MBA2213 Extended Interview: Justin Moore – How to Secure More Sponsorships for More Money

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things, of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to Save on New Tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals foreign. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. The place to be to build a business you want every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. Welcome to 2023 and we kick off the new year with an amazing episode for you. An episode that will help you make more money in 2023 with sponsorships. Now even if you've never considered getting sponsorships thinking that I don't run events Omar or maybe you run a podcast or a YouTube channel. Hear me out. There are ample ways for you to earn money leveraging your brand, your message, your content. Outside of just the typical ways of sponsorship, there are brands out there that are perfect, your audience that are dying to sponsor you and pay you money. But how do you negotiate the best deals so that it's a win win for the sponsor and you? Well that's why I'm so excited about today's extended interview with Justin Moore where he's going to share with us how to get more sponsorships for more money. Justin Moore is hands down the master at getting sponsorships for brands. He is the founder and sponsorship coach over At Creator Wizard, a school and community that teaches you how to get some amaz amazing sponsorship deals for your business. When I sat down with Justin, I started to realize even somebody who's a veteran like me in the sponsorship game, in the content game, in the business game, has a few blind spots. There's areas where I'm leaving money on the table, but more importantly, I'm leaving opportunities for my sponsors to get more ahead of the deal. So I decided to sit down with the expert himself, Justin Moore, to extract all the best strategies, methodologies, frameworks, pricing models to be able to win over sponsors and get great deals. This one is amazing. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Like I mentioned, Justin Moore is the founder and chief Coach over@creatorwizard.com what I love about Justin is that he walks the talk. Him and his wife April have been securing sponsorships for their own brand for over eight years and making over $4 million in revenue in doing so. He also has a unique experience of running an agency to help influencers earn more money sponsorships. So he knows what works, what doesn't, and where. We're falling short and leaving money on the table. We're going to jump into the conversation with Justin Moore right now, but I'll be back to wrap up today's episode and fill in any gaps. Let's jump into the conversation with Justin Moore right now. Justin, so awesome to have you on the show. How you doing today?

I'm great, man. Thanks for having me here.

I've been following you for some time on Twitter. We know similar people, we're friends with similar people. And I really was interested in having you on the podcast because your story is very interesting in a lot of ways for me because April, your wife, you work together, you kind of started your business through her, her journey as a creator as well. I want to start off by saying, you know, congratulations. It's not, I work with my partner, I work with my wife. And it's, it's. It's definitely a work in progress. You have to keep on kind of realigning and readjusting. Want to hear from you. How's it been with you in April, man?

I mean, that's a, That's a great question. We could have a whole episode probably about that topic. I mean, you know, we had to learn how to. To work together, right? I mean, I was in medical devices prior to us kind of both going. So she went full time first on YouTube. You know, she started it. She was in a Preschool teacher before, actually. And so, you know, we were both. This was a side hustle for us, kind of being creators, being, you know, having an online business and so on. And so, you know, she went full time first where I. Well, you know, we. I still kind of had the. The 9 to 5 income to kind of, you know, see if this thing was gonna, like, actually work. Right?

Yeah.

And then one, you know, we planned for several years before I actually went full time, because that's a big jump when you're both kind of basically putting your, you know, all your eggs in one basket, hoping that this thing is gonna work. And so just one quick anecdote there is that, like, when I, like, initially quit, I felt as though I had to justify my contributions to our business more. And I got in her stuff, like, a lot, like, creatively, like, let me help with the lighting and the cameras and all this stuff. And she was used to just, like, setting up the camera, filming herself while I was at work. And so here I am trying to, like, burst onto the scene. And so this is a small example. You have to work. You know, it took us many years to kind of figure out our strengths and, and, and. But honestly, I wouldn't trade it for the world. She's my best friend. Like, we get to lunch together every day at the kitchen table and, you know, but it's. It's definitely been a journey.

There's definitely so much to catch up on because it is. You're doing your thing in your side of the business. She's doing her thing. Oh, did you hear about this? Oh, no, I didn't see that. All that kind of stuff. So I definitely can resonate with that for Nicole and I. The one advantage we had is that we actually knew each other as professionals before we became a couple. So we were both working at the same school. We were teachers. I was actually the head of department, and she was in my department. So I kind of saw her and respected her as a colleague before I saw her romantically. So I kind of had that advantage of being able to know what it feels like to work with her. But obviously, business, high stakes, it's a totally different story where you're like, you know, your food and your. Your rent comes out of this thing. And you got to make sure that you guys work together, because if you don't, it's not going to happen.

So we joked right at the beginning of the pandemic that all these people being forced to, like, work together, together all the time, and, like, people either got really close. The pandemic or they split, right? We joke and we were like, you know, like, for us, man, we've been doing this years. Like, this is old hat to us.

So.

But it's true. Like, not, you know, it's not for everyone.

