SPI 631: Brand Deals & Sponsorships for Every Creator with Justin Moore

SPI 631: Brand Deals & Sponsorships for Every Creator with Justin Moore

Justin Moore: What a lot of creators do is they say, “Oh, I’ve got this great YouTube channel, or this web series, or this podcast, or whatever. I’m gonna go out there and try and find sponsors for it.” That is the exact opposite mindset that you need to have when it comes to getting sustainable and scalable sponsorships.

In fact, it’s the reverse. You go and you look at the dream brands that you wanna partner with, and you see what marketing objectives do they have this year? And then you reach out, you say, “Hey, I saw that you’re trying to do this. I can help you accomplish this business objective.” The brand has already allocated money to accomplish this objective. And so partnering with you is just a different allocation of those funds.

Pat Flynn: That was Justin Moore from Creator Wizard, and I promise you this will be one of the most beneficial and maybe life changing episodes of the podcast that you might ever listen to. Justin Moore helps people like you and meet creators of all sizes, even ones that have zero subscribers, get brand deals and sponsorships.

We’re gonna teach you some frameworks and he’s gonna really uncover the how to, everything from who to reach out to, how to reach out to them, and also the contracts and all that kind of stuff. Everything you need to know so that you can get paid, work with some amazing companies and build long-term relationships with them.

This is Session 631 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast. I’m so looking forward to introducing Justin to you If you don’t know him already, Justin Moore from CreatorWizard.com. Here he is.

Announcer: Welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, where it’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he still knows how to play all the Cal band fight songs by heart on his trumpet, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Justin, welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast. Thanks for being here today.

Justin Moore: What’s going on, man? Thanks for having me.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I’m stoked because there’s a lot of people listening right now who have started to build a following, even a small one, but I know they have an opportunity to make more money.

Now, there’s many ways to make money online. They can make their own products, they could do affiliate marketing, but one thing that I know you are an expert at, is brand deals and sponsorships and working with companies to sometimes get a lot of money to get a short promotional period in their content.

So we’re gonna talk all about that today, so make sure to stick around. But I wanna ask you, how did you get into this? What was your first experience with that kind of thing?

Justin Moore: Yeah, so my wife and I started our first YouTube channel in 2009, bro. So it’s like we we’re OG YouTubers. And back before there was a partner program back before anyone had any idea what we were doing, You know, still most of the time I feel like I, I don’t know what, like the whims of the platforms change every day it seems like. But, but yeah, man, we’ve been doing this full time for eight years now.

We, we were kind of doing the side hustle thing for, for, you know, kind of living the double life. I was in medical devices prior to this, but my wife’s first channel was around beauty cosmetics. She loved talking about these types of products, but didn’t have anyone in her actual real life who was also into that.

And so she started her first channel or talking about that stuff, and then I got pulled into the fold because like you said in your new channel and everything is that brand started reaching out. They started saying, first it was, Hey, we’re gonna offer you this. Free product. And she was just like, Yes, this is amazing, right?

Like my, you know, makeup is expensive, right? And so she was, she was so stoked in the beginning, but then it was ultimately when brands actually started saying, Hey, we’re actually gonna compensate you to talk about us. That was when she was like, What do I do here? I don’t know how much to charge. I, you know, like contracts, like what this, and so I was in business school at the time and I was like, Here I am, Mr. MBA, I couldn’t read this contract and all that stuff. I had no idea what I was doing. Right. But it was like, you know, Sure. $500, $200. Yeah. Sounds sounds about right. Right. And so in the beginning we just, we literally have made every mistake in the book, man, like you name it, like giving away, perpetual rights to the content, which means forever the brand can do with it forever. What they want to, you know, giving away rights to like, let the brand run the content as a TV ad, right? You name it, man. We’ve done, we’ve made the mistakes. And so over the last decade having done this personally, my wife and I have made over $4 million working with brands getting better and better at negotiating and not making those mistakes.

But then I’ve also run an influencer marketing agency. I ran it for over seven years and so, hundreds of other creators make millions of dollars as well. And so I have this very interesting perspective where I’ve been a creator in the trenches for many years, but I’ve also been in the room kind of behind the scenes with the brands and the advertising agencies and they, it’s not like, Okay, we’re gonna pay you a thousand dollars now.

It’s like, no, we’re gonna, we’re gonna spend $500,000 with a hundred creators and, and the platform strategies and like all the different ways in which you’re gonna, you know, make this campaign successful. So that’s kind of, The perspective that I bring to creator education is like this, two sides of it, to, to really understand how these campaigns come together.

Pat Flynn: That’s really cool. And so we’re just gonna dive right in cuz a lot of people, I’m sure, have a lot of questions as do I, you know, with growing channels and just a lot of opportunities do brand deals and sponsorships have to be exclusive outside of, you know, the, for example on YouTube, can you make money through ads on YouTube and a brand sponsorship deal at the same time?

Like, is that okay to do?

