Finance Mini-Series: How to Become a Sponsor Magnet with Justin Moore

Hello. Hello, Anne from the Food Blogger Pro team here. Thanks for listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This is the third episode of our finance miniseries sponsored by Cookie Finance, and we're sitting down with Justin Moore from Creator Wizard. You'll hear Justin's insights on the world of brand partnerships and learn about his proven approach to securing long term sponsorships. He walks us through his sponsorship wheel framework which helps creators craft customized proposals that align with brand goals and foster genuine, lasting relationships. It's not just about pitching for a quick deal. The name of the game here is to create a foundation for ongoing collaboration that benefits both parties. Justin also emphasizes that negotiation should feel like a conversation, not a one sided transaction. Understanding what both you and the brand are looking for and being flexible with pricing can pave the way for new opportunities. By mastering these skills, creators can turn sponsorships into a steady revenue stream while building strong, meaningful brand connections. We hope you've enjoyed this finance mini series thus far. If you do, we'd really appreciate it if you would leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts. And now, without further ado, I'll let Bjork take it away.

Justin, welcome to the podcast.

What's up, Bjork? I'm stoked to be here, man.

Yeah, we're going to be talking about something that I get a lot of questions about. We have experience in, but I don't necessarily have expertise in, which is all things sponsors, working with brands. And one of the great things about this conversation that we're going to have is you're not just somebody who's an expert on it because you've decided to create content around it. You actually went through the experience of building content, brand, working with sponsors, partnering with brands. So you've done it, you've been through it and now you've kind of immersed yourself in the world of working with brands and sponsors. So talk to us about that first phase. What was it like as you created content and we're actually in the weeds doing this.

Yeah. So I gotta first out give a, give a big shout out to my wife because my wife April is really the one who started this journey. I, you know, I was in medical devices prior to this, so I was not a creator really. But she started her first YouTube channel actually in 2009. So like way back in the day, this was way back before. They're like the partner program was just starting. Like you could not make money like on AdSense. You know, like everyone is like, oh yeah, that's a, that's like a totally Obvious thing to do as a creator because back in the day, it was like very much just kind of for a hobby. And so her first channel was all around beauty and cosmetics. But very quickly after that, we started a cooking channel. So we actually have done tons of deals of partnerships with. With food brands over the years. But real quickly, Bjork, it was not compensated partnerships that we were doing in the beginning. It was free stuff. And we were stoked about it. We were stoked about it, right? We weren't just like, you know, we were just like, oh, cool, free bag of potato chips, carton of whatever, like, send it over, let's go. You know, we were in our early 20s, no money, you know, so like, free stuff was. Was dope. Like, we loved that for. For years. But what happened was that I went back to school to get my MBA around 2010 and I started taking these classes all around, like, and marketing and negotiation and all stuff I'd never really immersed. I was an engineer by my background, and so I never really thought about this stuff. But the more I thought about the value that my wife April was providing to, you know, these brands who were offering her free stuff, I would constantly see these comments on her posts, like, oh, thank you so much. I've never heard of this brand before. I just went out to the store and bought it, you know, or, oh, I just went to their website. I just, you know, bought it. Awesome. Thank you. You know, free stuff just started feeling like kind of a raw deal, you know. And so really what happened was I just said tape on one day. I was like, just, why don't you email them back and be like, hey, do you. Do you have a budget to collaborate with me? And she's like, there's no way a brand is ever going to, like, pay me money.

Yeah.

I was like, just try it. And. And so, sure enough, she did that next brand and hey, do you have a budget to collaborate with me? And they came back and said, sure, if you can talk about us in two posts a month, we will pay you $700 monthly.

Yeah.

And that was a stratospheric shift for us because we had only ever made basically W2 income, 9 to 5 income, like same amount every month. And so this was like, I think kind of the first. There's this first step down a huge journey of, you know, we've done over 500 sponsorships personally and made over $5 million working with brands. So it's like it has become. It was basically our largest revenue stream as creators for Many years. So, yeah, like you said, like building up this expertise around how do not just get a brand to hire you once, but repeatedly.

Yeah. And it, it feels like the first step is even just opening the door to revenue. Okay, we can make money doing this. Once you do that, then you start to get into that world of hey, what does it look like not only to make money from this, but what does it look like to have it recurring? And what does it look like to increase the value of what I'm offering or even just the positioning of it? I saw one of the testimonials on your site. Somebody talked about, you know, going into it, thinking they're going to make 1500 coming out of it, making 8200. And I think what it takes often is either kind of having a lucky experience of stumbling into it and a brand being like, what's your budget? And that being the moment of like, oh, they're asking a budget, that means they're going to pay for, for this, or seeing somebody hearing from somebody else telling you, saying, no, actually you can make more from this. And my guess is that has been your experience with many of the people that you've worked with, creators, brands that you've worked with, companies where you can open the door to say, hey, you are either undercharging. You could make this into a recurring relationship because you've seen not only $5 million worth of deals with your own content that you're producing and partnerships that you're doing, but also thousands of other examples of creators you've worked with. So let's say it's a, a typical look inside of a creator business who's trying to or currently working with sponsors. What are the things that you would place at the top of the list that are most often going to be the fine tuning or major tuning that you do in order to start that process of leveling up what they're doing and also capturing all of the value with what they're creating.

