How to get brand deals when you post to your own audience
A brand deal means a company pays for a spot in front of the people who already follow you. That is a different product from making video for someone else's ad account, and it is won, priced and lost in different ways.
- Brand deals are sold twice: once by being easy to find, and once by asking directly. Most creators only ever do the first half.
- A brand is not buying your follower count. It is buying evidence that your audience does something when you tell them to.
- Median payments per deliverable sit far below the numbers creators quote publicly. Price from the market, not from screenshots.
- Silence after a promising exchange is normal. Budgets move by quarter, and the creator who follows up in six weeks is often the one who gets booked.
- No real brand or agency will ever ask you for money to be listed, vetted or paid out.
A brand deal is a sponsorship: a company pays for a place in front of the audience you built, on your account, under your name. The money follows attention and trust rather than production hours, which is why two creators with identical follower counts can be worth very different amounts to the same advertiser. Winning one is a sales problem with two halves. The first half is being findable, so that a brand searching for somebody like you lands on a profile that answers its questions before a single message is sent. The second half is asking, because most categories never get round to searching at all. What follows covers both halves, the four things a brand checks before it releases money, and the unglamorous reasons promising conversations stop.
Inbound and outbound are two different jobs
Inbound is what happens when a brand finds you. Outbound is what happens when you find the brand. Creators are usually temperamentally suited to one and avoid the other, and the avoided one is normally where the next six months of income was sitting.
Inbound compounds but you do not control the timing. Outbound is fast and controllable with a low answer rate, so it only works if you send enough for the average to appear. Run both. An hour a week on the profile that does inbound for you, an hour a week on messages.
They also feed each other. A brand that receives your message will look at your profile before it replies, so the inbound work is what makes the outbound work land.
How to make yourself findable
Brands and the agencies working for them search in a small number of predictable ways, and nearly all of them are keyword searches rather than browsing. Everything below is free and takes an afternoon.
- Put your category in your bio in plain words. "Toronto skincare and haircare" beats a slogan, because nobody types a slogan into a search box.
- Say where you are. Location is a hard filter on most creator searches, especially for anything involving a shoot or a physical product.
- Give a working contact route. An email on the profile, not an invitation to use direct messages you never open.
- Keep your last nine posts on-category. That grid is the audit, whether you like it or not.
- Tag brands you genuinely use. Social teams read their own mentions, and this is the cheapest inbound signal available to you.
- Keep one public, current media kit link. One click, no permission request, readable on a phone.
None of this produces a flood. It produces the two or three enquiries a year that arrive already believing you are the right person, which are the easiest deals you will ever close.
What a brand is actually evaluating
Reach is the entry ticket and rarely the deciding factor. Once you clear whatever minimum the campaign has set, four other things decide it.
- Whether your audience responds. Saves, shares, and comments containing actual sentences. Bought engagement is visible to anyone who looks for thirty seconds.
- Whether your audience matches theirs. Country, age band, and for anything sold in a shop, city.
- Whether you are safe to put money behind. Old posts, previous collaborations, and how you behave when somebody disagrees with you in public.
- Whether you are easy to deal with. Reply speed, clear pricing, and whether you have read a contract before.
The fourth one is worth more than creators think. A marketing coordinator with a deadline will choose the slightly smaller creator who answers within a day over the slightly larger one who takes a week, every time, and will keep choosing them.
What deals pay, and where the money concentrates
Public rate cards and screenshots of five-figure deals are a poor sample of this market, because what gets shared is whatever was unusual. Medians are duller and far more useful.
| Tier | Median per deliverable | What that usually buys |
|---|---|---|
| Nano | About US$134 | One post or one short video, organic, on your own account |
| Micro | About US$150 | The same, with a wider audience and usually a tighter brief |
| Mid-tier | About US$417 | Often a small package rather than one asset, with formal approvals |
Those medians are reported by OpenSponsorship and they are per deliverable, so half of all deals settle below them. Adjust upward for anything running in paid advertising, for category exclusivity, and for usage beyond an agreed window. Adjust nothing downward for being new, because the discount you give on a first deal becomes the price you are arguing against on your fourth.
CreatorIQ's 2025 study of paid creators found the top ten per cent of earners took sixty-two per cent of all payments. The middle of this market is thin, which is an argument for a handful of clients who rebook rather than for one large deal that never arrives.
Why deals go quiet
This is the most demoralising part of the job and it is almost never about your work. Five things account for most of it.
- The budget moved to the next quarter. Extremely common, and it does come back.
- The person you were speaking to does not control the money and could not get it signed off.
- The slot was filled by somebody the team had already used, because that is the low-risk choice.
- A legal or compliance step killed it, particularly in finance, health, alcohol and anything marketed to children.
- The company is quietly in trouble. You will never be told this one.
The response is mechanical rather than emotional. Keep one list of every conversation with a date against it. Follow up once after a week, once after a month, then once a quarter with something new to show instead of a reminder that you exist. Threads that die in March close in September more often than anybody expects.
When to say no
Turning work down is a pricing tool, and early on it is the only one you have. Every yes to bad terms sets your number for the next brand that asks around, and brands in a category do talk.
- Perpetual or unlimited-territory rights in exchange for a single post fee.
- Category exclusivity with no end date and no separate payment attached to it.
- A product you would not buy. Your audience works this out faster than your accountant does.
- Payment tied to sales you cannot see or audit, with no guaranteed minimum underneath it.
- Approval rights over what you post outside the campaign.
- Anybody asking you to pay for placement, verification, or the release of a payout.
Say no plainly and leave the door open. A sentence along the lines of "that does not work at that scope, but here is what would" keeps the relationship alive and moves the number more often than a flat refusal or a grudging yes.
Questions
How many followers do I need to get a brand deal?
There is no threshold, but there is a shape. Deals at the nano end exist and are paid, and local businesses will work with accounts in the low thousands because the audience is in the right postcode. What changes with size is who approaches you: below about ten thousand you will do most of the finding, above it a slow trickle of inbound starts and you can be more selective. Audience response matters more than audience size at every level, because a brand can read your comments.
Should I approach brands directly or wait to be approached?
Approach them. Waiting is a strategy that works for people who are already well known, which is a circular problem. The realistic mix for a smaller creator is roughly nine deals found by asking for every one that arrives unprompted, and that ratio improves as the found ones build a track record you can point at.
A brand has offered free product instead of money. Is that ever worth it?
Sometimes, and only with the arithmetic done first. Work out the hours the content will cost you, price those hours, and compare that to what the product genuinely retails for rather than what the brand claims it is worth. A trade makes sense for an expensive item you wanted anyway, from a company you would like on your list, with the right to keep and reuse the content. It does not make sense for a twenty dollar item and three deliverables.
How do I price a deal when I have never been paid for one?
Start from the medians rather than from aspiration, then adjust for what makes you specific. If your audience is concentrated in one city, one profession or one language, that concentration is worth more to the right advertiser than raw numbers are. Quote a figure you can say out loud without hedging, and never revise it downward inside the same message as the objection.
Why do brands go silent right after asking for my rate?
Usually because the number landed outside a budget that was decided before you were contacted, and the person has no authority to change it. Occasionally because they were collecting quotes to build a budget for next quarter. Both are worth a follow-up in six weeks rather than a rewrite of your pricing. If it happens on every enquiry in a row, you are probably quoting above the tier of brand you are contacting rather than above the market.
General information, not legal or financial advice.
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