Justin Moore: A hundred percent unless the brand tells you that you can’t. There are some advertisers who will say that you have to uncheck monetization for the sponsorship, for the duration of the term that you’re partnering with them. So if it’s like a three month term or whatever, that you’re exclusive to that brand, then you can’t have monetization on that video for three months.

A lot of brands, though, don’t care at all. They don’t really realize that. Okay, when a, when a viewer let’s. Simplistic example, let’s say that Walmart is partnering your, you know, partnering with your channel and they you know, the viewer sits down and then sees a target ad roll before your video.

That’s what they don’t want. That’s what the big advertisers don’t want. And so most of the time it’s the larger advertisers that, that you’ll see make those kinds of requests. But most smaller to medium sized brands don’t care.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, and I could vouch for that. I did a 10 k deal on a Pokemon video and ads are still on there, and I made an additional 10 k on that video.

So it’s like, Double dipping, and I think a lot of people don’t realize that you can definitely do both, but what’s the minimum size of a channel or a podcast listenership to be even, even to be able to have these kinds of conversations with companies?

Justin Moore: Well, Pat, I have a video on my YouTube channel called How to Get Sponsorships with Zero Subscribers. I wanted to be quite hyperbolic because I think this conversation happens all the time. It was like, Okay, well I’m not gonna reach out to brands until I have a thousand or 10,000 subs or 10,000 followers or whatever. And what I need everyone to hear is that in this stage, at the outset of your creator journey, when you’re still trying to find your fitting in your own niche and you know, you don’t think that you have anything to bring to a brand that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Because if you look at most. Today, there are still hundreds and thousands of brands who have literally never worked with a creator. Okay? So you probably think that, oh yeah, everyone does influencer marketing, every brand gets it. But there’s a huge percentage of brands who either are posting terrible stuff on social media.

You’ve probably seen it, you’ve gone to their, you know, their handle on Instagram or their YouTube channel. How many brands have you gone to their YouTube channel and the only thing they’re posting there is like their 30-second TV ads or something, right? Yeah. Yeah. It’s like clearly that is not going to work on, on YouTube, right?

And so, the, the best mindset to have at this early stage when you’re growing your channel is, how can I create content for the brand that they can actually repurpose to put on their channel, to put on their social media, to use for paid advertising? Right? So essentially, your channel becomes your portfolio.

The brilliant thing about that is that when you reach out, the thrust of your pitch is not, Oh, I’m gonna like showcase you to my 400 subscribers. That’s likely not gonna move the needle for them. No. It’s gonna say, Hey, I know what I’m talking about because I’ve built this audience already, but I, and so I know how YouTube works, and so I am going to help you create compelling content to breathe new life back into your channel.

And so this is the easiest way at the beginning of your creator journey to make lots and lots of money, or essentially a hired gun for brands to, to create content on their behalf.

Pat Flynn: I love that. Cause when you’re early on, you think that you don’t have any influence at all because you don’t have many subscribers.

But it’s not about that you’re actually helping this brand have a different voice, a different perspective, reach a different group of people, maybe even through their own channels, through sharing, like you said. Now we keep saying the word channel. Can this stuff work for podcasts and blogs and things like that too?

Justin Moore: A hundred percent. So, so the way I, I, I look at it, regardless of where you have built your influencer or your presence, you essentially have built a bridge. Probably over many years to your audience. So imagine you have two cliffs, okay? You’ve got the brand on one side, and then on the other side of the cliff is their ideal consumers, right?

So every day they’re faced with this challenge of like, how do they cross this, this gap, this giant chasm to get to their ideal consumers, right? They could. Yeah, they could jump risk like jumping across and plummeting to their death, or they could cross this beautiful rope bridge that you have built over many, many years to get to them, right?

And so I think that what a lot of creators don’t realize is that you have built that bridge, you’ve been posting, you’ve been publishing, you’ve been engaging, right? And so are you gonna let any random brand cross your bridge for free? Definitely not. You’re, you’re, and you’re, you’re most certainly not gonna let them do it just for, Oh, I’m gonna ship you a $20 bag of potato chips or something, right?

No. Like that is 10,000 perspective customers of their brand, right? So whether you have a podcast, whether you have a YouTube channel, whatever it is, your number one task is illustrating to the brand that this, these 10,000 people represents 10,000 prospective customers of their brand. Because in the, at the end of the day, that is what the brand cares about.

They don’t really care about partnering with you. Yeah. Maybe you’re, you’re, you’re a good, great creator. Like, but sorry. Honestly, it’s because you are the conduit for them to reach prospective new customers.

Pat Flynn: That’s so good to know and understand. It’s like when I understood that YouTube just wants to make money, so let’s help YouTube get more viewers to stay on the platform ultimately, and then we all win, right?

Like we, we all win when we do that. But you know, a lot of creators will keep going until somebody reaches out to them. A brand reaches out and says, Hey, we noticed you. We wanna do this now. But it seems like we can take an initiative up front or early on at least, and reach out to companies. A, who should we reach out to, and B, and more importantly, likely, how do we do that ?

