134: How To Get More Sponsorships And Make More Money

we made every mistake in the book. Granting brands perpetual rights to our content, which means forever, that is Justin Moore. He is an absolute expert in how creators and podcasters can monetize their work by landing brand deals. And he's so good at maximizing brand revenue because he has done just that for over seven years. First as part of a creator team himself, we offered to do tons and tons of work for a very small amount of money, you name it. And then as the owner and operator of a huge brand deal agency, we paid out millions and millions of dollars to creators. Today, Justin joins us here on Grow the Show to help you do just that. By the end of this episode, you're gonna learn three things. First, Justin's gonna walk you through a step-by-step how you can monetize your audience through lucrative, profitable brand deals. Here's how you price a brand deal. Here's how you pitch a brand. Here's what you say when you're on a phone call with a brand. Then you're gonna learn which pitfalls and mistakes to avoid when working with brands. I've seen so many mistakes that creators have made over the years interacting and negotiating and all this up. This is when they decide, like, okay, we're never working with that creator again. And finally, Justin will refuel the major mindset shift that'll change the way you look at brand partnerships forever. So the big unlock here is realizing that it's not about you. It's about illustrating to the sponsor that you are the conduit for them to access this really engaged pool of prospective customers. All that and more, get it? It's coming at you right now. Here, on Grow the Show. All right, Justin, so can you start by taking us back to how you got exposed to the brand partnership and sponsorship world in the first place? Is this something that you always intended to do? Definitely not. I was in medical devices prior to this. You can believe it. So the opposite of being a creator on the internet, I would say, so really the story was my wife started her first YouTube channel in 2009, all the way back before there was a partner program. This was our first exposure to kind of creating stuff on the internet. And back then for her, it was just a hobby. She started her first YouTube channel was around cosmetics and beauty and testing out hair products and all that stuff. And so she got a lot of exposure to not only like what it actually takes to like upload a video onto the internet because remember, it's not as trivial like back then as it is now, right? You just take out your phone and upload it off your phone. But before it was like, man, we had like a camcorder. Actually, no, initially it was a webcam. So we had like, I feel like it was like 144p or something. We edited on Windows Movie Maker. And like we did the whole thing. We had to figure all this out. And you know, really our first exposure to collaborating with brands was they reached out in the early days offering to just send free stuff. And she was like, yes, I'm stoked. This is amazing. And because honestly, a lot of beauty brands got it. A lot earlier than other consumer focus brands because they were like, we send this person a free hair curler. They talk about it on their YouTube channel. We sell a bunch of hair curlers, right? It was like a very obvious thing that led to high margins. And so those types of companies got it a lot earlier. And so she definitely got a lot of experience, especially with the free product stuff early on for the first several years. But remember, there was no partner program. We were not making money off this. It was very much a passion early on. But then really when I got pulled into the fold, other than kind of supporting her behind the scenes was when the first brand reached out offering to compensate her. They said, hey, like we actually want to pay you money. It was actually a monthly deal. They wanted to do this like multiple month thing for her to talk about their products on her YouTube channel. I was in at this time business school at night. And I hear her. She was like, I don't know what I'm doing. Can you look at this contract for me? And I was like, what is this, right? And so I'm like analyzing the contract. I tried to have like our family lawyer look at it. Our family lawyer was like, what is this? What are you doing on YouTube, right? And so we got this kind of trial by fire of trying to forge these early partnerships mind you. No one had any idea what we were doing. All the YouTubers back in the day, the OG YouTubers would call ourselves, no one had any idea. We had these really traumatic experiences with multi-channel networks. And no, there was just a lie was a Wild West. Everyone, there was a lot of money started to flow. No one knew what they were doing. And honestly, we made every mistake in the book. Granting brands perpetual rights to our content, which means forever, we offered to do tons and tons of work for a very small amount of money, you name it. And so a lot of our experience about getting better with this stuff came from just making every mistake in the book. So that was our experience on one side is like actually being creators in the trenches doing literally hundreds of deals over the last decade plus. I think we actually just invoiced like in sponsorship number 530 or something. So a lot of sponsorships over years. But in 2015, I decided to honestly candidly, I was like, we need to diversify our income. Because we're creators, here we go. We always do things are growing pretty well. By this time we had both quit our full time jobs, which is another story. And I was like, okay, like yes, things are going great for us right now on YouTube and social media in general. But what if it doesn't in a year? What if people stop watching or what if we get demonetized or what all the existential fears you worry about as a creator. And so I was like, okay, we're pretty good at this brand partnership thing. What if I went out there, used my skills as like a product manager, project manager and got deals for other creators, right? We have all these relationships with brands and agencies that we built up over the last year, number of years. What if I go out there and I say, I make the pitch, I'm like, hey, we had a great time working with you brand on this deal. Did you also know I have this roster of creators where I can help you forge these other partnerships with other people who are just like us. And that pitch worked. Surprisingly, I threw up a landing page. I started to take all these meetings and I asked a bunch of our close friends on YouTube, hey, can