Yeah, definitely, man. Whenever I go to a podcast conference, whenever I speak on stages, whenever somebody's like, hey, can I pick your brain on a call about starting a podcast? The black box that a lot of people are just like, I have no idea about is sponsorships. It's like, how do I get sponsors? How much do I charge? They ask me all these questions, like, what's the process? Like, do you just. Do you negotiate or do you have rates and all that kind of stuff? And I realized that the world of sponsorships is really like a foggy forest that people can't see in front of them. They're just kind of like, winging it, really. You become the sponsorship, like, guru, expert in the space. And I love the fact that you really focused on this because it's really needed. A lot of people don't know how to monetize their content. How to monetize through sponsorships. What is, like, the first piece of advice you ask? You tell people when they say, hey, I'm looking to get some sponsorships for xyz, what is, like, the first thing you say? Like, hey, this is what I advise you to do.

The number one thing I say is delete the page that has pricing in your media kit immediately. Because that's honestly one of the biggest mistakes that a lot of folks make is they. They try to cram brands into this tiny little box and say, here's how you can partner with me. And they think they're. They're doing a good thing by saying, here, here's package one through five. And you can do all these things. And a brand looks at that page and they say, you know what? I don't. We don't actually want any of those things. We had this other idea of how we could partner, but I guess Omar is saying this is the only way we can partner with them. So I guess that we're either going to not partner with them, or we're just going to have to pick one. And then the result of that may not be what we're hoping for because we have a different objective in mind. And so really, the most important thing that you should do, other than deleting your pricing page, is asking the brand or the agency, if it's an agency reaching out on behalf of the brand. What is the brand's goal with this collaboration and what I teach in a lot of my education is that there's three things that pretty much every brand will try to accomplish when they run a campaign. Partnering with a podcast, partner with a creator, and so on. The first one is a conversion focused campaign, right? You run Webinar Ninja. You know, if you're going to go out and partner with someone for that type of campaign, you're going to say, okay, we're going to pay this person, let's say, $1,000, and we're going to hope we have our own kind of acquisition metric in mind. And we're hoping to drive, let's say, X amount of trial signups, which will then convert into, you know, Y amount of custom paying customers. And so the max that we're going to be willing to pay this person is Z. Right? Because the math has to make sense. Because this is a conversion focused campaign. You know, this could be app downloads, this could be sales on an E commerce website, whatever, right? It's conversion focused. The next type of campaign that some brands will want to focus on is a content repurposing campaign where the primary goal of them reaching out is actually to get compelling content that they can either put on their website, put on their social media, maybe use it for paid advertising. So for a podcast, or maybe that it's an audiogram that they could run ads with on Instagram or Facebook or something like that, right? And so the, the success metrics for that brand, oftentimes they may not even care how many downloads you have on your podcast, right? Because they really just want to get the content. They want to be attached to your name and likeness as a creator, right? And then the final campaign goal type is a brand awareness campaign. This is where it's a new, you know, you guys launched Course Ninja, right? You want to get this, spread the word, you want to get the name out there. And so, you know, the actual amount of signups or, you know, conversions of paying customers may not be the metric that you really care about in these, in this initial type of, you know, kind of spread the word campaign. So the reason that that's so important that you ask a brand what their goal is is that your pricing should change. Okay, imagine back to this repurposing example. What if you said to the brand, they said, yeah, repurposing, that's what we really want to focus on. You say, oh, well, so good to know that that's what you care about. I can actually make 5 or 1030 second videos for you, right. That I don't even post that you can use and throw in the black box of the Facebook, you know, business manager, ad manager and just see what works. I'll do different hooks, I'll test different calls to action, right. And it's going to be 10k, 5k, whatever it is. But now the amount of money that you're charging is completely detached from your, the amount of followers, subscribers, downloads, listens, whatever. Right. And so it's just a small example of how you need to be so strategic with these conversations and going back to your thing about saying it's kind of this black box or black forest that people don't really kind of know what to do. It really just comes down to just being interested in the outcome of the partnership for the brand.

This such gold because when you went through those three types or three scenarios, I can clearly see examples in my own business where, you know, we have sponsors on the show, of course, and depending on the brand, depending on the their needs, they want something totally, totally different. Like, you know, Dell Computers sponsored us and they don't really, we're not trying to move computers, they're not like, oh, how many computers can we sell through the show? They're really trying to, to associate themselves with being a champion for small businesses. Right. And they part of the sponsorship deal that we had is that I would be part of their conference so that they can have a whole bunch of creators like myself saying Dell's cool. Dell is like not explicitly, but it's just saying we're associating ourselves with the tastemakers in this area and that's a very broad long term view. But that has value to them. Like value that they can't manufacture with Facebook ads. Value they can't manufacture through their marketing think tank.

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Perfected. Moving on with this advice. Okay, I deleted my pricing page. I deleted this in my portfolio. I'm not sending this thing out anymore. Do I just get on the call with them and ask them these questions and then, and then what? Like, do I just throw them a number and say if they say no?