Justin Moore: Okay. All right. So, So to answer the, A question is like, who do we reach out to? There’s a very, very important thing that everyone listening needs to, to understand, which is that not all titles are made equal depending on the size of the organization. Right?

Okay. So if you’re reaching out to a small mom and pop shop or something, right? Who has. 20, you know, 10 people, 20 people working there. Then the person who is the marketing manager that you, let’s say, find on LinkedIn or Director of Marketing, that is probably the person that is doing everything right?

They’re doing the social media, they’re doing the Google Ads, they’re doing whatever, right? They’re working with creators. But if you’re trying to reach out to a Fortune 500 company, if you’re trying to DM that brand on Instagram and saying, Oh, I, you know, I’d love to collaborate with you, the person running their Instagram, has absolutely nothing to do with hiring creators for paid partnerships, right?

That that has been delegated to their advertising agency, likely in all likelihood, right? And the person who actually handles the Instagram is probably doing community management, right? They’re not doing like actual talent partnerships, right? And so, so that’s the very first thing to understand is that if you go on LinkedIn, you’d be like, Oh, the social media manager for Footlocker or whatever, Oh, that’s who I’m gonna reach out to.

They have literally nothing to do with paid partnerships. So, So it really does come down to like educating yourself around as the scale grows that you need to be targeting different types of people and learning the different titles. Right. You know, you’ve got brand managers, you’ve got the, you know, marketing managers.

You’ve got the, the nice thing actually, Pat, is that now most consumer brands have, or even B2B brands have influencer marketing managers now, which is not what they, they, that title did not exist like five, six years ago. So, So it’s so much easier these days than like to like figure out who’s actually responsible for this stuff than it was like in, in yester year, right?

Like 10 years ago on, on YouTube or whatever. And so, so that’s the answer to your first part of the question is like, you have to understand like your, your response rate is gonna be so much higher if you are targeting the right person. Because real quickly, like what happens if you receive an email that’s clearly not meant for you, Pat.

It’s like, okay, well this person either was trying to reach someone else, or this is spam, delete. I’m not gonna respond. This is dumb, right? And so that’s exactly what’s happening to you. So it’s not that your pitch sucks necessarily, it’s that you’re not reaching out the right person. So that’s, that’s part one.

And then the, the second part of it is like, what do you actually say? Right? Like, how can you actually get them excited about, about responding to you? Right? And so I have this pitching methodology that I teach in my course called the Rope Method. Okay. And this is very tactical. Okay? So, so it, it, R stands for your pitch has to be relevant to a campaign that they are working on or that they ran in the past.

Okay? So that’s R o is you can tie your pitch back to organic content that illustrates your credibility on this topic. Okay. Organic. That’s the O. The P in the rope method is proof. So you can actually show how you’ve helped other brands achieve results. Okay? And E is easy to execute when they say yes. So you’re, you are actually saying, I am going to do this, this, this for you.

Okay? So you’re not reaching out and being like, Oh, you know, I’d love to collaborate with you. I’ve used your brand, you know, for two years. What do you think, right. That’s what like 95% of creators do when they reach out. If you let, let’s actually do a real life tactical example of this. If, if you wouldn’t mind, give me a, a dream brand of yours that you’d love to work with and we can ropefy the pitch.

Pat Flynn: Ooh, okay. This will be just, let’s do like Home Depot, for example, Let’s say I’m a builder and I love using Home Depot equipment, and I go there and I buy my things, It’ll be fun to, you know, be able to have Home Depot pay me to, you know, mention their brand.

Justin Moore: Mm-hmm. . Okay. All right. So the first thing that I’m gonna do, Pat, is while you were talking, I just pulled up Home Depot’s Instagram. Okay. And inst, I don’t care if you’re on Instagram or not. As a creator. As an entrepreneur, Instagram is a research. Okay. Because virtually every brand has a presence on Instagram and you can ascertain what their marketing initiatives are simply by seeing what they are posting.

Right. So right now I am seeing, obviously Halloween related things. That’s what I was gonna say. I don’t wanna pitch Halloween right now because that’s too late, Pat. Okay, because if we are gonna pitch Home Depot now we have to pitch them for either the holidays or New Year, New You in January. Several months in advance, several months in advance.

Pat Flynn: It is about a month from Halloween. I’m already too late if, if we’re going for Halloween.

Justin Moore: Way too late, A brand like Home Depot probably locks in their campaigns at least minimum three months. Max, you know, probably six months in advance. Oh man. Oftentimes. Okay. Okay. Okay. And so what you were actually gonna do, Pat, is you were gonna scroll back to last January. And you’re gonna see what were they actually posting last year, right? Because most people think that like, Oh, brands reinvent the marketing playbook. Like they reinvent the wheel every single year with their marketing initiatives, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Okay? They will dust off the same playbook and be like, Hey, this worked pretty well last year.