I like put you in a deck? This will be not exclusive. I'm not managing you. I'll just bring you business. And if you want to take the deal, take the deal and not take a cut. It was pretty simple, right? And that business started to grow significantly. Ultimately, we paid out millions and millions of dollars to creators with that side of the business as well. And then COVID happened and the agency got crushed. That I'll spare you the gory details, but basically all the deals that we had relied on in our pipeline, those evaporated, I had many employees at this time, I had to lay everyone off. It was honestly the lowest point of my life. But in the ashes of this spectacular failure, I started to think about this really interesting and perspective that I had where it was, I've been doing all these deals for a long time as a creator, but then also I've been behind the scenes now. In the boardrooms with these big brands and these big advertisers, and helping them decide how to allocate hundreds of thousands of dollars now. Across let's say 50, 100 creators, it's not just little old me here where they're paying us 5, 10 K or 20 K, whatever it was. It was like, hey, half a million, million dollars. Like what could you do for us? Like give us a strategy, help us think through this. And so we were executing these deals on behalf of those big brands and interacting with creators. And so I have been on the receive again of literally tens of thousands of emails me and my team with creators. And I've seen so many mistakes that creators have made over the years, interacting and negotiating and all this stuff. And I was like, I actually think this is kind of interesting. And so I decided to just start making some YouTube videos, dude. It was like, I'm gonna just say, hey, here's how you price a brand deal. Here's how you pitch a brand. Here's what you say when you're on a phone call with a brand. Like all these things, it was just kind of a to scratch a creative itch candidly. And I was just so blown away by the response. People were so hungry for this information, especially because brand partnerships is such a significant portion of a lot of creators revenue streams. And they're like, this is information. I've never seen this information anywhere. And so yeah, fast forward to today for the last three years, I've now doubled down completely to focus on creator education through my channel creator wizard. And so I have coaching and courses and all that stuff too. And this is literally all I talk about is sponsorship strategy. And so I'm just having such a blast you figuring out this new chapter in my life. Yeah, well, so to the fact that you got started in this world way back in the ancient online times of 2009, right, this is a wild. And there's not a lot of people who can say that they've been doing this for that long because not a lot of people, it like it didn't exist before that. So just purely out of my own curiosity, back then at that point when you were in this space, obviously you were all figuring it out together. Did you have any idea that the creator economy and just the world that is creative entrepreneurship would become what it has become today? Dude, no way. I mean, like we knew no one doing this. Like literally we were blazing the trail. Like, especially when I quit my job, dude. So my wife quit in 2012. She was a preschool teacher prior to this. So I had, and like I kept my job critically, like had health insurance and like I was like, we didn't put all our eggs in one basket initially because it was like, you two, like are we really gonna do this full time? But we saw this tremendous opportunity cost where it was like, my wife was doing this full time. She was really hustling at this and I was supporting in the background. But then it was like, it came to the point where it was like there is a huge opportunity cost where what if I could spend 60 hours a week on this like nascent business instead of in the cubicle and doing the whole medical device professional nine to five trajectory. And so eventually we were like, we have to do this. Like there's so much upside, potential upside. And when I quit my job, everyone thought I was nuts. Man, this was 2014, right? I had a six figure income at a medical device job and our friends and family were like, are you insane? Like what you're gonna be a YouTuber, a full time YouTuber and even then people would constantly ask us in the comments sections of our videos. So what's your job? What do you actually do? What do you actually do? We're like, this is our job. Like being YouTubers, this is our job. And so like it's now pervaded the cultural zeitgeist like, yeah, people get that you can like make an ink a full time income being a creator. You scroll your Instagram feed, people see like paid partnership with, you know, brand or whatever. Like people get that this is like a career, this is a thing, but back then dude, it was very, very novel and we had no role models to look up to. We just a handful of people doing this. And so we've always kind of felt that we've been blazing a trail to speak, not blazing a trail. So we have tens of millions of subscribers or followers or anything like that. It was always just like we were here in our own little universe trying to figure this out as we went. It's remarkable how you guys were on the cutting and bleeding edge of this because, you know, nowadays, if you ask children what they want to be when they grow up, they say YouTubers. And 15 years ago, the occupation, you invented it, right? So today, we're gonna talk specifically for podcasters. Now, we get to show here for podcasters all the time who want to either monetize their show for the first time or monetize their show further and 99.5 out of 100 think and are like, how do I go get CPM sponsorships? So if one of those podcasters was with you today and they said, I want to monetize my show, how do I go get CPM sponsorships? What would you say? I would say, don't charge based on CPM. Okay, let's just start this off. Let's do some spicy takes right off the bat. I'm gonna put my agency hat on for a second here, right? Remember, I ran this agency for seven years. We did a lot of these types of deals and this is what happens when brands and agencies in particular, want to work with podcasters. The baseline understanding that you have to realize when they go out there is this, okay, we want to go out there and purchase a bunch of downloads slash impressions, meaning that we want to, let's say, be in front of a million years, well, I guess it would be two million because there's two years, right? But it's like, this