There's a lot of different directions we could go with this question. The first thing I'll bring up is I've actually codified this optimization process into something that I call the sponsorship wheel, which is an eight step framework that I teach in my new book, Sponsor Magnet, around how do you actually systematize this thing about working with and collaborating with sponsors? And so step one, just as a real quick overview, step one is pitch. Step two is negotiate. Step three is contract. Step four is concept. Step five is produce. Step six is feedback. Step seven is publish. And Step eight is analyze. And we can go into, you know, each of these over the course of the conversation in a bit more detail. But what I would like to answer this question by saying is that it's actually the least sexy steps. The, you know, the concept, the production phase, the feedback phase, those kind of middle steps there. I have found over the years that it's those things. It's actually becoming a true professional in the execution phase of the deal. That's when the brand decides whether they're going to hire you again or not. Really. It's like, wow, this person was amazing to work with. Even if they were maybe a little bit more expensive than some of these other partners that we were working with, we're just going to go back and keep hiring them over and over again because it was so awesome.

Why do you think that is? Like, if you could tap into the mindset of the brand, who's paying the creator? What do you think the reasoning is for going back to that creator?

Dude. So we didn't even get into this, but in 2015, I actually started an influencer marketing agency. So basically parlayed a lot of the expertise that we had working with brands to getting deals for other creators. And so I can answer this question very credibly because I was in the boardrooms with these big brands and advertisers where they were saying, hey, we don't want to just pay you. April and Justin, 5, 10, 15K over here. We want to spend a million dollars across 20, you know, 200 creators. Tell us what the strategy should be, what types of partners should we working with? What should, you know, give me, you tell us basically is what would happen. And so I was afforded this really interesting window into the mind of a brand of why they had, why they would decide to, like, work with someone a bunch of times and why they would put other people on a list, be like, never. We never want to work with this person again. And a lot of it came down, surprisingly, Bjork, to some of the intangibles. I would say, for example, if a brand came back to a creator and they said, hey, you mispronounce the name of this CPG brand wrong or our product wrong. Or they said, hey, you demonstrated this incorrectly. Like, this is not how you're supposed to show our product or whatever. And then the creator would be like, how dare you? This is, you know, you're violating my creative genius. And no, it's going to be $3,000 more money to do this. You know, two minute voiceover. Change or whatever, you name it, dude, I've seen it all because I was on the receiving end of this, running my company for sure. And so it's these, it's the small game, I call it these things where it's like, you know, the brand just, yeah, you may have a million followers or you know, a bunch of page views on your blog, but if you're just a nightmare to work with, it's just not worth it to them anymore. And so you know what you notice what's conspicuously absent from my answer is following reach views. A lot of times it doesn't, it has nothing to do with that. It's about the relationship building aspect. And just, I don't know, just remember like these people are human beings. These brand contacts, these people at the agencies, they're human beings and if you could just make their life easier, that goes a long way.

Yeah, I think sometimes you can forget that and it feel especially if a lot of the communication is email or messaging, you can forget, oh, this is actually somebody, an individual, it's their job. They have a boss who's coming to them wanting to make sure they get their stuff done on time, they get the deliverables out the door. And so that reminder that hey everybody, you're interacting with this human. And a lot of times the decision to work with somebody ongoing is do I like working with this person? Is this person quick to respond? Is this person helpful when I give feedback and saying like yes, I can do that. But my guess is there's also the initial decision that a brand would make when looking at somebody's following to see if they're going to reach out or to see if they are going to respond to an email that somebody has sent. So how about on that early side, you know, taking. You talked about the wheel, the pitch side. Like if, if the in between, on, on the wheel, as you get into it, the decision is made around probably does this person produce good content? But also is this person good to work with? How about on the early side, on the pitch side? How are brands making those decisions around do I want to work with this person?

Okay, so let me, let me actually share something that is a big mistake that people make is they, they realize, they think that there has to be a. You know, one of the biggest mistakes that I think people make when it comes to the actually actual pitching phase is thinking that it's all about them as a creator, as an influencer, as a blogger, when in reality, sorry to say this, but the brand doesn't really care much about you.

Sure, yeah.

You saying, oh, I love your. This product. My family has eaten it for, you know, five years, 10 years. I'm a huge, you know, fan of it. That's what everyone says, right? Like, that's literally what everyone says who is trying to reach out to the brand, is trying to talk to them. What the brand cares about is, does your audience have an affinity for their brand or their product? And what this should lead the. The exercise that is actually required as a blogger, as a creator, is not just learning about the demographics of your audience, which is fairly easy to find in social platforms or in the dashboards, whatever. You know, what's harder to find and actually requires a little bit more work is learning about the psychographics of your audience. So the form that this takes is, okay, you know what? I'm gonna need to actually send out a survey and say, hey, audience. You know, hey, friends, I want to learn more about you. I'm planning out my content for 20, 25 or the next few quarters, and I want to make sure that I'm serving you. Can you tell me a little bit more? Are you married? Do you have kids? What types of jobs do you have? What's keeping you up at night? What problems do you have? What brands and products and services are you using and loving right now? So let's say that you send this survey out and, wow, you are shocked because 35 to 40% of the respondents of this survey you discover are homeschooling families. I don't know. I'm just making this up. Right. But let's assume that. Right. You know what would be a really interesting partnership for you as a food blogger? If you. If you uncovered that maybe you should go out there and forge a partnership with ABC Mouse, a reading app or something that is going to help your audience. And so, again, it's not a food brand.

Yeah, yeah.

It's about. I bet you could think of a. Probably a pretty creative way to integrate that into your content. Right. And so I think that I love starting here when it comes to the pitch because I think a lot of food bloggers get very boxed in and thinking, like, I. I just don't really know what types of brands I could partner with. It's the same old brands. I'm seeing them all the time. But I think that this explodes the potential of, like, you know, potential partners out there.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting. Even thinking of. Our girls go to preschool, kindergarten, three days a week, but we have a. We're ABC Mouse family. Like, even when you say that, and immediately I start thinking about, oh, what would that look like if we were to partner with ABC Mouse as a company, we use. A lot of the people in our world, I think, are kind of in the following. Like, for pinch of Yum would say, you know what? I think we have kids similar ages. Like, suddenly you're able to speak to that audience. So in, in the surveying of your audience, in asking those questions, is it for you to get ideas? Like, is that the purpose of it? Then you can take that to a brand and say, hey, I asked my audience these questions. Here's what they said. So we feel like this would be a good match and a good partnership.