Let’s just like, maybe we’ll do it a little bit of activation on TikTok this time. Right. Okay. And so I’m gonna scroll back. I’m just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Let’s see some of their Christmas stuff right now. Yeah, so I’m, I’m in February right now. So let’s see here. What is this right here?

Okay, so right here, I saw on December 31st, 2021, they did a post that says, No matter the year, it’s always DIY a clock. Okay. And they have this little gif with like a, you know, how Home Depot thing, and so your pitch to them, Pat, could be, let’s, let’s say you have DIY channel Okay. Or whatever. Your pitch to them would be, Hey, I saw that you were running this initiative around how it’s always DIY a clock.

Like the time is, you know, as the clock strikes 12 from December into January, right? Are you gonna be running this campaign or this promotion again this year? I would love to help you amplify this promotion to my audience and I can do, they’re already, I’m already posting about this, right? Here’s a link to my organic post that I made, you know, a couple months ago, or this is the next level tactic packet, is that you can actually strategically make an organic post prior to pitching them and say, Hey, I’m gonna pitch Home Depot in three weeks, so I’m actually gonna make a post that I’m gonna use in my pitch.

Okay, so you say, I’m gonna do this, this, this, this, this. I’m gonna do a YouTube video, I’m gonna do a podcast insertion. I’m gonna do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Here’s how I’ve helped Lowe’s achieve result, probably not Lowe’s, but . Here’s how I’ve helped some other, some other brand achieve results.

Are you free at on Thursday at 10:10 AM to talk about it? That’s the pitch, Pat. It’s not, Oh, I love Home Depot. I’ve been shopping there for three years, Instant delete. Oh wow. To that pitch.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. And you gave him a time like, let’s meet, like here it is. What do you think? Just really direct right to that.

Justin Moore: The biggest insight around this, Pat, is that you have to make your pitch them focused, not about you. Because what a lot of creators do is they say, Oh, I’ve got this great YouTube channel, or this web series, or this podcast, or whatever. I’m gonna go out there and try and find sponsors for it. That is the exact opposite mindset that you need to have when it comes to getting sustainable and scalable sponsorships.

In fact, it’s the reverse. You go and you look at the dream brands that you wanna partner with, and you see what marketing objectives do they have this year? I’m gonna look at their Instagram, I’m gonna look at their blog. I’m gonna look at the press releases they’re putting out. I’m gonna go look at their job board.

To see, like maybe they’re recruiting for a marketing manager. I can see what, you know, what they’re trying to accomplish. Right? And then you reach out, you say, Hey, I saw that you’re trying to do this. I can help you accomplish this business objective by sponsoring my YouTube channel, by sponsoring my podcast by, right.

So it’s like a, to cause an effect. It’s like the brand has already allocated money to accomplish this objective. And so partnering with you is just a different allocation of those funds.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. A better one. Yep. Right. A better one. A better one. Nice. I’m here 43 weeks ago. I don’t know what date it was, but our 2021 holiday gift guide is something for every kind of diy.

I didn’t even know DIY stuff was so popular for Home Depot, so I could be reaching out and saying like, Hey, I’m coming up with my 2022 gift guide. I’d love to include Home Depot into it. Here was ours from last year that reached, you know, 4.2 million people. How would you like to be a part of it? Let’s set up a meeting.

Justin Moore: It would actually be to slightly tweak that it, again, That’s too much. You focused . Sorry. Like the, the, Your first sentence is not about you. Your first sentence is, I saw that Home Depot is trying to position themselves as the DIY authority. For any DIY project home Depot is your. Okay. And then you transition into why you can help them be solidified as that authority.

So it’s not about you, it’s about them. I

Pat Flynn: mean, these are tips for just pitching anything, right? You wanna be a guest on another podcast. I always say that exact thing. Don’t make it about you. How can you help this person, you know, amplify the message that they have, Or fill in a gap that, you know, maybe they’re missing this.

Okay, first of all, I, I’m gonna mention this a few times, but obviously you are the expert in this. Where can people go to join your newsletter? Cuz you talk about this stuff all the time. You have examples like this. I love it. What’s the CTA for your newsletter? We’ll drop it a few times today.

Justin Moore: I appreciate you, dude.

It’s just CreatorWizard.com/join and it’s actually even better than that, man. Not only do I share tips like this, but I send you sponsorship opportunities every single week for free . So I literally curate a, a, a huge list of like brands that are actively paying creators for partnerships in all sorts of different niches and verticals and platforms and so on.

So, yeah, I would love to have y’all on there.

Pat Flynn: Incredible. Thank you. Next question. Let’s say Home Depot or a company gets interested, right? How do we not shoot ourselves in the foot? I remember the first time I got a brand to get interested on putting a little 150 by 150 pixel. This was back in oh nine when this is what sponsorships were.