is how they think about it, right? And so your 50,000 downloads a month or per podcast or 5,000, whatever it is, that gets grouped into this massive number. They don't care who you are. They don't care about your show. As long as the audience demographics are right, the audience psychographics are right, they're gonna book a spot. How much can I get this so they take your CPM figure, whatever you're using to charge for your show, they group it into all the other people, right, it's as big, literally just one light item on a spreadsheet and that becomes the total number. We're spending 500,000 a month on our podcast strategy or a lot of the brands group YouTube and podcasts together and they say we're gonna spend a million dollars a month, 500,000 dollars a month and you are just one mini school little line item on that. And so if you try to charge too much money, sorry, we'll go and find someone else who's gonna just slot right in there. And to them, listen, it quates to a listen. They literally don't care about you. A lot of brands who are operating at this level of scale. Okay, and so a lot of people call me they're kind of tough love mentor when it comes to this type of thing because I'm just telling you how it is. I've been on the other side of this. And so that's why you may get very frustrated sometime when you're trying to like negotiate with some of these agencies or sponsors who just wanna, they're obsessed with like how many years, right? The listens, right? You can answer a question. What I would do is I would put my hand on the aspiring budding podcast or someone who's been around for a long time and I would say, look, the amount of downloads, the amount of listens that you get on your show is only one of the types of goals that a brand has when they want to partner with podcasters. There's actually three campaign goal types and I'd love to talk about them because we're obsessed with this idea of conversions because a lot of brands have said this to us like, okay, how many, you know, you put your tracking link or your coupon code or whatever in the show notes, right? How many people clicked on that link? How many people took the action? How many people bought the thing, downloaded the app, whatever, et cetera, et cetera, right? And so creators have been, if they do have a little bit of experience with those sponsors, they have this assumption that, well, that's just what everyone cares about, right? That's what all sponsors cares like. How many downloads, the conversions, the results, the metrics, right? And so oftentimes that is what they lead with. Whenever there's an inbound inquiry to them or wetly out, maybe they're pitching a brand response or, hey, I'd love to work with you. This is how many downloads I'm getting. This is my demographics. This is my XYZ because they think that that's what everyone cares about. But in fact, there's actually two other campaign goal types that most creators don't think about. The second one is called repurposing, okay? And the reason that a brand wants to partner with a podcaster in that scenario is because perhaps you might be the leading voice in your niche, in your content vertical. Everyone like, you know, in your, maybe you're like a developer or something, and you have a podcast all around the best practices around being a developer or something, right? And like you're the guy or gal for your niche or something, your language, whatever, right? And so the reason that a brand wants to partner with you in that scenario may have nothing to do with how many downloads that you're getting on your podcast. They just want to be able to say that we are partnered with this person because they are the leading advocate in their space. And so the big value proposition for them is, let's say, getting an audio grant of that snippet of you talking about them on your podcast. They can put it on their website, they can repurpose it on social media, they can run paid ads with it or something like that. And so the reason that it's so critical that you understand about that scenario is that they don't give a crap how many downloads you get. And so your pricing should now be completely attached from how many downloads you're getting. The third campaign goal type is awareness, okay? And this is a scenario where the brand just wants to spread the word. Maybe they were only offering their product of their service in a certain geographical territory, right? They're in the UK, now they're launching in America or they have a seasonal promotion that they want to spread the word about or they want to get grassroots support out about their product, their service or a new feature, you know, their new AI feature or whatever, right? Every brand is like wants to get this in front of everyone, right? And so it's like in that scenario, again, they're not like thinking about how many people are downloading trials, et cetera. And so the reason this is where I want to start with this conversation because this has to be where you go. The very first question you as a podcaster have to ask prospective sponsors is what does success look like to you? What is your goal? Because you cannot provide them a compelling pitch or proposal until you have that information. Let's say a sponsor reaches out to the podcaster. Hey, we're interested in working with you. So it sounds like what you're saying is the first objective for the podcasters to understand which of those three categories this brand is really looking for. Now, is the brand going to know that lingo? Like would you just ask like, are you looking for this or that? Or how do you approach that? So this is the challenge. A lot of brands don't know. A lot of brands will say awareness and conversions. And your task in that scenario has to be to educate, hey, it can't be both awareness and conversions. Because the way in which I would actually execute the ad read is going to totally change. If it's awareness, I'm going to focus on the features, the benefits. There's probably not going to be a promo code, right? There's not going to be a real call to action really even because that's not the goal. If it's a conversion focused campaign, yeah, there's a promo code. Click the link in the show notes for 20% after first purchase, just in 20 or whatever. That's conversion focused, right? And so it's to the point of not only you have to align with what their goals are, but you're tactically, your content is going to change, right? And so to your point, a lot of brands are not going to be savvy enough to understand this. It's actually going to take you educating them to realize that they need to