So yes, it's as simple as getting on a call or getting on a zoom. And I know if you're listening to this, I know you might be petrified of that or nervous. You don't know what to say. What if the brand you know says something to you that you don't know the answer to? It? Have a mindset, shift around this, this piece of it and treat it as simply a fact finding mission. So what I want you to do is prior to these calls that you have with brands or agencies, you go and you do, I swear, Omar, 10 to 15 minutes of research. You go and see what are they, you know, posting on Instagram right now? What are their campaigns? It seems like they're running. Actually scroll back to their, you know, Instagram last Q1, see what they were pitching, you know, last year. They're probably going to run a variation of that campaign again in 20, in the next year. Right? And so you, you educate yourself around kind of what's going on in their world, what kind of products they're pushing. Go and look at their press releases, go and look at their job boards. Are they trying to find a marketing manager, content marketing, social media manager? Familiarize yourself with kind of what it seems like is going on in their business, right? And so when you get on a call, you ask simple questions, right? Remember that one. What does success look like to you in 2023? Like, are you launching any particular products, any new lines? Are there features or benefits that you're trying to focus on? But tell me about, you know, your, your, you know, what's going on in the, in the ecosystem? Like, are you facing a stiff competitor who's like gaining a lot of market share? Are you trying to understand your USP or unique selling proposition relative to you know, other folks in your space, you know, just like, honestly, look, understanding, acting again, acting interested in their, you know, it's not just a money grab for you. You actually want to see this partnership yield results for them. Right. And so there's a couple things that you're doing by, you know, asking for this call and asking these questions is, number one, you're establishing rapport. Right? So if they're, when they're reaching out to you, the cold truth of it is that they're probably reaching out to 20 other people trying to gauge pricing and trying to gauge, you know, who might be a good fit. And so what you're doing is you're putting a face to your name, right? They're understanding that it seems like you care about the outcome. Right. And when push comes to shove and when you do ultimately put to, you know, send over your proposal with your pricing, even if you are 2 or 3x what some of your peers are quoting them, they might just go with you because it seems like, you know what, the campaign is probably going to go better with Omaha. Right, right.

And so it's easier for them. Yeah.

And you made it easier for them. And so to your, the second part of your question is like, okay, what do you do after that point once you have this information? And it really is a matter of tying what you are proposing to what they are saying. So let's say, for example, because what a lot of creators do is they just, they just take a boilerplate, you know, proposal. They say, okay, here's three packages. Package one is one podcast integration. Package two is three integrations. Package four, it's just like more. Right. That, that's, that's, that's how they justify adding more money into the larger packages, which is the exact opposite approach. Okay, let's say that the brand, for example, say to you that they have a couple like different objectives. Right. Number one is just like spreading a word about brand and in your particular niche, let's say, you know, objective number two is driving more trial, sign up, whatever it is. Right. And so what you are doing in your packages is saying, okay, in package one, we are going to accomplish goal one. Right, right. The brand awareness thing. And so with that, we're going to do, you know, a certain amount of podcast ad reads, we're going to do a certain amount of, you know, let's say, you know, Reels or TikToks or YouTube, you know, integrations, whatever. Right. That's going to be the large, you know, high funnel type activity where you're just caring about impressions and views and engagement and positive brand association and all that stuff, right? And then tied to Package two is going to be Gold two. It's going to be completely different. You're not offering those things. What you were saying is, oh, Goal two is all about conversions, right? And so we're going to do newsletter blasts, we're going to do only Instagram stories, so where we can have a link sticker on every frame. We're going to, you know, do our podcast integration in a very specific way where we're driving people to the show notes and so on. And so that is the biggest unlock, is understanding that you have to tie what you're pitching to to their brand objectives, because that is what they have money allocated for to accomplish their own objectives at their organization. They don't have a slush fund to pay random creators, right? And so that is how you can unlock these budgets. Because, you know, you know, you, you allocate, you know, marketing dollars to promote your own company, right? And so you're saying, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna allocate 100k to, you know, trying to drive, you know, signups within the podcasting community. I'm just making it up. I don't know. You're right. I haven't, I swear I haven't, like, penetrated your slack. Right, but it's like assuming, right? Let's say 100k. And so you comes a creator saying, hey, I understand that you're trying to target the podcasting niche. I can help you do that in the following ways. And so in your mind, I bet the calculus is, okay, let's just reallocate 20k of this over to this podcast coach or whatever who has the ear of a bunch of other aspiring podcasters, right? So that's really the unlock.

That's huge. That's absolute gold. Because they don't understand the context of your packages. They don't understand what it actually means. And at the end of the day, you're talking to somebody that has KPIs that needs to hit their KPI so they can impress their boss. You know, if you're getting the sponsor, if your sponsor is Disney, you're not pitching to Robert Iger. You're pitching to somebody who has a boss and wants to keep their job, wants to get promoted. And the way they get what they want is they hit their targets. So you help them hit their targets by saying, hey, you need to do xyz. The things I offer will allow you to accomplish XYZ for Them, it becomes a no brainer. Then it's like, oh, everybody else is just telling me this is how much it costs. These people are showing me what my money is going to do for me. And even if they just go back to their boss and say, hey, I just secured a deal and these are what, these things, it's already a win, right? It's already a win for them, 100%.