I put a little pixel banner out on my website and they were like, What’s your price? And I. $25 and it was like 10 times below what it should have been. Just cuz I had zero experience. When, when it comes to like pricing our stuff and going through the, like the more mechanical parts of this deal, like give us some tips.

How do we avoid the big mistakes?

Justin Moore: All right, I’m a framework guy man. So I’ve got a framework for you, A course acronym, another acronym, so another acronym. So it’s called the DUE rule okay. To get paid what you due Pat. And the D stands for, you have to understand what the deliverables are going to be for this partnership because a lot of brands will reach out and they’ll be like, Oh my gosh, we just really wanna partner with you.

It’s gonna be this awesome organic collaboration. Right? And they’re like, We wanna do a couple posts on YouTube, couple posts on blah, blah, blah on the podcast. No. How many videos? Is it gonna be integrated? Is it gonna be dedicated? If it’s on Instagram, is it gonna be a real, is it gonna be a photo care cell?

Is it gonna be static? If it’s a podcast integration, is it gonna be a midroll? Is it gonna be a host red ad? Is it gonna be a dynamic ad insertion? Like exactly, what does the brand want you to do? You cannot adequately price anything until you know that. Okay, so that is your job To figure that out, not theirs.

Okay. The second the, the you in the do rule is the usage rights. What does the brand want to do with your content beyond you posting it on your platforms, on your podcasts, on your YouTube channel, whatever it is. Okay. Because there’s so much value from that for them to run ads with it, for them to embed it on their website or on a e-commerce landing page or whatever it is.

So you need to know that and for how long they’re gonna. Okay. The term and then the e in the due rule is the exclusivity, right? Is the brand saying that you cannot work with their competitors for a certain duration because there is an opportunity cost that comes with that, right? If they, if another brand reaches out in three months and you know what?

You signed away the, the right. For that particular category. I think a lot of creators don’t realize, like when a brand says, let, let’s say for example, Samsung reaches out to you, Pat, okay? And they say, Hey, we look, you know, we wanna collaborate with you. Let’s say it’s a, I don’t know, smartphone deal, whatever.

And they say, you cannot work with any competitors of Samsung for six months. Well, Samsung makes a lot of things. They make fridges, they make microwaves, right? And so it’s totally within your right to say, okay, it’s just gonna smartphones. That is the category. That’s it. Phones, right? And so that, that is a very, very helpful framework.

And so that’s, that’s the first step. Okay. But when it comes to pricing, Okay, this is the, the, the other very, very critical thing to understand is that you have to ask brands a very simple question before you can provide them pricing, which is what would success look like to you for this partnership, and it’s always going to be one of three things, Pat.

Okay? The first is gonna be a conversion focus campaign where the brand is gonna say, Okay, we, we just wanna drive sales, or we just wanna drive trial signups to this link, or we just wanna drive, you know, downloads on our app, whatever. That’s a conversion focus campaign. The second one is a content repurposing, like we talked about, right?

They, they say, you know, Pat, we just want to be aligned with Smart Passive Income. That’s what we care about most. Being able to say that we’re aligned with you run ads with your name and likeness and your face, and like that’s what we care about. Okay. That’s the other goal. The third goal is a brand awareness campaign where the brand is launching a new product line or they’re launching, you know, some sort of initiative, a seasonal promotion, and they just wanna kind of spread the word.

Okay. And the reason that it’s so critical that you ask this simple question is that your price should change based on their goal. Let me explain a conversion focus campaign, the brand is going to have some very specific set of metrics, some acquisition metrics by working with you. So they say, Okay, if we pay Pat $10,000 to talk about us, right?

We are gonna estimate that, you know, X amount of thousand people listen to the podcast and of that, you know, whatever percentage is gonna click through and sign up for a trial link. And then that’s gonna convert into paying customers. And so let’s say it’s, I dunno, it’s a random number, we’re gonna convert 500.

From this partnership, right? And if the LTV right, or the lifetime value of each of these 500 people is a hundred bucks, 500 times a hundred, that is the max we’re gonna be willing to pay Pat because we have to at least break even on this partnership. So your ability to negotiate with a conversion focused brand on this particular campaign is going to be limited.

You’re gonna go get blue in the face, trying to be like, Why is this brand like so cheap? It’s because they have their boss breathing down their neck and saying, You cannot spend more than this. Okay. With a repurposing campaign, your ability, your, their price sensitivity to negotiate is going to be a little bit more, right, Because they’re gonna say, Okay, we understand that we have to pay Pat to actually create the content.

We, we get that right. And so then your ability to negotiate is gonna be a little bit better. However, with brand awareness, the metrics are going to be the squishies. Okay. It’s gonna be views, right? That’s the metrics, the impressions downloads, right? It’s like, did we spread the word? I don’t know, like, hopefully right?

Impressions, right? But they don’t have, the boss isn’t like breathing down their, their subordinate sec being like, Hey, I need to refuel my, my yacht next week. Like, how many sales do we make? Right? It’s like, no. Like they don’t care, right? And so you, that is when you should be the most aggressive in your negotiating.