Dude, think about how much better of a pitch that is than, I love your tool. I've been using it for three years. Versus, here's a big pool of prospective customers that are saying they're having an active issue with this in their family, in their life, in their business. And it's so much more of a compelling pitch. And the other thing, too, about this idea is that they may have never considered targeting this customer Persona or consumer Persona before. They may have only been working with lifestyle or mom influencers on the Internet or something. Family creators or whatever. Never tried food bloggers before. That's. That's actually a really interesting one, but it's kind of a little bit ancillary or tangential to their normal market, but pretty compelling. So again, like, a big part of this is, like, now you're differentiating yourself too, when you reach out to these, to these sponsors. So I do think the other really fascinating thing about this surveying strategy, Bjork, is that you might uncover new types of content that you should maybe create.

Sure.

Right. Knowing that your audience has these issues, that's great.

So let's say somebody does this, they send out this survey, they start to get to know their audience better. Not only are they getting ideas for how they could shift their content, they're getting ideas for brands that they could reach out with. With. Reach out to. How do you then start to form up that pitch? And at what point does money enter the conversation? Because it's one thing to say, we would love to partner with you, and we have some ideas for what that could look like. But it's another thing to say, here's exactly what we imagine the deliverables could be and how much we think we should get paid for it. Or is that not even the right way to think about it?

So let's say that you hook the brand. Right. You send out a pitch or. Actually, real quick, can we clarify something about the pitch? Because this is important. A lot of people think of a pitch as an outbound activity. They think about it. I'm reaching out. I'm pitching the brand. I'm saying, hey, I would love to collaborate with you, but if a brand submits an inquiry on your contact form on your blog saying that they were interested in partnering with you, you still have to pitch them.

Yeah.

Because they probably reached out to 20 other food bloggers.

Sure.

Not just you. And so you still have to convince them that you're the best person for the job. So that's an important distinct, I think.

As to why in every relationship you are pitching.

Yeah, in every relationship. Exactly. Right. So it's just important to note. Okay, so let's talk about you hook them, though. Okay. They're interested. They're, you know, they're wanting to move forward. A mistake that a lot of food bloggers make, I think, is just jumping right to the contract phase. There's not much. Not much negotiation that is happens. Maybe the extent of the negotiation happens over email. My. My sincere, earnest advice is try to get on a phone call with the brand, even if they're not asking you for that, because there is something about establishing that initial rapport. Again, they may be holding you up to 20 other people that they're kind of kicking the tires on, so to speak. And you're the one who is asking for this call. You're learning. You're asking smart questions about the campaign, about their product roadmap, about, you know, what's going on in their industry, supply chain issues. I don't know. You do your research about, like, whatever the brand is, it seems, is important to them. And then not only does that establish that beautiful rapport, but inevitably at the end of calls like that, they will say, oh, this is. This is really great, Justin. Thank you so much. Okay, so, like, give us a ballpark. Like, how much do you charge normally when you, you know, collaborate with a brand like ours? And so this terrifies people. So I understand why people don't want to get on phone calls with brands, but there's a very specific. And you can almost verbatim just pause this podcast and kind of just write this down. Almost a verbatim script that I talk about in the book is you basically say, hey, instead of getting back to it, you know, again, instead of getting backed into a corner and just stammering and spitting out a number, like a thousand. Right. And then you, you know, cry about it in the shower later or something. Not that I've ever done that. And. And so instead of that, you say, hey, thank you so much. This was a really, really useful call. I got a lot of great information. I need to think about this a little bit more. And what I would love to do is I would love to put together a proposal of how, you know, we could. We could collaborate on this. And what I usually do is I'm going to put together three to four different packages of how we could bring this partnership to life. Do you have a sense of what I should set those three to four tiers at? From a budget feasibility perspective, this is very different than asking what is your budget? Because if you ask, what is their budget, the brand doesn't want to tell you. They want a stonewall. We don't know this type of thing. And there's no wiggle room. Remember, they're talking with 20 other people. Remember, I ran this agency for many years, and what would happen is our client would hire us. They would say, here's 100k, we want to work with 10 people. You go figure it out. And so we would have to, like Tetris. I call it Tetris, the budget. Together, everyone's charging different amounts. And so if this one food blogger over here charged this much and we just couldn't make it worth work because of the Tetris thing, we just wouldn't be able to move forward with them. And so your goal is providing some option, some package for the brand to move forward with you at. Whether that's package one or package five, it doesn't matter, because your approach as a. As a. As a creator, as a blogger should be this, what I call kind of this Moneyball approach. If you ever saw this movie, it's like you kind of build a business hitting singles and doubles all day long. And so this is shocking for maybe people to hear, but 75% of the time, when you ask that question about the budget ranges, they will tell you, I've done this across hundreds of negotiations. So my students, they'll say 1, 2, 3K or 5, 10, 15K or 100, 200, $300, whatever. So not only do you get insights into what, you know, where you should, you know, kind of arrange this proposal as well as probably how much time you should spend on it, but about 25% of the time, they. They'll still stonewall. They'll say, we don't know. You tell us. We've never done this before. And my Advice in that scenario is you still give them packages, but package one, which is like the lowest amount has to be your, what I call your hell yeah number, which is basically like, you know, if they move forward with that, you have to say, hell yeah, let's go. I'm excited, I'm stoked. Not, oh, shoot, I do this now. Oh God, I got to like. And you're resenting them at the outset. So again, I understand that this is, it's kind of an art and a science when it comes to this stuff. And you know, I, of course I have calculators and all that stuff in my programs and stuff, but like, at the end of the day, it's about what gets you excited and start from there.

