having a niche is very important and I'm going to give you a pro tip. If you are a very small influencer, I actually recommend niching down even more and I know it sounds counter intuitive, but let me give you another example. Let's say you are a beauty influencer and you have less than 10,000 followers. If you choose to be a one size fits all, meaning that you do videos for everything and anything under the sun of Beauty, it's going to be a lot more harder for you to pitch to these companies on why you're the perfect fit. However, if you choose to niche down and instead of doing beauty for everyone, you're now focusing on doing beauty specifically for women who suffer with acne. You're then going to be a lot more attractive to companies who also sell to this type of audience because you're basically guaranteeing that about a hundred percent of your audience members are going to be a perfect fit for the brand that you're thinking of working with. With that being said, if you're a small influencer and you don't have the vanity metrics to back you up, like a big influencer would. Niching down and being very clear on attracting a specific and targeted type of audience is gonna bring you more leverage when it comes to negotiating with these brands. 

Because at the end of the day, like I said earlier in this video, brands care about having a good return on investment. They wouldn't be paying you 0002000100 doesn't matter of dollars if they don't think that they're going to make it back by having you promote their products. With that being said, let's talk about pitching. This leads me to the third tip that I have for you and that is to be data driven. Now back when I was working in corporate and I got the experience of doing public relations, I would get time and time again, influencers that would email me occasionally asking for products because they love my brand so much and because they're trying to grow and it was all about them, but they never really said about what they brought to the table or gave me stats and data of their audience members because as a brand I don't just care about whether you like my products or not, but I want to know whether or not your audience will love my products as well and if you're not giving me the stats and you're not giving me the data for me to understand your audience demographics, how they convert your engagement rates, your impression rates, all of that. Then it's going to be very hard for me to determine whether or not I want to pay you or give you products. Now to help you get started. Here are a couple of ideas and data points that you can share with brands when you are negotiating or when you are pitching. For example, brands are gonna want to know your demographic stats. 

Okay, so what age range is your audience in? Are they mostly female or male? What are their general interests? What stage are they in their lives? So for example, majority of you guys are trying to start your businesses or you're trying to become content creators are trying to build something and therefore many of you are in the beginning stages and that's why a lot of brands that I appeal to are also targeting you guys who are still building up and who is still probably going to need the software, the tech, the tools in place to help you grow your businesses. Read too: Amazon launched a Ring flying security drone, are you interested? Being very specific on this audience type that you've attracted with your channel or with your platform and like I mentioned earlier on in this video, location is very important as well. If you're pitching to a company that's in Canada, they're probably gonna want to know whether or not majority of your audience is also in Canada as well. If you're pitching to a company in Germany, they're gonna want to know whether or not majority of your audience is in Germany or not. That's why for me, I only work with brands that are in North America because 80% of my audience is from North America. Not only this, if you've ever had affiliate links, a really great thing to look at is your conversion rate or your click through rates and leveraging this data to these brands saying, hey, whenever I'd use an affiliate link, I have x amount of conversion, I have x percentage of a click through rate, and that is higher than industry standards. 

 So you know, and you're guaranteeing that people actually buy from you. These are really great creative ways to leverage data in order to spin it and position yourself as someone of value. Not only this, you also want to consider whether or not you're on other platforms as well. Do you have an Instagram? Do you have a youtube? Do you have a blog? Do you have an email list? Do you have a Facebook group? These are things that you can also leverage and especially if you are a smaller on a certain platform, you can leverage your other platforms and increase the value as a whole. So let's say for me on Instagram, I have like 35,000 followers and compared to an influencer that has 100,000 followers, I'm considered a lot smaller. However, I still charge a lot. If I were to ever do something paid on my Instagram because I have an email list, I have a blog post, I have my youtube channel, I have my own business, I have a very loyal following. There's all these other factors that jack up my prices because it's not just Instagram that you're looking at. You're also looking at my other platforms as well. Nowadays as well because there's just so much fakeness on the Internet. I always also like to attach my social blade stats to prove my authenticity and this is something that I think is going to be very beneficial and really shows your integrity. If you straight up share your social blade stats with that brand so that you're letting them know that you are someone that they can trust and someone that is steadily growing. Now at this point in the video, as we're talking about data and stats, I also have another pro tip, especially for you smaller influencers out there and that is instead of focusing on your followers, try to focus on your impression rate. And the reason why I say this is just because you have followers doesn't mean you have influence and if you're actually measuring your success based on impressions that showing to these brands how many times your content was actually seen. Let me give you a concrete example. Now we all know Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, right? Not all of us actually needs to hit the follow button in order to see their content. Maybe some of us will actually creep their profile time to time and look at their content. 