And so it is kind of an art and a science, and I do go into it in a lot more detail in a lot of my videos and articles and stuff. But like that, those are the two most important concepts you need to understand when it comes to setting your pricing.

Pat Flynn: When it comes to like the conversion rate negotiations, I’m curious, are you allowed to like ask specifically money wise, what is your goal?

Justin Moore: What is your CPI target? They can either say, we’re not gonna share it with you, or it’s X. Right? And you are literally no worse off. Right? And so you either have more information or you’re back at the same place that you were.

Pat Flynn: Got it. Okay. That’s really fascinating. This is probably pretty intimidating for some people to hear.

How does one who’s never gone through down this pro sort of path before with negotiating? And I remember when I first started doing these business deals, I was. Oh my gosh, I’ve like talked to people and you know, I’m not a good negotiator. Like what if they roll over me like, and I almost just avoided it completely because of that.

How do we get over the mindset that might block us from kind of really getting paid what we should or even doing this in the first place.

Justin Moore: You know what’s so surprising to me, man, when I started out educating creators around this topic, like I very much came at it from like an engineer like I’m an engineer by background, and so I very much was like, Here’s a template, here’s a script, here’s a framework, blah, blah, blah.

And I just thought that would be enough, right? But as I’ve like coach so many creators, like a, like you said, so much of it is mindset is like, what if they say no? What if they ghost me? What if they laugh in my face? What if they, you know, I, I leave thousands on the table, like by undercharging and like all these like very much mindset related topics.

And the the honest answer is you have to educate yourself like in any other job, if you wanna get ahead in your career, what do you do? You go back to school, you get a professional certification, whatever it is to advance when you are a creator or when you are a solopreneur or a business owner, What do you do?

What, what do you do? Where can you go to actually educate yourself? And so like that is the kind of void I think I’m, I’m trying to fill with the stuff I’m talking about because it can have such a absolutely profound impact on your business and life. Here’s a very, I’m gonna give a shout out to one of my favorite books on negotiation, it’s called Negotiation Genius, is by Deepak Maholtra, and he’s like a Harvard negotiations professor.

It’s a absolutely, it’s a little like, like, like dry. But if you like this topic, like I absolutely, absolutely recommend geeking out on this topic because there’s one principle that he talked about in the book, which is very, very fascinating. It’s called your BATNA, which means your best alternative to a negotiated agreement.

So when you are negotiating, both parties have a BATNA. Okay? So what this means is that if this brand did not hire you, Pat, what are their alternatives? Right. Okay. Well, they could go maybe hire another creator. They could go hire a production company who would then have to go hire actors and actresses to like star in the content.

They’d have to hire editing team. They’d have to if, and then if they wanna actually serve the ad, they have to pay Facebook and Instagram and YouTube to run the ding ad. Contrast that with you being a production company in a box. Basically, right? You’re the creative team, you’re the production team, you’re the editing team, you’re the marketing team, you have a distribution channel, right?

And so it’s this very interesting concept of like, okay, how can I confidently feel like I can walk away from a crappy deal if it is not advantageous for me or my audience? And so the way in which to do that is ha is to have a lot of the stuff you talk about, a diversified business, affiliate income, you know, merchandise, whatever it is, because that will empower you at the negotiating table.

Pat Flynn: So if you’re interested in the stuff and you’re listening, You know, you have to consider your BATNA right now. You might as an alternative, try this yourself, fail, make whole bunch of mistakes, lose a lot of money or, You can check out Justin’s newsletter!

Justin Moore: What a segue.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Thank you. What’s the what’s the URL one more time?

Justin Moore: CreatorWizard.com/join.

Pat Flynn: Nice. I thought you’d like that one. To finish off here cuz we could talk for a very long time about this, but I, I have some specific questions about like the legal and the contract stuff that often also the thing that stops people worth recommending to use an attorney to help you through this process?

Or is there, is there some other means to, to go about, you know, just ensuring your safety and you’re not signing your, you know, life over the devil kind of thing.

Justin Moore: The number one best investment that you can make in your career as a creator, as a solopreneur, if you’re going down this path is to go and hire a lawyer to create a boiler plate contract template for you, even if you do not have a deal in hand to justify that expense, a lot of people will be like, Okay, well you know, I’ve got this $500 deal, but if I go and I wanna make sure I have it, like, you know, legally reviewed, but if I go out and I hire a lawyer for two hours, all my profit’s gonna be gone.

Well, guess what? If you start any other business, you have to invest in things to make that revenue. If you open an ice cream shop, you have to get equipment, you have to hire personnel, you have to get insurance, you have to get pay rent, you have to do all this stuff, but somehow no one looks at that as like a cost of business to make the revenue.

But if you are a creator and you are gonna be making partnerships like this, it behooves you to go out there and spend a thousand, 2000 bucks, whatever it is, 500 bucks to get a lawyer to be like, Okay, here is a contract template. All of the first 10 pages are blessed by me. And then the only page that you are gonna edit, dear creator, on every new deal you do, is the appendix, which is the very last page.