It's interesting. The. I had a conversation with somebody who they have a outdoor, like a multiple outdoor sites that they use and they talked about the brands that they were working with. And this was, you know, doing like seven figure deals sometimes.

Okay.

And one of the things he was talking about was in those situations where there is, you know, somebody is reluctant to give a budget number, they would say, well, we usually work. This is him now saying it. We usually work with packages that range from 10 grand to 250,000. But one of the things I haven't thought about that I really like is giving the brand the opportunity to tell you what those numbers are. Can you talk about the reasoning behind having somebody else give you those numbers as opposed to you giving those numbers and kind of the psychology behind that? When you are in the pitch slash.

Negotiation stage, they're very much as like an anchoring. It's a psychological kind of negotiation principle that like they say it's kind of like the first person who says that number loses kind of. Right. Because you're anchoring kind of where the negotiation, you know, the range will. Will be. I do think that there is this phenomenon. I can't, I can't quite, you know, articulate how powerful it is when you're on a phone call with someone and it's. You've developed this rapport after over 60 minutes or over 45 minutes where when you ask this question, it, it feels like a reasonable question. It's like, hey, how can we make this? Let's just. I really want to make this thing happen. Like you, you tell me like, what, what, what do you think is like, just tell me, be honest with me. Like, you know, what are you working with here in terms of the budget range? I want to make sure that I send over a proposal that's like feasible that we could like, you know, because I don't want to like, do all this work. You can even say this, you know, like, I want to make sure I don't just send something over that's like totally in the wrong ballpark. And then it's like, we're not even going to make this happen. My motivation is to like, make this happen. So you tell me, brand, like, what, what's the, what's feasible? The other thing too here, man, is that like, I think what a lot of food bloggers have a habit of doing is they may have a media kit that they is pixel perfect and they've worked really hard on it. And they may have a page in there that has some prefix packages. They say, package 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This basic package gets you the blog posts and this package two gets you the social amplification and the, you know, whatever they have. Some things that they've pre identified may or may not be pricing on those things. Which by the way, if you have pricing on your media kit, don't do that. Delete that. Okay, a little bit. Yeah. And. But what happens is that when a brand sees that, when a brand sees that prefix thing, it'd be like you go to the doctor and you have this ailment. You go into the waiting room and the doctor walks in and you open your mouth to kind of start telling them about your symptoms. And the doctor says, shh. They take out their prescription pad and they just write a random prescription on there and be like, here you go. And they leave. That's what you're doing when you're not asking the brand, hey, tell me about your problems, tell me about your objectives, what are your symptoms so that I can prescribe a customized solution to you.

Yeah, you are an expert, you are a professional, and you are a professional in creating content that influences people in a certain way. They take action in a certain way. And what you are doing in that initial meeting is understanding the ailments of the brand and how you can potentially help with that. Well, we have a new product that we're launching. We really want people to be aware of it. We want to educate people on, you know, this new consideration for like, in our case, we worked with a brand, Nordic Ware, Minnesota company. There's PFAS and these chemicals and they wanted people to understand why that's a bad thing. And, and why they're moving away from PFAs. And so it's like, oh, that's really important for us to know if we hadn't had three touch points to learn more about that, we wouldn't have had the context to say, here's how we think that could work well on the multiple different platforms, the multiple different types of content that we can create here are the ones that we think, with our 15 years of experience, would be helpful for your specific situation. And then from there saying, okay, what does that then look like to work together to fulfill this so we can get you what you want and then we can be fairly compensated within that. So talk to me about not including pricing within a media kit or when you send that over, is that kind of because of this specific situation where it's like everyone is going to be different in terms of the package that you are creating?

Yeah, 100%, man. So, you know what, if there's one big takeaway that I hope you get anyone listening from this conversation is that you do not have standard pricing because what you pitch to every brand is going to change based upon their ailments. You were mentioning a second ago around learning what's important to the brand. I've actually codified this into something that I call the ARC Framework. Arc. So basically there's three goal types, types that every brand is going to have when they want to collaborate with you as a food blogger. A is awareness. So as you mentioned, right, they've got this PFAS initiative that nordicware has. They want to spread the word about this. People don't really understand what this means. Or maybe it's a seasonal promotion. Maybe they were only available in the uk, now they're available in the us. That's kind of an awareness play. Right? The R in the ARC framework is repurposing. So the primary reason that they want to hire y' all is to take the content that you generate and use it elsewhere on their website, on an E commerce partner, on their social media, for paid advertising, advertising, et cetera. So they don't really care that much about you putting out on your own blog or social media. And then the final the C in the ARC framework is conversion. Yeah. So they, what they really care about is sales. They care about, you know, leads, they care about app downloads or whatever the brand is. Right. And the reason it's so critical that you need to be asking, hey, what is your goal? Like, what does success look like to you? Is that what they say to you may completely change what you pitch to them? So, for example, like, let's just take the YouTube example for my wife and I, oftentimes we would have these brands Come inbound and be like, how much do you charge for an integrated YouTube video that, that you know we're interested to hire you, right? And what a lot of creators, influencers do is they just spit back one number. Oh, 1500, right. Like it's this right versus the better question, which is we're super interested in collaborating. This sounds like an awesome campaign. Tell us more about your goal. What are you trying to accomplish with this?

What does success look like for you?