reevaluate like the brief that they're providing you because they just don't know. Got it. So let's fast forward a little bit. Let's say we've figured out which of the three it is. The next biggest question is going to be, OK, well, what the heck do I charge? OK, so this is my favorite mindset shift around this, which is that a lot of people think that conversion focused campaigns you can charge the most, but it's actually the opposite. It's brand awareness campaigns. And here's the reason. So when a marketer is trying to run a conversion focused campaign, they have a very specific set of what's called CPA or cost per acquisition metrics that they are beholden to internally. So if they say, hey, look, I want to sponsor Justin at Creator Wizard, OK? And he gets 10,000 downloads on his podcast of the 10,000 people that check out that episode were conservatively assuming maybe 10% of the people are going to click the link in the show notes, let's say, right? So 1,000 of those people dead, those 1,000 people hit the landing page for our AI stats and video editing to whatever, right? Of the people that hit the landing page, maybe 50% of those people will actually sign up for a free trial. So that's 500 people. All of the 500 people that sign up for the free trial, let's say that 100 of those people are going to convert into a paying member. We know that the LTV or the lifetime value of a paying member, or let's say that that person is going to stick around for six months. Let's say they churn after that, right? And so let's say it's a $10 a month software, time, $60, is how much each person that signed up from Justin's ad read is worth to us. Remember, and so it's a very simple math equation to them is like, how many people are going to sign up versus how many people will listen to it, right? And so that's the max they're going to pay me, right? Because not only do they not just want to break even, but they want to make a profit, and so reality, that's the reason they're doing influencer marketing. That's the reason they want to sponsor you as a podcaster, right? And so the reason that you may feel a lot of resistance and you feel as though they're trying to kind of lowball you when it comes to this type of campaign is because they have their boss breathing down their neck and saying, hey, how many people signed up for our software program based on this ad read that Justin did? Contrast that with a brand awareness campaign where the metrics are so much squishier. I like to say, right? It's like downloads, views, engagement. It's kind of hard to tell. And remember, now this person's boss is not breathing down their neck anymore. This is like, did we spread the word? Hopefully, right? And so you're negotiating leverage in that scenario where they're trying to take advantage of your position in this industry, your name and likeness, that's harder to measure. You have a much better, we can go really into the weeds like the Negotiations Psychology stuff related to this. And so when it comes to like Palma Shacharge, it's first understanding that your pricing should change based on the brand's objective. And so if you have a rate card in your media kit, this type of thing, a lot of people, oh, like here's how it is, book 110 podcast ad reads, 2000, book 20, 4,000. You know, it's like this very linear thing. It's like, oh, just click here. Go to this part, a spot on my website. You can book it there using Stripe or you could do it, which trash. Anyone doing that's trash, stop doing that. How do you know whether that pod kit, that sponsor didn't want to be your title sponsor, be $30,000 for the entire season? You don't know unless you have a conversation with them. Let's talk a little bit about the Negotiations Psychology because I know a lot of folks are hearing this and they're like, my Negotiations Psychology is, I'm scared. So, love it, love it. What can this podcaster who's excited but also slightly terrified of these huge big name brands that they've heard before and they've seen them on TV? Like, how can they approach that conversation with the right psychology and make sure, at minimum, they get a fair deal, but at best, you know, they're really able to make out. I'm gonna make it really simple, okay? Remove yourself and your own confidence from the equation. And you know how you do that? You start from an audience first perspective. So, a lot of podcasters are very focused on their audience's demographics. Maybe you're using a platform like transistor or something and you look at your dashboard and you can see generally like, okay, and yeah, by people are located here and it seems like their ages are around this, like, et cetera, et cetera. You have like very simple analytics around who's actually listening, right? And so, you know, people put that in their media kit, they provide that to prospective sponsors and it's like another data point, right? So, one of the biggest opportunities for most podcasters is actually kind of ignoring the demographics and focusing on the psychographics, which are literally the psychological characteristics of your audience. So, what I mean by this is like, what are their jobs? Like, where are they consuming your content? Are they listening to, you know, your podcast in line at Starbucks for like, you know, at five minutes at a time? Or are they sitting down, you know, on their morning commute and it's every morning, they're listening to an entire episode where they're catching up on your last five episodes on Sunday morning, you know, drinking a cup of coffee, like, how are they interacting with you and your brand and your content? What problems are keeping them up at night? Like, do they have kids? What's their household income if you're comfortable asking that? Like, what are their hobbies and interests outside of this? What brands and products are they're using and loving right now? So, when you start asking some of these questions and by the way, the way you do this is very easy. You put a link in your show notes and you say, hey, I would love to learn more about you. Maybe it's a call to action at the end of one of your podcasts or maybe it's maybe you do your own pre-roll at the beginning of your podcast. Hey, I really want to learn more about you. Tell me about you. Click the link in the show notes, do X, Y, Z. Maybe you have social media. You could do a poll on your Instagram stories. Like a newsletter, right? It's simple, doesn't have to be complicated. And you start building this colorful picture about who your audience is and what makes them tick. And especially that brand and product question in that survey I