Maybe we'll just see it on our Explore feeds and all of that. That truly shows that Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian have a of influence because they're able to garner a lot of impression. We don't all have to follow them in order to see their content. And that's why I personally feel like impressions is a lot better of an indicator of how far your content actually goes. So all in all, what I'm trying to get at here when it comes to being data-driven, is you cannot just email a company and beg them for free product and beg them to pay you and talk all about me, me, me, me, me, me. You got to explain to them why they would benefit from having you on their team, from them having you as their influencer, as their brand ambassador. You really want to frame how you're going to be a value to someone. And the first way of doing this is by showing them the data. However, there's one thing of just throwing data in an email and there's another of actually positioning yourself in a way that ties back to the company. The way you position yourself in a pitch is going to be the most important thing when it comes to landing these paid brand deals and sponsorships because like I said earlier, you cannot just go into that email talking all about me, me, me, me, me. 

You got to be able to position yourself in a way that benefits the company. Just like going into an interview, you're not going in begging for the position. You're not going in talking all about how much this position is going to help you, how excited you are for all the trainings you're going to get. Instead, you're going to walk into this interview and tell them, Hey, this is what I can do for your company. This is what you're going to see. These are the results that you could get. These are the benefits of you actually hiring me, and that's going to give you a bigger chance of actually landing the job versus sitting there talking about how the job is going to benefit you. You always want to tie it back to the company every single time. Now, as you guys all know, I recently did a partnership with Blinkist and this video right here, and I'm going to share with you a snippet of something that I had sent them in an email I wrote. I have the niche channel of an audience that is dedicated to personal development, social media and entrepreneurship. So right from the get go, I'm explaining my audience interests. This means Blinkist will be getting targeted traffic from an audience that would genuinely care about your service. My community are those who care about their career development, and many of them aspire to start their own online businesses or become content creators that have businesses. This seems like it would be a good fit for Blinkist considering those who read books frequently care about having a consistent upgrade of knowledge, yet have very little time to consume books in full as they're either busy with their nine to fives or working on their business or doing both at the same time. So here I'm really tying back how my audience would specifically benefit a lot from learning more about Blinkist as a company and as a service. Another thing that I mentioned in this email is I wrote, as mentioned previously, the shelf life of a youtube video is incredibly long. And seeing my channel has not yet matured or plateaued yet. I can only see it going up from here. This means there's going to be more prolonged visibility and exposure for Blinkist as the video continues to generate more targeted views and traction over time. So what you've seen that I've done here, me compared to the other channels that Blinkist may partner with, maybe they partner with channels that have, you know, over 100,000 subscribers, which I'm not there yet. I'm trying to really tell them why it's a huge benefit of working with me because I'm still an up and coming utuber and therefore I'm going to have a lot more longevity with that video, so that's why the way that you position yourself is so important and as a smaller influencer it's going to be really helpful if you master this skill. 