What does success look like for you? And you know what would happen. The first time this happened, it blew my mind, dude. Basically, the brand said, you know what we're really most excited about is when you upload the video. We would love to take the footage and cut it down into a 30 second version that we could run ads with. That's what we care about. And so instead of coming back and be like, yeah, instead of coming back and be like, okay, it's gonna be 1500 for a YouTube video. We see, you know what we said to them? We said, oh, well, knowing that that's your goal, we can make you five 30 second videos that we don't even post. We vary the hook, we vary the calls to action. You take all these five videos, you put it in the meta and you know, Instagram, Facebook, black box and the ads manager and see which one performs best. It's going to be 10x probably or 5x what we would have charged for a YouTube video. But that's what you said is important to you. And so again, like, when it comes back to the pricing conversation, you have to understand their objective because your pricing is going to change.

Yeah, it's. And I think one of the things I like about it is it takes down some of the pressure around like brand reached out. Now I need a pitch. Now I need to talk about money. And it moves it into something that is, in my opinion, more relational, which is a brand reached out or I'm reaching out to a brand. Both potential scenarios. The goal isn't to get to a point where you can send them a media kit with numbers. The goal is to get on a call and ask them questions around what would success look like if we worked together and then take that information, go back into the lab, create some scenarios that you feel like have the highest probability of resulting in success given the things that they told you. Does that feel like an accurate kind of recap of what the goal is as a creator in those early conversations?

Dude, a hundred percent. And you know what the first page of the proposal is Literally in every proposal, this is what it says. What I heard, that's the first page. Yeah, this is what I heard. It's going to be regurgitation of exactly what you told me your objectives are. That's the first page. Because you know what's going to happen, dude, is that this proposal is going to get forward around to everyone internally who may not have been on the phone call with you. Maybe it's the their boss, maybe it's another colleague, maybe it's their client, if it's an agency. Right. And so you have to ensure that whoever, whatever the decision makers are that are seeing this proposal know with certainty that if this person is asking for all this money, they know what the objective is, they know what the goal is. And the big kind of game changing thing that I talk about in chapter two of the book of the negotiation section is tying the packages to the goals. This is what this, this is a big kind of the next level up in terms of strategy. Because what most people do is, hey, maybe you're listening to this and you're like, you know what, Justin, come on, I've done packages for years. I know what you're talking about here. But what most people do is the only variance in their packages is actually quantity. So they say package one is one blog post and package two is two blog posts and package three is three. And maybe the only reason that a brand has to select package three is because of a price concession. Oh, if you pick the top package, we'll give you 15% off or whatever, which is really not that compelling to a brand. You know, they're going to want to do some initial testing with you to make sure that it goes well before committing to a longer term partnership. And so the better strategy is tying each package to the goals. So package one is the awareness package. That's where we're going to do the blog post integration. That's where we're going to do a dynamic ad read insertion into the entire back catalog of the Food Blogger podcast. Right. That's the awareness play, right? Package two, that's the repurposing goal. Maybe again, maybe you're on the phone call. They probably set a lot of different goals, awareness and more sales and get the content. And they're saying a lot of different things on the call.

Right?

They want to do a lot of things. And so you said, okay, great, package two, that's where we're going to be doing those three, you know, ad videos that we create that we don't even post. Package Three, that's the conversion play. That's where we're going to send the coupon out to our newsletter of our 5000 most engaged audience members. And guess what, guess what package four is Bjork. That's the package where you get everything.

Sure.

And the, and the brand realizes that the only way they can accomplish all of their objectives is by picking the top package.

And so from that conversation that you had with the brand, you can start to understand what are they after. You can then slice and dice that and say, here's what it would look like to get those different objectives to achieve success in those different areas. If we just want to do all of it, here's what that would look like. I think of that friend who has the outdoor sites that they focus on. One of the things they do is in person events. So they'll do a huge meetup in Utah. Like and that's a part of the positioning and the packaging is this opportunity to do an in person event. And they have a videographer out and they capture footage from, you know, people biking. And you start to understand how it unlocks kind of to your point about ABC Mouse, you can be creative with thinking about the brands you reach out to on the deal formation side, you can start to get really creative with, with what are you actually offering the brand. And we've interviewed other people on the podcast who their primary revenue source with their business is in person events. They'll have a brand sponsor a launch of a new chocolate and they have all their friends out who document post to social. They get numbers around how many impressions there are. You can get really creative with the options that a brand has once you understand what their goals are. But that requires you to have that early conversation in order to put that all together. The thing that I'm. Oh, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, I have, I have a.

Comment about this actually because I'm launching my very first in person event in March so very soon. And the really interesting thing as I've gone into the market and have been talking with sponsors for my own event is that oftentimes you'll realize like there are different budgets that you unlock when you have different content formats. So like the one sponsor in particular that I'm thinking of is that I was talking with their basically partnerships manager. And when I about doing partnerships on my newsletter and YouTube channel and all that. And then when I talked about the event, they're like, oh, I gotta introduce you to our events marketing manager. I was like, oh. And I realized, wow, they got a Whole different budget for events. Right. And so, so, so that's also a big unlock. Also one quick anecdote I can share and I hope this unlocks something for a lot of people. One of my longest running coaching clients, his name is Paul Jameson. So he has a podcast called the Green Industry Podcast. And you're gonna love this, Brooke, because he teaches lawn care professionals how to grow business.

Yep.

He's getting 150,000 downloads a month on his podcast. Right.

Awesome.

And again, you could just imagine these are guys on their mowers all day.

Yeah.

They just got their AirPods in and they're listening to his podcast.

Right.

They're just listening to his podcast. Right. And so he's crushing it. And, and one of his most. He's done, you know, all the standard types of partnerships on his podcasts and social media and all that, but you know what his most recent partnership was that was extremely lucrative? John Deere, the largest tractor company in the world, said, hey, we have our largest trade show of the year happening in October. You know what we would love, Paul? We would love for you to be in our booth the entire trade show and record podcasts. Have your friends on, have people from the marketing team on. Yeah, they've got their logo in the background. There's the press there, there's the videos, it's the photographers. He's the key opinion leader, the luminary in their space. And he is in the John Deere booth the entire thing. And they said, here's a here. We're going to back up a dump truck full of money onto your driveway for this privilege of doing this for us. Does that sound like a standard brand deal?