love the most because now guess what? You have a targeted list of brands and services and products that you can now target. So when you reach out to that brand and you're having these initial conversations, you don't have to worry about your competence. All you say is, hey, guess what? I have a significant cohort of my audience who says that they love and use your product. I would love to expose my full audience to your product. And so the big unlock here is realizing that it's not about you. It's about illustrating to the sponsor that you are the conduit for them to access this really engaged pool of prospective customers. So you are the bridge to help them accomplish that because that's their job every day is, how can we find new customers? And so if you can just get out of your head around whether you're good or not or whether you're a good negotiator or whether you're confident or whether you're terrified getting on a phone call or emailing with a brand or whatever, it doesn't matter. You have put in the reps. You have hit publish for probably sometimes years and built up this really engaged audience who trust you. And that's not something that marketers can really do very easily. Yeah, they can go and they can purchase rented traffic on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube ads, whatever. But it's like, no, the reason that they want to partner with you is because you have this really unique connection that you can offer them. I wanna go back a little bit to the question of, what do I charge? Because in my experience, when I answer that question, I'll get a client or an audience member or somebody to conference or whatever, but who's who are like, it's the first podcast sponsorship, what do I charge? And I'll be like, well, it depends on the value and they're like, yeah, but what do I charge? Well, you know, you gotta figure out that, yes, but how much? So the podcasters just starting out, they just need you to give them a number. They're just like, please just give me a number to start with. What would you say? I say, too bad. I say, if you want to leave a bunch of money on the table, fine, here, I'll throw out a random number for you. Go, go find a podcast, random free tool online to type in your number of downloads and type in the industry baseline CPM. And yeah, I will spit out a number fine. If you wanna get the reps in, that's fine. I won't fault that. But what I say too bad, what I really mean is you have to educate yourself around this. You have to understand what is your worth to the brand. You cannot analyze yourself in a vacuum. If you're trying to just like say, oh, okay, yeah, this is how much I should charge based on that. We're completely missing this whole other part of the conversation is what is the brand trying to accomplish? Because they're sitting here thinking, we have a million dollars in our budget right now to accomplish this business outcome that we're trying to reach, right? We're trying to spread the word about this product, this feature, whatever. So they have a million dollars, right? And here you are come in and then they say, okay, this podcast is perfect for us. And you say, okay, it's gonna be $500. And they're gonna be like, okay, I guess. And so I'm trying not to be too facetious about this, but it's like part of this is like you have to understand, okay, I'm gonna give you something tactical actually which will help, okay? When you're in these conversations with brands, okay? Your biggest objective when you're on these calls is to just ask questions. It's like, hey, I want to understand what are you trying to accomplish? Tell me a little bit about the industry in the market right now. What are the, are there some like headwinds right now from an economic perspective or maybe some competitors? Whatever, you're just like asking about their objectives and all the circumstances surrounding this campaign. And then at the very end, inevitably, oftentimes what they're gonna ask is, okay, so how much she charged, right? It's oftentimes these conversations is what happens. And so the tendency for a lot of creators would be like, oh, $500 per ad rate or they just blurt something out, $250 per ad rate. So instead of doing that, I want you to do the following. Everyone this thing, okay? Basically verbatim. They say, how much does it, how much she charged? And you say, well, you know what? Thank you so much. This conversation has been super helpful. What I'd like to do is go back, I'm gonna put my thoughts together and put together a proposal for you. And typically what I like to do is I'd like to put together a couple different packages of what a collaboration could look like. Do you have a sense of what, let's say three tiers could be from a budget feasibility perspective, and then you shut up. You don't say anything, you lean into the silence. And this is very different, by the way, than saying what's your budget. This is what people, what's your budget, right? And they say, the brand says, you tell me inevitably, right, that's what's gonna happen. And so the reason that this is a subtle difference, this thing about the tiers is that you have to understand, when a sponsor is talking with you, they're not just talking with you usually. They're usually kicking the tiers on 10, 15, 20 other podcasters. And so what they're trying to do is get a sense of like, okay, we've got a million dollars, remember, or 200K, 100K, whatever. And we have to try to twist this budget together because everyone's gonna charge different stuff, right? And so if they tell you, oh yeah, budget's 20K, then what do you think your proposal is gonna come back and it's gonna be a 20K proposal, right? And so contrast that with you giving them an out. You're saying, yeah, give me a range. And they say 1, 2, 3K or 5, 10, 15K or 50, 100 to 150K, whatever, whatever the range is depending on your scale, this allows them an out where now that they're having all these conversations, everyone's coming in at different rates, they now know that, okay, we have an option to go back to Justin at that lower tier or the middle tier. We're not like locked into that number that we gave him. And so I have found in about 75% of the conversations that I've had over, again, remember, hundreds, thousands of small shifts that I've done now, about 75% of the time they will give you a range. Right then and there, you're saying, right then and there, they'll have it ready to go and they'll give you that range. Yeah, they'll just kind of throw out a number. And you'll get directionally a sense of, even if it's in the right ballpark for you, right? Because that's