And that has all the deal points on it, right? It has the deliverables, it has the usage rights, it has the exclusivity, it has the term, it has literally everything we talked about on this podcast, right? All that stuff. And that’s the stuff that you know, highlighted in yellow, lawyer. And I’ll just go and fill it in.

That is going to be such a beneficial investment for you over the course of your career.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I, I agree. Thank you for that. When it comes to the performance, I mean there are gonna be times when perhaps you’re doing a conversion based situation. And then the video, you know, on YouTube, sometimes those videos go wild and other times they don’t.

Or the podcast doesn’t get as many downloads, or the blog post doesn’t get as many reviews. In my experience, I know those who are interested in conversion based, they wanna see the reports, right? You give them the report and it’s just, it didn’t really reach the goals. What happens next? Usually?

Justin Moore: So first of all, let me split hairs with your statement.

Didn’t meet the goals according to who?

Pat Flynn: It didn’t meet the goals according to, to the advertiser. Oh, it didn’t reach as many people as you said it would, or, you know, it didn’t have as many downloads as, as I thought it was gonna have.

Justin Moore: So I believe that in actuality, that statement when people say, Oh, the, the campaign did not do well, or the, the partnership didn’t do well, it’s actually us introspecting and looking at ourself in the mirror and be like, Dang, this video didn’t do as well compared to my other videos or to my other organic content that I posted. And so the brand must hate me. That is the vast majority of the time when a creator thinks that something didn’t go well, that’s, that’s what’s actually going on.

Because in reality, the brand is probably thrilled. And what what creators don’t do is they think, Okay, this campaign didn’t go well, and so I am not even gonna reach out to the brand. They may ask for screenshots, they may ask for this, whatever. I’ll send it to ’em, but I’m not gonna be like, Hey, how’d it go? Because I can’t handle, My ego cannot handle that if it did not go well.

When in reality, a professional creator, someone who is doing this as a business, has the hubris to be able to lean into that regardless of the outcome. They say, Hey, brand, here is my post campaign report that I am sending you proactively. I say, Here’s the insights, here’s the analytics, here’s some insights from my audience or people DMing me saying, Oh, thanks Pat. I bought this. I never heard of this brand. Right? Me here’s, you know, future campaign ideas, right? Given all these insights I learned, here’s the next idea, right? And so you give the, the brand the opportunity to say, Hey, you know what? Well, number one, if they say, Hey, it went great, then you pitch ’em on the next idea.

You don’t just never talk to them again. Right? And then the but the other alternative that they say, Hey, you know what, this didn’t go so well. You need to be able to say, Hey, that’s so fascinating. Can you tell me more? Pull that thread and say, Oh, that’s so fascinating. You know what? I actually also acknowledge that, and I think in the next iteration of content, we should talk about that.

I was actually on Nathan Barry, you know, CEO of Convert Kit, his podcast the other day, and he, we had the same conversation and he said to me, Justin, if a creator came back to us, that, that we hired and, you know, they, it didn’t go so well in terms of like driving a lot of signups for Convert Kit, but they said to us, here is a bunch of insights into the market, into our, you know, the partnership. And we would a hundred percent hire them again, because no one is doing this. No one is, no one is like, you know, being proactive in, in doing these types of things. And so this is a CEO of a multimillion dollar company saying like, if, if creator just like actually took the initiative and acknowledged that, hey, you know, it didn’t go so well as, as we thought it would, we would a 100%, you know, invest in them again to, because they understand that you need a larger sample size oftentimes to determine the overall success of a partnership.

Pat Flynn: Wow. That is a huge insight. Thank you for that. From Nathan, there, are there times where a company might say, you know, can you do another one first for free?

Cuz it just didn’t go as planned. And, and what do you do if you, if you were presented with that, because that maybe wasn’t in the contract. Maybe you can think ahead and say something in the contract like, Hey, you know, we expect to get a hundred thousand views. If we don’t, we’ll add you in another video.

Like, has that ever happened?

Justin Moore: So first of all, don’t make guarantees like that unless it’s very conservative. I mean, if, and if the brand, if you know that, okay, I can hit 200 k easily, then fine, put a hundred k guarantee if the brand’s like dead set on it and the deal’s not gonna happen unless they have some sort of concrete guarantee.

But there’s, there’s all sorts of other guarantees that you can make brands that have nothing to do with performance like that, but that’s a separate conversation you. It depends, I guess, is the real answer. It depends on the how fruitful you believe this, this partnership, this relationship could become over the lifespan of your career.

Right? Because I, I think a lot of creators look at things very transactionally, and it’s like, Okay, I’m gonna get 5k, or I’m gonna get one K, or I’m gonna go $500 from the this deal and then I’m literally never gonna talk to them again. Well, of course you shouldn’t do for. Extra work for them if you’re never gonna talk to them again.