Right. Right.

Not really. Right. And so I think, I hope it's like this, this, this mindset of like, creativity, what is important to the brand. Right. And be flexible to kind of pivot from there.

Yeah, that's great. Before we continue, let's take a moment to hear from our sponsors. We know that developing, testing and publishing a blog around food can get costly, which is where cookie finance comes in. Did you know you can write off ingredients like flour, butter and chocolate chips that you're using to produce content? Cookie Finance specializes in helping content creators like you maximize tax savings while handling all your bookkeeping, quarterly tax payments, and personal and business tax returns. Plus, they'll help you uncover deductions you might be overlooking, whether it's kitchen tools, camera equipment, ingredients, or even your Food Blogger Pro membership. So you never miss out on savings month to month plans with no long Term commitments. Cookie Finance makes managing your taxes and finances simple so that you can focus on what matters most. Creating amazing content. Ready to start saving? Book a free consultation with Cookie Finance today by going to CookieFinance Co and clicking on the Book and Intro call button. And I think for people listening, sometimes what it takes is just hearing that, being reminded of the fact that you can work outside of this very narrow path that we've usually thought of, which is it's a video to Instagram. Sponsored content is a video to Instagram. No, sponsored content is you as somebody who can create content and a brand who has an interest in, you know, achieving their goal, partnering and thinking creatively around how can they get that. And there's hundreds of different ways that might happen. And back to an earlier point, not all of them are reliant on how many followers you have like it it it. There's so many other ways to approach it.

Here's a great visual for those visual learners that are watching or listening. What a lot of people think a negotiation is, is. Looks like is you're on either ends of a table. You've got your arms down, and it's like this really contentious thing. There's all this animosity, and it's like, I want this. No, I want this. And you're kind of going back and forth. Imagine you're sitting in this, like, office chair with, like, the little squeaky wheels. And so you go, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak. You go around the table, round the comp conference table. You're both sitting on the same side now, and there's a whiteboard in the office. And the brand says, here's where we're at. Here's the starting point.

Yeah.

Here's where we're trying to get to. And you're both on the same side of the table being like, how can we make this happen? That's what partnerships should look like.

That's awesome. I love that. And the visual is, you know, I think people who are hesitant around pitching negotiation, partnerships in general, deal making have that idea of sitting across from the table. But as soon as you realize that you're sitting side by side and thinking about, what can I do to help you? And we've had calls where I've gotten on with a brand, and it almost turns into like a brainstorming session around what they're trying to do. And some of the stuff we might be able to help with, some of it we might not be able to help with. But, like, I could provide an introduction and make A connection. And I consider that to be a pretty significant part of the conversations that I'm having is almost kind of like a jam session around, hey, what does it look like to achieve your goal? And maybe we fit into that. And if we do, great, let's talk about what that looks like.

You know, one, one thing I hope is like an eye opener for people listening, especially, especially with that anecdote you shared, is that one gripe I hear a lot is like, well, there's this endless line of food bloggers behind me who are willing to do it for free or for very cheap. So I feel like I don't have any negotiating leverage because there's all these people out there just like cheapening what we do as. And what you just described there about getting on a phone call, having the humility to understand that, like, hey, I'm just. This is kind of a brainstorming session. We haven't signed a deal yet. We're still kind of going back and forth. This is kind of a discovery thing. So few creators are willing to do that. So few. The bar is so low, dude. And so if you can have the humility to be like, yeah, okay, I may not be an expert or I may not feel like an expert. I have a ton of imposter syndrome right now. But just getting on a phone call, having the willingness to do that and not off sourcing that to your manager.

Which we could talk about.

Just get. Honestly, something like getting on a phone call can make a huge difference.

That's great. So one of the things I know people are going to be curious about is, let's say you feel confident around what success is for the brand. You've maybe had a call or two to inform the different packages you're going to put together. You understand conceptually that the package isn't necessarily like one blog post versus two. It's outcome based. How do you then go about pricing those? That's always going to be a question that people come back to, what, how do I price what I'm doing?

So again, the first leading question should be understanding the budget range from the brand. Do not try to price yourself in a vacuum.

So it's almost like reversing. It's going backwards. So you, you should go into the packages knowing here's what the range they're working with, and then you backfill that with your deliverables.

Yes.

Knowing what you feel comfortable with. Yeah.

You could charge one brand 5k for the exact same scope of work. Then one brand 5k and another brand 10k for the exact same scope of work, simply because you're tuning it to their exact objectives and their outcomes. And so this is, this is a mind bender for a lot of people. Like I could do that. Yeah, you can do that. And you, in fact you should do that because it should be a, a customized bespoke prescription that you're providing to a particular brand. And so yes, I do have some calculators that are very robust that I've developed in my programs and things like that. And even in the book that you can access a lot of the formulas that I say. But honestly, at the end of the day, that is a baseline that you should use just directionally to kind of understand how to value the various things that you're doing. Whether it's an impressions based platform like blogs or social media or things like that, or a views based platform like something like TikTok or, or YouTube or whatever, or maybe it's live streaming or whatever you're doing. There's definitely formulas that can help with this stuff. But again, that should be the backstop. The front stop basically is understanding from the brand adequately understanding what their range is or what's your hell yeah number. That should be what you use to back into it. I talk actually in the negotiation chapter around the four different pricing styles that I see people use. And the most toxic one actually is the competitive pricing style. Because this is you mentioned earlier, like how do you, you start a lot of times you just like ask your friends, you're like, oh, I've never done this before. How, how much do you charge you? You seem to kind of know what you're doing. The problem with that though is that, that your friend may have also gotten trash information from their other friend who didn't know what they were doing either. And so you could very quickly get into this vicious cycle of, of just not charging your worth and resenting it.