oftentimes a struggle. A lot of people will get really excited, they'll get really invested in this. And then the brain comes back and be like, our budget's 500 and you're like, what the heck? Like we were not even in the same leak here. And so that also will allow you to realize, okay, how much time should I really devote to this? Proposal because I want to make sure it's even worth my time. By the way, the 25% of the time where they, again, we'll push back on that question because they will. They're going to be like, I don't know, we don't know. We're still trying to figure out the budget, you tell us. Then my mindset here is your package number one that you provide to them has to be your hell yeah number. Meaning that if they said, hey, let's go with package one, you're like, hell yeah, let's do this. You don't say, oh man, I got to do this now. And then you grow to resent it. I realize that this is not as simple as a formula and to be clear, like I have a lot of various sophisticated robust like tools that I've built in my program and my coaching and stuff like that. But I just wanted to provide you just a rough framework to realize that like stop using calculators. That is a baseline, that is a starting place. If you want to transform your income using sponsorships, you have to understand that this is an art and a science and you have to just as much as, you know, understanding and assessing your metrics, which is a part of it, but you have to understand what the brand's trying to accomplish to because this is the way in which you go from charging a thousand to $10,000 without 10 times the work. Right now, I mean, what you've shared is the perfect medium between what I'm sure you have the like specific formula as that you have to put it together. But a lot of these folks, you know, that are here in this right now are coming from a place of just question marks, just no idea, and that's immensely helpful. So the next question that they're gonna have is, okay, packages, that sounds fun. Three different packages. I thought I was just doing podcast adries. So what are the types of other things that a podcaster can include in a package as they go up that ladder? So one of the biggest mistakes that creators make with twofold, number one, is not offering packages at all. People are just like $50 spread rate, $200 spread rate. Go on my website and book and just add to cart, all the cart, this type of thing, right? And so if that's something that you're doing, this is like the lowest-hanging fruit for you. It's just don't do that anymore. Anytime, like a brand like asked you, like how much do you charge per ad read? You don't just come back and spit out one number. So don't do that anymore. The second thing, when it comes to packages, if you are doing that, another mistake that creators make is they just have the packages increasing linearly, right? So it's like package one, 10 reads. Package two, 20 reads, 30 reads, and there's like, maybe some price break, right? So the more you book, though, maybe you get a 10% price breaker or something like that, right? The most important thing that you need to understand is that your packages have to be tied to the brand's goals. So if they tell you that they have several different goals, maybe driving more leads to their SaaS tool is one goal or getting more awareness or getting people to show up to this webinar that they've got going on or getting people more people interacting in their private community. We're like, a lot of times you have these conversations and they give you all these goals. They give you various different things, right? And so what you do with your packages is say, okay, package one, yeah, that's going to be our lowest tier. That's going to be the, let's say the conversion focused thing or driving people to your tool, right? Yeah, 10 ad reads, that's going to, you know, links in the showdowns, like that's going to be our package one. But then package two is completely different. Package two is going to be aligned to goal two, which is, hey, we want to get a bunch of people to sign up for this webinar and we want to get people into this community. And so, you know, it's actually a better thing to do for package two is I'm going to do some newsletter blasts. I'm going to do some IG story frames because I've also got, you know, 10,000 developers on my Instagram and I'm going to do three series of Instagram stories with a link sticker on every frame because that is the line to that goal. So it's a really, really important, interesting insights and I'm sure your mind is, the everyone listening is their mind's going in a lot of different places here because it's like, wait, I don't actually have other platforms here. I'm just doing a podcast or I don't have a newsletter. I don't have a thing. And this is the reason why it's so critical that you start thinking about what is my multi platform strategy? Because if all you have is a podcast, you don't have anything else to offer. Well, you can't give them a bespoke, like proposal. All you can do all day long is I'm going to give you podcast ad reads. And remember, it's audience first. So how can you serve your audience, right? So you can serve your audience with a podcast. Yes, but I bet you you could serve them in other ways too. Maybe it's with the newsletter, maybe it's with a YouTube channel, maybe it's with, you know, other social platforms, whatever it is, right? But again, it's about serving them. And so that's going to get you to start thinking about, like one of my favorite takeaways from a lot of folks who participated in my program is like, they come into it and they're like, I'm never doing short form content. I'm never getting on TikTok. I'm a podcaster. I'm never like this, but I'm not dancing or whatever, right? And then they get in the room and with other people who have grown a huge business with their short form content. And they realize that, you know, what? Actually, I think my audience might find value from me talking about this or doing this in a short form way. And so now, guess what? Fast forward. Actually, this is a great example, dude. I didn't have a podcast for the longest time. Okay? I literally just launched one in January. I've been a creator since 2009, right? And I never had a podcast in like an internist. The obvious thing for me would have been like, I'm going to make my sponsorships podcast, right? And the lowest hanging fruit for me would have been like, I do a live stream every single Friday. And so I could have just like repurpose those, right? I'll just like strip it out. I'll like repackage it a little bit and