But if this is going to, if you want to work with them for 12 months or an 18 month partnership or six months even or whatever, then yeah, maybe there is a world in where you do a, a very low lift, shout out on Instagram stories or like a plug on the podcast or something like that as, as a sign of good faith to the partnership, right?

So there absolutely is a time and a place to essentially help your contact at the brand, because at the end of the day, that’s really what it comes down to is that you know, you do not want that person who hired you to have to go to their boss or if it’s an agency for them to go to their client and be like, Hey, I’m, I’m really sorry, but I know we paid Pat 10 K, but we only got two sign ups.

You don’t ever want that. And so any scenario where you can go, obviously that wouldn’t happen to Pat. I’m just hypothetically speaking, but I’m just saying. Your job is to then go back and be like, How can I help you win internally? Let me know because I guarantee you that that person’s gonna remember that when the camp, the next recruitment for the next campaign rolls around.

Pat Flynn: Man, these are huge insights. Thank you so much for this. I think it’s gonna inspire a lot of people to consider that there are actually money making opportunities that are legitimate, that have all parties winning. That have always been there. You just kind of, kind of get out there and start talking to companies.

This, for a beginner creator, this is the last question like who is literally starting from scratch? Are there any ideal companies to reach out to? Cuz there’s millions of companies out there. What? What would be the best to start with?

Justin Moore: The best thing to do, Pat, is to start following everyone in your niche, your niche neighbors.

Okay. Everyone, so many creators look at their peers as competitors when in reality this is a not a zero sum. Their rising tides float all boats. There is literally going to be $15 billion spent on influencer marketing this year alone. Okay? And so if your peer gets a deal, that is a number one, good for them because what does the brand do?

The moment after finishing that partnership, they think I need to find 20 other people just like this person, , right? And so that is your cue to reach out and be like, I saw that you just forged this other amazing partnership with this other creator at a similar following as me, right? By thousand followers, whatever it is.

I would love to help you amplify the, the messaging of this campaign, right? And so by following everyone in your niche, like that allows you market research and insights into who’s actually partnering with creators. But another thing is that you become a supportive and known quantity in their comments sections, right?

And you say, Oh my gosh, congratulations. This is an awesome partnership, right? You do this for three months. Then when your dream brand partners with them, you slide in their dms and you say, Oh, congrats again on this partnership. Would you be willing to introduce me to the brand? Believe me, that creator will remember how vocal of an advocate you’ve been for them.

Because creators, every creator is just kind of a little self-conscious. Every time they post a sponsorship, they’re like, Oh my God, people are gonna hate me. Right? And so if you’re the one being like, Get that bag right, Like, like good for you, right? They’re going to remember that. And so obviously you have to be doing the work on your side to have a platform worth recommending. Mm-hmm. to a brand. But if you’re putting in the legwork and you’re supportive of your community, man, it all comes back around.

Pat Flynn: What Amazing message. I mean, we’ve heard it talked about here before, the idea of digging your, well before you’re thirsty.

If you’re already asking for something from somebody without having first dug that well, and you know, do that goodwill and show that support, then it’s just gonna, it’s gonna come outta nowhere and just feel like you’re just trying to take something from somebody. So I love that zero sum. No, this is all like, we can all win.

Right? And I, and I love that. So thank, thank you so much for that message, Justin and, and for coming on. And I’m just, sorry my gears are going cuz I have this like Pokemon channel that’s exploding right now and I’m like, I should be reaching out to more of these companies because we can all win and, and we can all support this community together.

So Justin, thank you so much. CreatorWizard.com/join to join thousands of people on that newsletter. It would behove you to do that. So thank you again Justin, and hopefully we can talk soon.

Justin Moore: I appreciate it man. Thanks for having.

Pat Flynn: All right. I hope you enjoyed that episode with Justin. Just amazing energy, but more so just the best information that I’ve ever heard about getting these brand deals and sponsorships.

And I want you to work with companies this coming year especially. So if you wanna know how to do this right, be sure to go over to CreatorWizard.com/join. Or you can come over to the resources page on SPI and get all the links and everything else we talked about today. If you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/session631.

Justin, thank you so, so much. I got a lot to think about because with the Pokemon channel especially, we are at that point where we could probably get some really, really amazing long-term deals, but even on the Pat Flynn side of things too. So I’m gonna sit down and think about this. I hope all of you sit down and think about this as well and be sure to check out CreatorWizard.com/join when you have the opportunity.

Justin, thank you so much. I appreciate you for coming on. I look forward to seeing you and working with you in the future and thanks so much and be sure to hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss out on future episodes coming your way. They’re gonna be great, and I don’t want you to miss ’em. Cheers. Take care, and as always, Team Flynn for the win. Peace.

Thanks for listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Our senior producer is Sara Jane Hess. Our series producer is David Grabowski. And our executive producer is Matt Gartland. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media. We’ll catch you in the next session.