And like a lot of what a lot of creators tell me when they hear me kind of give this advice, they say, that just sounds like so much work, I don't have time for that. I'm on true, I'm on the content hamster wheel. I'm doing all this stuff, like I just don't have time. And so I say, I sit them down and I say, look, look, what if I told you that taking this approach and yeah, it's going to take longer, it's going to take more time, you're going to be more thoughtful. What if I could, I told you that you would be closing minimum 50% more deals and 50% higher a ticket, you know, on, on these proposals because, and people will say, oh, okay, well, maybe, maybe it is worthwhile too. Right? And so, and so you're, you're totally right. It's a different approach. It's not the, you know, spray and pray approach where you just have all this inbound activity. You know, another thing that people, especially podcasters, newsletter folks love to do is they love having a landing page where people can just go and just book inventory, right? And they're like, here, 200 bucks, 100 bucks, whatever. And it's just like you are leaving so much money on the table. What if, what if you could have, what if this, you know, brand wanted to be your title sponsor and buy out all of your inventory for $50,000? How would you know unless you had a conversation with them? And so I know a lot of folks, they just want to focus on the creative side of it and they don't want to deal with all the sponsors, but like being like educating yourself around how profound of an impact sponsorships can have in your life and business may make you, you know, give a second look to this, to this approach.

Yeah. And do you think that part of the problem, because I, I look at this whole booking thing and spots and how much these spots cost is that you're equating sponsorships to like commercials, like TV commercial ads, like Super bowl costs 1.5 million a minute, whatever it is, you know, and you just think that that's how it's done and, and much the airtime costs. And that's kind of how most people kind of simplify it, which, which you can do. But again, you're leaving money on the table, and you got to be okay with that now that you know this information. But the alternative is putting a little effort, even maybe getting someone in our team to help organize. Like, for example, on our team, we have Romina, who's our executive assistant, and she does most of the legwork. I just show up to the meeting and I get to do my thing and show them the value that we can add to their brand. That's the most important part. But I think what most people are worried about is the headaches of the admin and the back and forth and the scheduling and like, crafting kind of all this stuff together. But that can kind of get taken care of.

Hire an executive assistant, just like you said, like that. The return on something like that. Yeah, maybe you have to do it in the beginning, but eventually in your business, trust me, that investment is going. If you really don't want to do it, just hire a va. It's fine. Right. And so again, like, I think it's a matter of. To your point, like, your task as a creator, as a online business owner, is to get yourself out of the commodity bucket as quickly as possible. Because if you're saying that, oh, it's so saturated, if they, if they don't work with me, they're going to go out and they're going to hire my peers or they're going to hire my competitors or whatever. Your job, just like that example you gave with Del Omar, is that how could you quantify, like, how could you quantify being associated with their conference or doing a webinar with them or doing something like that? Oftentimes you're not going to have that package on your media kit. You're not going to have that listed on your site, your sponsor me page on your website. It requires a conversation. Right. And so again, you like having this, this open level of. Because a lot of creators, they would say, well, if the brand told me that they wanted to do that thing, I'd be open to it. I'd be flexible to, like, talk about this stuff. But they don't know that unless you advertise that they can hire you in these other types of ways.

I love it. Now, I'm often on the other side of the equation where we're running ads, we're sponsoring creators to promote our brands. The podcast webinar Ninja or software. And I'm often given, you know, kind of, like, no conversation. This is how much it costs to sponsor my newsletter, all that kind of stuff. How would you advise me to approach, hey, I. I want to do something else. Like, I want to. I want to break this mold that you kind of put me in. Because often I get resistance when I kind of say, hey, I have a better idea, or how about we try something different? And then they almost, like, fear getting on a call or, you know, kind of like, I don't have time for this. How do I appeal to them so that they are kind of open to different ideas?

So a couple suggestions for you. Number one, first. The first decision I think that you need to make, actually coming from the brand's perspective, is deciding whether you'd even want to push it with folks, like, who don't even seem like they're open to being a little bit flexible. Because in my opinion, at the outset of a relationship, that could spell trouble down the line if anything comes up and they're not flexible and, you know, even, like, you know, providing, you know, they want to make changes to the copy that you're not comfortable with or whatever. Right. And so that. That's a decision that you'd have to make. Right. And what you said earlier about pushing for a call, I totally valid. If a partner, especially if there's a lot of money on the line, if someone's not willing to even jump on, like, a quick call, that to me would be a concern. I would say another thing. Perhaps asynchronous video, maybe loom, something like that. Say, hey, just wanted to, you know, if you're not free for a call, like, can we just do a couple videos back and forth? I do that a lot, actually. That's a good suggestion. Yeah. And so I do that a lot with prospective advertisers or whatever. And so that's a suggestion. But again, also, I think a lot of it is recognition or acknowledging to a potential partner that they got a good thing going. And the reason that you want to partner with them is not to, like, cramp their style or not to take away their creative latitude, but it's to integrate, you know, to kind of tell the story of how their. Your, you know, product will, you know, help will actually serve their audience. Because I actually think this is a very big insight that a lot of folks don't think about, which is that a lot of people are scared to do sponsorships because they are gonna. They feel as though their audience will look poorly upon that, or they'll be sleazy, or they're trying to be salesy or whatever like that. And so a lot of what I talk about is, is how the best sponsorships are win, win, win. You're obviously winning because you're getting paid, right? And you're, you know that that's obviously the main motivation for a lot of folks. The brand is winning, right? Because they're getting to access your audience. You're the conduit, right? And then it's actually that third win, which is that your audience should win, too. They're getting exposed to a new product or service. They're getting. Probably getting a discount on it or, you know, learning about a seasonal promotion or something like that. And so when I uncover that last part, a lot of creators go, oh, I get it. Like, actually could be a great thing, because I'm at the end of the day, it's a service mindset, right? And so I think what you could do as a brand is draw that line, which a lot of creators don't really get, I think, is that, hey, I actually really want to serve your audience. I think that our product could really serve your audience. Not necessarily just serve you, obviously. We want to make sure that you're thrilled about it. But, like, our audience is. Your audience is who we really want to, like, serve with this partnership.