like, there's the podcast, right? But I didn't want to do that. I went to this like audience first idea, right? I was like, how can I serve them? At the same time, I was having all these conversations with different partners who were saying, hey, do you have a podcast? Yeah, we want to partner with your newsletter, your, you know, your YouTube, like all the stuff but do you have a podcast like can we do ad reads on there? And I kept being like, no, no, I don't have podcasts. No, I just kept saying no over and over. And eventually I was like, this is stupid. I should lodge a podcast, right? And I had a bunch of people in my audience asking that too. So it was like this, I was getting it from both sides and I was finally like, okay, I have to do this, I have to do this right. And so ultimately what I did was I launched a podcast that was not just about sponsorships. It was called creator, it's called creator debates tagline. You'll enjoy this stupid arguments to help creators make smart decisions. And every podcast is I pit to high profile creators against each other to debate a hotly contested topic in the creator economy. And the beautiful thing about this format is that, I'm not the focus, right? I'm just the moderator, I'm the host of it. But I do get to oftentimes flex my expertise within this format because we often drift into sponsorships quite a bit in some of these other topics. So actually our pilot episode was video versus non-video podcasts. Like can you succeed and grow? Nice. It's like various topics like that. And so now I have this new content format. You know, fast forward six months later. And I can now, regardless of what a brand tells me their objective is, I say, okay, for you brand, the perfect bespoke solution for you, you're trying to do that thing is sponsoring my newsletter, sponsoring my YouTube channel and let's do some social promotion. That's the solution for you based on what you're trying to do. You brand over here, your solution, I think you should actually do a guest session in my course. I think you should sponsor the podcast. I think you should do XYZ because that's what you told me your objective is. And so every proposal that I'm providing to different brands is based on their own objectives. So it's a total game changer. And so when it comes to thinking about packages, it's like, how can you put together the different things in your business to help not only your, you know, to serve your audience, right? But also help brands accomplish their own objectives. Fantastic. We've spoken about how to price, how to negotiate, everything before the deal is done. Let's talk a little bit about what should happen after the deal is done. You've got the deal. What are some of the pitfalls that you see specifically podcasters get into post to Qing? I'm so happy you asked this question because it's the least sexy question because everyone wants to go pitching, and negotiating, and pricing and all that stuff. But in my experience, again, I'm putting my agency hat back on. It's this phase that actually determines whether the brand or the agency will want to work with you again or not in the future. Because it's all hunky-dory up till then, right? Like emotions are everyone's super optimistic and it's gonna be great. But if they, the moment you sign on the dotted line and you're not responsive, it takes three, four days to get an email response back from you. They come back with a few edits to your ad read and you give them a bunch of flack. Like, this is when they decide, like, okay, we're never working with that creator again. Right? Because that's what happened to me, right? Contrast that with the creator who's super responsive. Oh, yeah, sure, no problem. I'll just record a new voiceover, like figure that thing out 30 seconds. Don't be a deal. Set it back to me in two hours. That's the creator that we then go on to recommend to all of our clients. Yeah, we've had a great experience working with this person. We're gonna put them into every single proposal that we're putting out to our clients who are the brands as an agency. And so it's so important to realize that client services kind of, right? You're running a business here, right? Is actually the most important part. And so rather than kind of phoning it in and like being super lackadaisical with the delivery of the partnership, this is where you should obsess. This is where you should design systems and tooling. And like, I have a whole really sophisticated notion template that I designed for my students to help keep track of a lot of this stuff. Because like, you may not think that delivering something two or three days late is a big deal. Or you may have some sort of like schedule issue where you can't release your podcasts on the day that you usually do. Or you have to swap out an ad read for another one because you overbooked by accident or whatever, right? Like these things happen because you know we're so much in our own head. Thinking about our own show. This is my show. And I like need to maintain the content cadence. I need to do this. You don't realize that there is a lot of repercussions of you not putting the ad read on the day that you said that you're going to put it into. Because remember, if not just you, they're working with. Especially if it's an agency, so here's an example, the biggest issue is when a podcaster puts an ad read that's supposed to go on March 30th, they put it on April 2nd. Because that now has not only shifted into a new month, but it's also shifted into a new quarter. And so when that agency or when that brand is doing internal reporting, they now have, everything screwed up because they now can't put that into the right column. And you may not think that's a big deal. You're like a non a big deal, but like that's a big deal because they have monthly and quarterly budgets for all these sponsorships that they're doing. And so again, like this is, I think the benefit of having around the agency and seeing the havoc that disorganization wreaks on brands and agencies and like these things that you do have, they just are distasteful. They leave a bad taste in your partner's mouths. And so if you could understand how the dynamics work behind the scenes, you're gonna be way ahead. Yeah, what type of reporting is required? Like what do podcasters after, you know, the ads go? Should they tell the brand partner anything? Or is it just like, hey, thanks for the money? So, so this also is like with the biggest myth, is that podcasters will do the partnership, they'll do the 5, 10 ad reads, whatever was contracted, and then literally never talked to