Sure, yeah, that makes sense. And I feel like the resentment number is also real. And for some people it's really high. Like to work with a brand new on a sponsored campaign, that number is going to be 25,000. For the same person working with the same brand, it might be 10,000 and they might feel really good about that. So one of the hard things with any of this is it's all very individual in terms of how willing are you and what does it feel like for you as a creator to work with a brand? For some people, they don't do it at all. For some people, they love doing it. And so, Dude.

Yeah, go ahead, sir.

Well, and point being, there are variables that exist in that equation that are specific to you, the creator. Another example might be you. You get an outreach from a brand that is your dream brand and they have a budget that is half of what you would normally feel comfortable with because it's a dream brand. You might be more willing to flex in a way that you wouldn't have if it was outside of that. That.

You know what the other, the, one of the variables that you're talking about here is that a lot of people listening to this probably are maybe making money in other ways. Maybe you're selling, you know, meal plans to your audience. Maybe you're. You have your own digital products or coaching or whatever it is. And so I think not a lot, not enough people realize that you can't just analyze sponsorships in a vacuum. You have to analyze them relative to the other ways you're making money in your business and, and figuring out what the heck. Yeah. Number is relative to those things. Because it may seem like, oh, yeah, a thousand dollars, that's great. But if you're making good money with your affiliate marketing or for your digital products or something, you just, you have to analyze it holistically. I think that's also an important point.

Yeah. Within the makeup of your business, what does that look like? How much time would it take? Talk about getting on the call. You talked about outsourcing it to somebody else on your team. Why is it important for the, the creator, the person who's going to be doing the content creation to get on that call?

Okay. I'm gonna make an even broader statement to answer this question, which, which is that I believe that 99% of creators should not have representation, should not have managers, should not have agents, should not have brokers that they work with.

Yeah. This is, which is like a really big statement.

Yeah.

Yeah, explain that.

Yeah. So a lot of different reasons. We could probably do a whole. Maybe we should. We could do a whole episode about this. About this topic, actually. So a lot of my perspective is colored from many years of having experience with managers, being in networks, having lots of friends who have had managers and representation over the years. And there's a lot of really poorly aligned financial incentives with the traditional management model, where, let's say, the only way in which your manager is eating is when they're getting 20% of your deal. Basically. Right. 20% cut. So let me, let me hammer this home with this story. So when I ran my influencer marketing agency and just to Quickly clarify. We did not represent creators. We were more of an advertising agency. So our clients were the brands. They would hire us for a campaign and creators go, yeah. And then we would reach out to creators for those on a project, per project basis.

And you would never then work directly with the creator or in that scenario, work with the creators manager.

Yes, exactly. And so what would happen is we would identify a creator that would be, we think would be a great fit for this, this campaign. And we would go to their bio on their Instagram or their blog and it would be their manager's email address in there. And so we said, okay. So we would email the manager and we would say, hey, I think we're, you know, this client, our client, the food brand is really interested in working with your, this, your client. And the very first thing the manager would say would be, hey, yeah, I think she might be interested. But do you also need additional people to work with? Because I also represent these 19 other people and oh, by the way, here's their pricing and what do you think? And so I was horrified when that would happen because of course I have ethics and I would, I would be like, that's super shady because we have, I haven't locked in the deal with the, with this client that I reached out about, but you can imagine that there may be some brands who were like, oh, actually those three other people are cheaper and better, so let's actually work with them instead. And, and I can't tell you how many times this happened, dude. And, and so of course there's, you know, a lot of great managers out there and I have a lot of friends who are managers who hate me that I'm now saying this type of stuff. But honestly, like, this is a real thing. Another thing, dude, is like, you know, let's flip the tables here. Imagine you're the manager, right? And you pound the pavement. You work your butt off to bring a, an opportunity to someone on your roster. And you are out there doing the dog and pony show, convincing the brand they really want to work with you. It's going to awesome, let's do this. And then takes three months, four months, you finally convince the brand to work with you. You bring the opportunity to your creator and they say, no, I'm not interested. I don't, I don't really want to work with that brand. And now the rep is like, I'm not going to bring this person as much business anymore. And again, they don't care where the 20% comes from.

Sure.

And so things change. Of course, when you have someone on a retainer or you have someone on your own team who you're training up in your own methodology, your own sales process. So what I hope you're hearing is not, don't have a team. Don't do this at all.

Do everything yourself.

Yeah, yeah, do everything yourself. But there is something special about you. Be thinking, I am the CEO. I am the CEO of my business. At the end of the day, you know, it is actually my job to do business development and do sales. And so maybe there. What I often advise is that there is this kind of handoff that you can orchestrate between your va, that you've trained up to do this, or your operations person that you've trained up to do this, where they do some sort of light qualification of at the time. You know, probably you have deal flow now when you're, you know, have a team, right, and you've got some inbound deal flow that they're lightly qualifying. And then once the brand expresses interest, that's when they orchestrate the handoff and they're like, hey, okay, this is awesome. You know, Bjork would love to hop on a call with you now and kind of hash out some of the final details.

It's interesting. It's. You've almost described exactly where we've landed in terms of our workflow. So we, for a long time, we had an agency. Yeah.

Oh, let's go, Lex. You didn't. You didn't even know. I'm just.

I'm just going to do it.

You didn't even know I had a sound of soundboard. Let's go.

I need to. I have. Is it a stream deck?