It. I love it. How important is the actual content itself when you're. When you're doing the sponsorship spot for the. For the company? The reason why I asked this question is because when I started podcasting and I. We started to get sponsors, I was like, how do I do this read? So it's interesting, so it converts so that people don't skip it, all that kind of stuff. And I used to listen to Mark Maron's podcast. Comedians are great at this. Like, Like, I. I never skip the ads because their delivery is so good. If you're. If anybody's listening is interested in hearing really good reads, smartless, you know, Jason Bateman and. And his friends over there, they do the reads really well. It's funny, it's entertaining. And of course, my podcast is not a comedy podcast, but it gives me an insight of, like, okay, how can I have fun with this? How can I make it applicable to my listeners? How can I customize this as much as possible? There's not always. This is not always possible with some institutions, especially if it's like an institution that's finance or something, and it has to be verbatim. But most of the time, 90% of the time you can. How important is this? And what are some tips you have for people to say, like, make this a great experience for the listener or for the viewer, the reader.

So the first advice is actually a little bit more tactical or, sorry, a little bit more strategic, which is that I think you actually need to have that conversation with the prospective advertiser or brand. And if brands are listening, listening to this, be open to that feedback from a creator to tell you, hey, thank you for sending me over the creative brief with the, the key messages and the talking points and all that stuff. I would. Here is actually how I would like to integrate this because a lot of wheel spinning and frustration that I have found is, you know, you think as a creator, you do a great ad read or you do a great integration for this brand and then they review it and they're like, this sucks. Like, that's not how we wanted you to do it. Redo it, basically. Right. And so that actually, in my experience, sours the experience of working with brands for lot of people. Yeah, the expectation is misaligned. And so a lot of the advice that I give in my content, in my courses and so on is like, it's this kind of, you know, like, you know, effort that you make prior to doing anything, before you ever turn on a camera, before you ever hit record, is you actually tell the brand, hey, whether it's on a call or whether it's a written format, concept, this type of thing is say, this is how I'm going to bring this to life. Give me feedback on this and allow the brand, like, actually you can put it into the contract. You can have feedback rounds for the concept, not just the content, feedback rounds on how you're actually gonna do this. And so you will save yourself so much time if you, as a creator, you are a professional person saying that I'm gonna derive income from partnering with other entities and brands and so on, is that even if the brand is not asking you for a concept, you give them one. Right? And so I think that, like, that's just the first thing is like, is like, just be smart about it and don't, you know, know, just work, work smarter, not harder.

Right?

That's number one. And then the second piece of this, going back to the goals, Omar, is that the way in which you actually execute and do the read or do the integration should be different based on the brand's goal. And this is the tough part, is a lot of brands don't know the difference. They don't Understand this stuff that we talked about. And so it's actually on you to educate them. And they say, oh, hey, our goals are like awareness and conversion. It's like, no, you can't do that in this. Yeah, maybe we could do a couple different, a larger sample s size of partnerships where I'm going to do maybe 20 ad reads on the podcast over a couple months and half are going to be brand awareness and half are going to be conversion. The way you're going to talk about the product is going to be totally different. You know, like for a conversion focused campaign, it's HelloFresh.com 100 MBA that's 100 NBA. You know, it's like, it's a very different type of approach versus a brand awareness type play. And so again, a lot of this comes down to educating yourself. There's lots of resources. You're reading books, understanding buyer psychology. How do you actually tell stories to, you know, drive action? And so as a business owner, as a creat actually behooves you to educate yourself around how to do better ad reads and integrations because guess what? You'll, those will perform better and then the brands will hire you again.

That's so money. Because I recalled a, we, we did a, a deal with, with Boosted Board. So Boosted Board was interested in being part of our podcast and in our conversations and even in the, in the details of the copy that they, they sent me, they were very specific about calling it a vehicle, not, you know, a toy or something else. And it was, and this because it is an expensive product, it is a mode of transport. So knowing that, knowing that they kind of really were emphasizing that I talked to them, I was like, hey, listen, I gotta be honest with you. My listeners are, they're probably not even thinking about using this as a mode of getting around. They're not even thinking about getting on electricity, electric skateboard and, and going to the grocery store. So I think for this campaign we need to kind of just educate the audience that hey, this is an option, right? And I, I presented the idea of like, hey, Nicole and I, we only have one car. We have one car because we don't, we work from home. We don't really need a second car. But this is a great second vehicle for us because I can go shoot over to the gym, shoot over to get something, groceries. It's fun, it's quick, it's good for the environment, it's electric. So, so we kind of created a story around it with the purpose of just planting the Seed that, hey, before you think about buying a second car or getting an Uber, maybe this is a good investment of your, of your time, money, all that kind of stuff. And they really loved it because they, they felt like this is the unpacking of the why, why they are stressing call it a vehicle. And it would never happen if they were not open for a conversation. And we went back and forth for 100.