the brand again. They'll get the money and they'll be like, Sionara, I'm gonna go find like another brand partner, another sponsor, like I need to find someone for my, you know, August like ad reads now. And so here's the reason that I believe that most creators don't do this. And it's actually a simple reason. It's that a lot of podcasters are scared that they actually didn't drive results. They're thinking that actually people, I don't think people actually signed up for it or I don't know if I actually drove any sales of signups of this tool or whatever. And so going and circling back with the brand and be like, how to go? They cannot handle it like emotionally, if the brand were to come and back and be like, actually, it didn't go well, right? And so they feel as though sticking their head in the sand is the best course of action. And let me liberate this mindset for everyone listening, which is that there's only two outcomes when you ask this question to a sponsor. You are either going to win, meaning they're gonna say, hey, it went great. And that means you can pitch the next seal, right? So you're gonna win or you're gonna learn. So they're gonna come back to you and they're gonna say, actually, it didn't go well. And you say, I'm so glad that you can share this with me. Can you give me some ideas as to why you think that is? Well, why do you think that it didn't go so well? And they share their piece with you and then you know what you do, you go and you sit down and you be introspective, why didn't this go well? Could be a lot of variety of reasons. It could be the talking points that I recited. Like I knew that this wasn't gonna resonate with my audience. Like you should have told them that to begin with number one. The landing page, yeah, this was actually kind of confusing. The copy on here, the thing that I was driving people to, I don't know if this is something that my people would feel comfortable signing up for. It was confusing, et cetera. This is a whole other topic of like landing page design and landing page feedback of stuff that I go into my program. But it's like having the humility, having the humility to realize like, hey, you know, I need to be able to go back to the brand and say, you're right. There's a reason that it didn't go so well. And here is how I would recommend we change that for the next partnership. I had a conversation with Nathan Barry, who was a CEO of ConvertKit on his podcast and we were talking about this topic. And he said, you know, that's so interesting. If we had a creator who we paid to like talk about ConvertKit and it was conversion focus campaign and they just didn't drive that many signups for ConvertKit, but they came back to us and said, hey, you know what? Here's a bunch of insights from my audience. I had a bunch of people who emailed me or DM me and say, hey, you know, man, I've been thinking about converting or migrating from MailChimp to ConvertKit, but I have so many automations and I just, it's such a pain in the butt. Like, I don't want to do that. Then you have that information and you go back to them and say, hey, look what all these people are saying. That allows the brand to give them the opportunity and be like, oh, well, we actually have a concierge migration team. That should be the focus of the next partnership is letting people know. Like, there's this whole idea in like sales psychology around overcoming objections, right? Anytime you buy anything, you did not just be a creator, but just like as a consumer, right? You're in the grocery store, you're shopping on Amazon, like whatever it is, right? You're just like, how should I buy this thing? Is it really gonna work for me? Am I gonna get the expected outcome that I want out of purchasing this product? Right? People are doing that same evaluation with your ad freets. They're thinking, I don't know if this is gonna work for me. And so your task proactively is to think, how can I construct this sponsorship in such a way that I can overcome these objections for my listeners preemptively? And so you go down this process, it should be this very collaborative thing with a brand where you're helping them understand how we can improve these partnerships. And so really what I teach is what's called post campaign reporting. You're not just setting a screenshot of how many downloads it got, right? You're circling back qualitative feedback too. Like I mentioned, screenshots of emails, screenshots of comments, brands are desperate for anything to send to their boss or anything to send to their client who's the sponsor to be like, hey, this went well. The especially if it's a wireless campaign. Yep, right? So this is like a really big unlock. Yeah, Justin, we could go for six more hours and I'm sure you do more than that every single day helping creators. So podcasters listening right now, they want more, they want to understand what your frameworks are for what can they do. So the best way honestly is to just sign up for my free newsletter. It's creator wizard.com. There's two reasons why you should sign up. Number one, I send you paid sponsorship opportunities every single week for free on a silver platter. I'm saying, hey, these brands right here are currently looking for creators to partner with. So that would be number one. And then the second reason is just I share if this whole conversation massage your brain, this is all I talk about is sponsorship strategy. So pitching, pricing, understanding the mindset around how to charge your worth and all this stuff. I share stuff like that on a weekly basis as well. We've got 31,000 creators on it now, which it's like blows my mind. I had 1700 last year, dude. So it's like, it's really grown very significantly. And so yeah, and then I'm just kind of at creator wizard everywhere on social. It's well deserved this whole throughout the conversation and I'm prepping for it. I'm like, my gosh, I cannot believe that we get to share this with our audience because it is just so positively full of exactly what they need right now. So I'm so grateful for you for spending the time with us, and we're going to send everybody the newsletter. It's the only one that pays you, right? So yeah, thank you so so much for the time. Absolutely, thanks for having me, man, it was a blast. This episode of Grow the Show was produced by me and Jeremy Grader with Post Production by podcast boutique, my number one podcast post production agency. Check out the link in the show notes to set up a call with them to make your show sound super professional. For Grow the Show, my name is Kevin Schmidland. I'll see you next time.