Now, the way that I pitch and position myself is going to be very different from the way that you pitch and position yourself. However, as you go through this journey of landing brand sponsorship or working towards landing brand sponsorships, you got to put your thinking hat on and ask yourself how exactly you can position yourself so that the company knows they're going to get massive benefits of working with you. Now using an example that I mentioned previously, if you know that you're pitching to a company that sells in the u s and has a predominantly female customer base and your stats match, that meaning that let's say 80% of your audience members are female and 80% of them also live in the United States, you're going to want to play that up. You're really going to want to highlight that. So all in all, what I'm trying to say is that having data is awesome. Having a clear niche is awesome. Having a real audience is awesome as well, but if you're not able to position yourself to communicate that value clearly to these companies, then it's going to be a lot more harder for you to negotiate a premium rate, which leads me to my next advice and that is know your worth when it comes to pricing. I know a lot of people stress about it and so did I. I had no idea how much to charge for a video, how much to charge for a shout out, all this stuff and because I have my own business, I'm not really someone who focuses a lot on brand deals in general. However, I can totally understand why this is a stressful topic, but at the end of the day you got to realize your worth. You got to understand that these companies want to work with you for a reason. They're there to use you as an advertising platform that otherwise would have costed them a lot if they use traditional advertising like TV, youtube ads and all of that, and that's why there is so much money to be made in the influencer space. Also, you've got to recognize that these brands are probably making a lot more money thanks to your recommendation because your audience members are going to end up buying the products that you shout out. For example, you'll notice that in my youtube description box I have a lot of affiliate links to Amazon and to date I've generated thousands of dollars for Amazon. Yet I only see about 1% of the total sale. So that really goes to show that these companies are truly benefiting a lot from having your exposure. That's why when you're thinking about doing the rates of your packages, you got to not only consider the fact that you're giving this company a lot of advertising exposure because of the trust that your audience has in you, but you also want to factor in the amount of time it takes for you to produce that content in the first place. That's why I get so sad when I see people only making 20 bucks off of a post when they in fact spent the whole day of creating that post in the first place. You're basically making less than minimum wage at that point. That's why the first step when it comes to pricing is making sure that you at least have a solid benchmark. And the app that I recommend to do this is social blue book and I'm going to share my screen and show you exactly how social blue book works. It's a free app and you can also pay for it if you would like. It's a website that you can leverage that specifically looks at your engagement rates, looks at your falling rates on any social media platform like youtube or Instagram, and then it's going to give you a range of what they suggest that you should charge and they base this off of your competitors as well. So it's pretty solid in terms of having a benchmark. So let me share my screen and show you in depth what it looks like. Hey guys, right now I am on social blue book and as you can see I've already created a profile just so that you guys know social Google is something that you could use for free. Hey guys, sorry for this random pause in the video, but I realize as I was going through this screenflow, I actually didn't even explain what social blue book is. Basically, it is a website that benchmarks against other influencers and industry rates so that it can give you an estimate of how much you should be charging for sponsorships per social media platform. With that out of the way, let's just get right back into the screenflow. However, if you choose to do it for free, you can only link one social media platform at a time, so if you want it to see your stats for Instagram or stats or youtube, you either have to pay so that you can add more accounts or you can simply just create new accounts, which is kind of what I did. But basically I want to quickly show you the interface for social blue book. You go into your profile here. Once you've connected to your profile, you can then add your platforms. In my case I've chosen to add at my youtube channel and here you can see the amount of subscribers I have, the amount of views per video, and here it's going to show the suggested price. Then afterwards what you can also do is choose the type of upload that you might be doing for that company. So if it's a dedicated upload for me, it's telling me that my range is around 1000 to 5,000 if it's just a shoutout, it's also going to adjust the prices accordingly. And now you'll see that it goes from 500 to 1000 you can also choose the month of upload for you. So if I'm going to collaborate with a brand in August, I could then click August and it may or may not change the stats, but basically this is a really handy tool for you to at least benchmark what rates you want to charge brands. 

Not only this, if you click more info, you're also going to be able to have a quick peak at all of your stats. But just so you know, a lot of these stats you can still get from your analytics on Youtube or on Instagram. So anyways guys, this is a really awesome way to get a benchmark for free on how much you should be charging brands. Now, with that being said, let's go back into the video now. Obviously just because social blue book is saying something, it doesn't mean that that has to be your rates. For me, I actually charged a lot more than what social blue book suggests because of the other factors put into play. I'm someone that has my own business and therefore if I'm spending time to create assets and to create something for another company that's taking time away from me actually building my own business. So I also factor in how much I would charge for my time on top of the exposure that I'm already giving this company. Not only this, for me specifically, I have a higher engagement rate both on Youtube and on Instagram compared to my competitors. I'm someone who is new and up and coming, which makes me even more attractive. And also I have other platforms that I leverage as well, such as my Facebook group, my Instagram, my youtube, my email list. I have a weekly blog post, I have a weekly newsletter and therefore all of that combined is going to jack up my value like I mentioned earlier on in this video. So with that being said, using something like social blue book is going to give you a really solid base, but there's obviously other factors that you want to put into play in order to jack up your prices and in order to get a better rate for yourself. 

 Now a common question that I get when it comes to sponsorships and brand deals is a lot of people don't want to be a sellout. You don't want to sell too early to your audience. You don't want to make your audience feel uncomfortable. You don't want your audience to feel like you can be sold or that you can be bought by money. And that's why I want you to hit the notification bell because in the next video we're going to talk all about it. We're going to talk about when exactly is the right time to sell to your audience. For me, I didn't sell to my audience for half a year and then afterwards I started talking about my own programs and now I'm at a place where I finally feel comfortable enough to actually accept brand deals because for a very long time I've been approached by countless of companies and I've always turned them down because the trust that I have with you guys is so important. 

So that's why I want you to hit the notification bell because the next video is going to be really important to make sure that you're doing brand deals and sponsorships in a very appropriate way. I talk a lot about being content creators, social media, entrepreneurship, and all the likes of that, so make sure you check those videos out as well. As always, guys, I appreciate you. I hope you guys have a great day, a great week, and a great life, and I'll see you in the next one.