I mean, just a quick anecdote to share from my perspective. Like, so I just had a newsletter sponsor. I'll give them a shout out. They're called Notch and they are social media insurance for creators. It's actually, it's actually pretty cool. So their pitch is that if you get hacked, you're kind of screwed if you make your income like from social media and stuff like that. Right. And so it's basically an insurance product for. And they kind of have a concierge team to help you try to get your account back and all this stuff too. I think it's a, it's an awesome, huge, huge product. Yeah. Yeah. And so what I told them, I said, hey, my, my newsletter is all around like, I help people get sponsorships, right? And so I said, I, I would really love to adjust this copy to be, to say if you, if you have four brand deals that you're planning on posting over the, over the next month on your Instagram or your YouTube or something. Imagine if you're. You got hacked. What's going to happen to those sponsorships? Is the brand going to be flexible to be willing to adjust the deadlines? Probably not. Maybe not. And so it's like I made that. You know, it's your job as a creator to make sure that the way in which you're integrating this, this partner is going to really speak to your listeners. And I think too many creators are just, they just take it verbatim, they read it and it's not effective. And then they're scared to reach back out to the advertiser because they don't think it went well. And so it's like you have to have the confidence as a creator to understand how to integrate something properly.

Great stuff, man.

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I want to wrap up our conversation with a few selfish questions. I like to ask these selfish questions. They're questions I want to know the answer to for my own selfish reasons. Okay, so first selfish question. Ready? There's three of them. So the first selfish question is I spent the last eight years going all in on podcasting. This is our jam. This is why our audience is so large. This is why we have so much traction. But this is all I focused on in terms of content, in terms of following for the last eight years. And I've really made a concerted effort just to focus on that. Because of that, I have been basically inactive on social media because I just felt like it's been a distraction. The biggest social media kind of platform I'm on is Twitter. Just because I enjoy the medium of writing a laughable Instagram. Not really interested in Facebook that much other than hooking up and speaking to my friends and catching up with them them things like that. So what would your advice be for somebody like me who went all in on one medium, whether it's YouTube or podcasting or newsletter or whatever, emails. And is there value in like trying to focus on growing the social media platforms or is it hard to kind of do it all and spread yourself thin?

I'm going to answer from a couple perspectives. I'm going to answer from the business diversification perspective and I'm also going to answer from the sponsorship strategy perspective. Okay, so the first is that you're right, you can't do it all. You're gonna drive yourselves nuts, especially if you're a small team and you don't have the budget to invest in lots of other, you know, team members, like help you all do all this stuff. And so my advice is that you need to go where your customers and or followers are hanging out. And if that's to someone like you. I think it's probably Twitter and LinkedIn would be my guess. That would be probably the two places that if I were you, I would start to focus on. And I don't think it would be that hard, Omar, to hire a va. Maybe you know, someone, an executive assistant, another person like Romina or someone to help you extract all of the awesome to take the transcripts. In fact, this is what I do. Okay, so you, you know, let me finish that thread. Take the scran transcripts from your massive back catalog of podcast episodes and just start repurposing the heck out of those, right? You, you, because this is what we do. So basically I take our long form. So I do a lot of content. I do YouTube videos, I do, you know, I have the a Trice weekly, Thrice weekly newsletter. I do tons of stuff on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, all that stuff. And so I take one of those pieces of long form content, whether it's a video, cause we script it very heavily or the newsletter and we take snippets out of that, out of those articles and turn those into LinkedIn posts, Instagram posts, tweets, and that fills up the entire social calendar for the next couple months. And so in my mind, it actually takes just a concerted strategy and say, okay, I'm gonna hire someone and I'm gonna give them access to this giant back catal stuff that I have and I'm gonna say, give me a content calendar, schedule all my tweets out, Instagram posts, all this stuff for the next three months and I guarantee you it's not gonna be that heavy of a lift for you personally. So that's the first recommendation. The second one is from a sponsorship strategy perspective. You're right, there are, you know, like advertisers who are fine just saying, hey, yeah, let's just do an integration on, you know, the podcast and that's fine. But to your point, there's going to be lots and lots of advertisers who want, want the ability to do what's called social syndication or social amplification, where it's like, okay, yeah, we're going to do a podcast integration, but oh, you can actually amplify us to, you know, a similar, you know, lookalike audience or whatever on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, you know, whatever, TikTok, whatever it is, and that you're able to upsell that into, you know, a package that's two, three times the amount of money. Let's do it. You know, where do I Sign. Right. And so, from a dollars and cents perspective, I think it would absolutely behoove you personally to do something like that, because I think that the advertising and sponsorship deals that you're already getting will be a very easy way. A perfect example of this, Omar, actually, real quickly, is that my wife and I started doing Amazon Live streams about two years ago. And you're probably like, Amazon Live? What the heck is that? It's. It's live commerce, which has been a format.

Qvc.