Is it a stream deck? Is that how you do it? I have a Rodecaster Pro.

Okay. I need to get one of those. That's incredible. So we had an agency that we worked with for a long time. It was great because we could outsource the. It would get inbound, we would just forward it on. But eventually what it start to feel like is, wait a minute. It. We're getting all of this inbound. 95% of the deals that are happening are inbound. And we're passing off that contact and that relationship to this agency and suddenly we're kind of cutting ourselves out of the process. And so we eventually took that in house. We were able to control it more. We were able to decide, hey, what does it look like to follow the. Like, what do we want the conversation to look like? And. And we now have that relationship as. As One that's internal. We know the people by name. You know, we get a Christmas card from them, like that sort of connection. And now at this point, if we get inbound, what will happen is might be on Instagram. If that's the case, Lindsay will kind of vet it because she's the one that's in Instagram and in the DMs, it might be email inbound from the site. Jenna, who general manager for Pinto vm, will source it and post it in Slack and say, hey, Lindsey, are you interested in, you know, this brand? And if it's a yes, it immediately becomes, how do we get on a call as quickly as possible? Lindsay's not the one getting on the call, but I'm the one getting on the call, and I get on the call, and it's like an opportunity to ask those questions. Hey, what does success look like for you? Which has been for us, really helpful to shift what it looks like when somebody reaches out because it's more high touch. It feels like it aligns with what we would hope the experience would be with the brand, which is, hey, we're here to help you. How do we figure out how to do that? You know, I think one of the things that is a takeaway for me that we could adjust is we still have this media kit that's like, exactly what you described. Hey, in general, here's how much it's for one blog post, two blog posts, three blog posts. And one thing that I never really thought about even until this podcast was, you know, there's a 10% discount if you do, like, a package of three blog posts. And the idea for a brand, it's like a thousand dollars off probably, or whatever it is. $2,000 off probably isn't a huge motivation for them. So it's almost like the shift for that becomes that's an internal document for us to get a general sense of where are we at? And then we have an external document that puts it together in a package with like a line item 100.

Dude. Oh, my God. This is like. I got goosebumps. This is like you just had a real time realization here.

Yeah.

That, like, this is a huge game. Like, this simple tweak to your strategy could make you help you make twice as much on your brand deals next year. I swear to God, dude, I. I have so many success stories that have just made this very small tweak. Just like what you said of just, like, pulling this in house. Okay. We're no longer gonna, like, put our numbers out there and splash them everywhere. We could still have our media kit out there just without, without the, all that stuff.

Right.

You could have that publicly on the blog or whatever. And this is such a game changing thing to do because how do you know Whether you know Nordicquare, they want to spend their entire $500,000 marketing budget getting the word out about PFAS and how bad it is and all this with you. How do you know? You don't know until you have a conversation. They could just decide on the phone call. We want Lindsay to be the frickin brand ambassador now for the next two years and we're going to give all the money to her versus well, here's the package. 1, 2, 3, 4 and the top one is 10k or whatever. So it's just, it's so critical not to anchor yourself without having a conversation first.

Yeah, that's great. We will schedule another follow up podcast to have that conversation. But I want to make sure that we get a little bit of time here for you to talk about your book. And it's launching, it's newly launched. Is it officially launched yet? As of this recording. When does it officially launched?

It's, it's officially launched as of January 21st. So I think it's launched and yeah, you can basically if. If this entire conversation has stimulated your brain in any way, shape or form. This is just a small sliver of what I cover in the book. I've. I've basically taken you know, the last 15 years of doing hundreds and hundreds of deals with my wife and I but also you know, running this agency for many years and seeing thousands of deals for other creators and kind of. And over the last four years coaching creators as well now. So it's kind of this trifecta that I've distilled build into the book. And you know I talked about the, this eight step sponsorship wheel framework which was, I kind of go into it in extreme detail throughout the book. So if you're someone who is either currently doing sponsorships in your business and you think, you know this could give you an edge up to start making more money on those deals or you're just someone who's always been a little sponsorship curious or maybe even sponsorship skeptical and thinking like I don't know if sponsorships are really for me, I would really encourage you to pick up the book as well because it'll open your eyes so you can go to sponsormagnet.com to pick up a couple copy.

Awesome. It's very rarely do I do this. But when I first saw you talking about it, first learned about it a little bit, I like took a screenshot. I was on my phone. This is the process I use. I saved that screenshot onto my desktop so I could create a to do to like make a note of when it would be released. And I don't know, I'm trying to remember if that's maybe where this podcast came out of where I was like, hey, we should also interview Justin. But it's so such a clear overlap with what we do and such a clear return that people would get by reading it and applying the best practices that you've learned through the years. So we'll be picking up a copy for sure. It'll be I don't have many books sitting on my desk here, but it'll be one of them and would encourage anybody else to pick it up as well. So we'll schedule another call to continue the conversation. Justin, thanks so much for coming on.

Appreciate it man. Really do.

Hello there Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed listening to this week's episode of the podcast. Before we sign off today, I wanted to mention one of the most valuable parts of the Food Blogger Pro membership and that's our courses. In case you don't already know, as soon as you become a Food Blogger Pro member, you immediately get access to the all of our courses. Here on Food Blogger Pro we have hours and hours of courses available, including SEO for food, blogs, food photography, Google Analytics, social media, and sponsored content. All of these courses have been recorded by the Food Blogger Pro team or some of our industry experts and they're truly a wealth of knowledge. We're always updating our courses so you can rest assured that you're getting the most up to date information as you're working to grow your blog and your business. You can get access to all of our courses by joining Food Blogger Pro. Just head to foodbloggerpro.com join to learn more about the membership and join our community. Thanks again for tuning in and listening to the podcast. Make it a great week.

Sam.