Yeah, it's qvc. It's been huge in Asia for the last couple years. Right. And so our thesis when we started doing this was that, that no one knows what the heck this thing is now, but if Amazon is the juggernaut is putting all of this time, resources, energy into building this out, this could be huge in two or three years. And so we spent a ton of time learning, getting better at it. And the whole reason we invested in this new content format, even though we've been doing this a decade, is that now we can upsell this to existing sponsors. And so for the last two years, every, you know, advertisers that's come in from YouTube or Instagram wanting to do all these other types of deals, we say, oh, this is so great. We're super excited. Would you also like to add an Amazon Live integration into this partnership? And so we've made an additional, you know, like literally six figures doing this, this type of thing. And so it's just an example of, like, if you are doing this as a creator, if you're an online business owner, it is your job to figure out, kind of have your eye on the horizon of where the ball is moving, not where it is right now.

Love it. That's awesome, man. Second selfish question. Second selfish question. When it comes to our sponsorships, we, we, we do take some sponsorships ourselves, but I would say about 80% of our sponsorships is done through our agency. And that's fine. They do a great job, all that kind of stuff. We have never done any kind of sponsorships in our newsletter. We have a very big email list and newsletter, both the $100 MBA and webinar ninja. Would you recommend to somebody who is selling a product already to these customers to have integrated ads in the newsletter even though they already bought something from you and they're already a customer?

Look, dude, again, service mindset. You are serving your customers, whether it's with your products or with someone else's. It's about serving them. And so that is my perspective, because the way in which I serve my customers is, you know, who are on my newsletter and all creators is that I have courses, I have coaching, I have all that stuff. But like, hey, if I can introduce you to this like insurance product for creators, like I want you to see this because this is going to help you with your business. And so my North Star is always, how can I help you improve your lives, improve your businesses? And so if that means, yeah, getting sponsorship again, it's not. This is a win, win, win. Right. And so if I was you, I would 100% start doing sponsorships, figuring out what are complimentary adjacent products that can help you, you know, you know, related to your businesses, you know, because, because like you said, I know you have tools that help them do a lot of things, but there's other, there's things that you're not going to build that probably aren't on your product roadmap.

Our integration partners.

Yeah, yeah, Integration partners, right. So that to me, that's a no brainer.

Awesome. And my third final selfish question. You're a busy guy, you do a lot of things, you work with your wife. Tell me a little bit about how you make sure you have time to recharge. What is your work life like? Do? How many hours do you work? What is your holidays like? When is your next holiday? How long are your holidays? Do you shut off when you're on holiday? I want to hear a little bit about like yeah, that Work life balance.

I really appreciate you asking this dude, because I don't get asked this a lot actually when I do podcasts and stuff like this and it's really important, I'll be totally frank with you, man. Work life balance, ever since both of us became full time creators has always been really tough. Especially because, you know, for my wife and I's kind of personal channels and all that stuff that we were doing over the years, our life is our business, right? It's like we're, we're family vloggers. We're sharing our life and like the trials and tribulations and all that stuff too. And I think a lot of you know, know it's just the blur, it blurs the lines, right? And man, I work easily two, three times as many hours and as hard as I did ever did when I had like a 9 to 5, right? Because it's always my, the gears are always turning. There's always things I want to do and all this stuff too. You actually put a tweet out recently saying like, what's the biggest obstacle in your, in your business. And I said, it's like I'm just doing too many projects at once versus just like focusing on one to two and making deeper progress. Right. And like that has always been my challenge is I have all these really ambitious visions for what I want to do with our business and with educating creators and all that stuff. And so it comes down honestly to being very purposeful about designing the life that you want to lead. I have a quick anecdote around this. When I was looking at the trajectory of my course enrollments for my sponsorship course over the last two years that I've been doing this, the numbers were truly, I'm trying to be humble here, but it was really going up. So I was getting really stressed out. Omar, because I am a small team me, I have a, a VA and I have like a community manager, but that's it. I don't have like a big team or anything. And so like serving these people in a live cohort format was getting really, really stressful to me because I, I want to make sure that like I'm delivering outcomes and, and it's, you know, they're having a great experience. And I decided I'm, you know what? I cannot do this again. And so I capped enrollment. I said, it's going to be capped now and I'm increasing the investment. Right. And, and that, that decision was primarily because I said, you know what, I'm looking down the horizon. I don't know if I want to have a company that has like 20 employees and managing all that headcount. I've done that in a previous life when I ran an agency and it was really, really stressful. And so it's like, I think you have to have the humility and the courage as an online business owner, as a creator, to make tough decisions to design the life you want and not let your business run you.

That's awesome advice. One of the things that Nicole and I talk about a lot, like on a picnic, in a walk, walk, whatever, even over dinner, is this whole concept of like having it all. I think a lot of entrepreneurs think like, yeah, you can have it all. And there's always going to be sacrifices, always going to be trade offs. Like the, do I want to have peace of mind and feel like I have a little bit of sanity, or do I want 20, 30 people on my team and be able to say that at parties? You know what I'm saying? Like, you can't have it both ways. You know, you have to choose and, and that's definitely something I talk about a lot. Especially because our identities are so wrapped up in our business, who we are, our significance in the world. And sometimes, you know, I remind myself. I just got reminded about this from a friend of mine, Dale Beaumont, here in Sydney. And he. He always says, you know, you got to spend time working on your life and not just on your business. Because he looked at his father who retired building a business, doing the same thing for 50 years. Years. When he retired, he was totally lost. Like, I don't know what to do with my life. I don't have hobbies, I don't have interests. I don't even know if I go to the bookstore, what kind of books should I pick up that are not dealing with the business I just sold? It's pretty insane, right? And it got me thinking, oh, we gotta carve out time for cultivating our own life outside of the business. And. Yeah, work in progress.

You know, just a bookend.

This.

I think one of the biggest insights that I've had had over the last several years that's really given me peace with, you know, not putting the pedal to the metal and, you know, foot to the, you know, floor all the time with business stuff, is that I've realized that it's actually the process of building the business that I love. It's not the achieving a revenue milestone or achieving this many creators that I, you know, are in my enrollments and my courses and all that stuff too. At the end of the day, like, I, you know, I've made. I mean, we made. We have made so much money over the last decade of being creators. And so it's like that incremental amount of money that we're making is like, it's not giving me marginal increases in happiness. We're just like, always, like, we're happy. Like, we can travel, we can eat out, we can do all this stuff, right? And so what's it for? Like, to me, I just sit and I really look at myself in the mirror. And I think it's actually just the building of the business. Like, figuring out cool and unique ways to, like, serve people and like, you know, how can I grow the newsletter, treating everything as experiments. And like, that is really what I. I get so excited about every day and serving people. And it's not this number on this random, like, dashboard, you know, that I set for myself. And if I, you know, I my mood swings based on whether I'm hitting KPIs or not. Obviously that stuff's important as a business, but at the end of the day, I think it's a matter like, like you said, like, you know, you're going to be, if that, if that is what you're striving for, this perfect snapshot of your life that you have in mind. Believe me, I've been there. I've gone through that. I've gone through the, like the nadirs and the, and the giant peaks of success and happiness and failures and it's really going through it. You're going to look back, back on most fondly at the end of your life.

Totally. I mean, Nicole and I were looking back at the fact that, you know, we've been running webinar nature for eight years and, and what you talked about, the building, the struggle, the solving the problems, that that is life, that that's how you're spending your time on Earth and your waking hours, when you look back when you're 60, 70, 80, that's what you're going to remember. You're not going to remember, you know, the, you know, the day you hit your milestones in the launch or whatever those one offs, you know, what you're going to remember is the grind actually or the, or the work that you into making it happen. So sometimes we have to. What I, I forgot who said this, but I love this idea of like choose your problems. Like choose the challenges you want to take on in life. Everybody's gonna have challenges in life. Everybody's gonna have problems, but choose the ones you want to take on. The ones that you're okay with kind of enduring. And you, you said it best, you know, like we, we all have these options. We always. And it's a good problem to have. Like the fact that we have options, like we have different opportunities. Most people have very limited options. So it's a good problem to have, but it's still a problem. We still need to kind of remind ourselves that, you know, we are in control. We need to craft that life like you said and, and take action accordingly. So Justin, this has been great. I love, I love having you. I loved learning from you. And also we, we need to talk more often and hang out. Like I really enjoyed getting to know you on this call, but you've been a great gift to our audience.

Totally, dude. Absolutely. Really, really appreciate you having me. It was a blast.

Awesome. What a value packed episode with Justin Moore. I'm going to be honest with you, after I had this conversation with Justin Moore, my conversations with sponsors totally changed. I started to ask more questions, learn what their goals are and we started to craft more custom tailored sponsorship packages that work for them and for us. And you're going to see how some of those deals panned out right here on the because they're going to be sponsors of the show and you're going to see some unique ways of doing sponsorship that we decided to go down after learning from Justin and implementing the things that we learned in this episode. Here's the thing I learned over the years. I thought you had to have a huge audience to start thinking about sponsorship, to start getting sponsors for your newsletter or for your virtual events online, or even your physical events, like in person events. But I've seen Creators Online have regular sponsors on their newsletter, on their podcast, on their YouTube channel, in their live events with small audiences. I'm talking about people that have a newsletter list of 500 and 1000 people. But because they have a great relationship with these followers, the sponsorship works. It's a good fit, especially if the product or service fits with the audience very well, if the messaging is done well from the actual creator. Think of it this way. If you got in front of an audience of 500 people, like on stage, a captive audience, people that love what you are all about, that are perfect for your products or services, wouldn't you love that opportunity? Of course you would. We would shell out cash to go to this conference, spend money, have the opportunity to be able to be in front of these people. And that's exactly what sponsors are looking for. A strong audience that is connected, that's interested in what they have, that are a good fit. And it doesn't have to be hundreds of thousands of people. Listen. You want to take your sponsorship and sponsorship deals to the next level? Go ahead and check out creatorwizard.com join to join their community and learn from Justin himself on a regular basis. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe, hit follow on your favorite podcast app. Also, make sure you leave us an Apple podcast rating and review. We'd love to hear what you think of the show. If you're on Spotify, hit follow so that you can give us a star rating. Thank you in advance for doing that. It means a ton that you're supporting the show in this way. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Some businesses make all their money on sponsorships, meaning they don't even have products for sale. Big newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels. This is how they make their money. They just focus on creating great content and let the sponsors pay their bills. So this is a very viable business model and something you can use to supplement your current income and get extra revenue to give your business that boost. You're producing content. Anyway, partner with a sponsor that's a good fit for your audience. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you you then. Take care.

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