Why You Have To Stop Working For Free As A Small Influencer!
YOU HAVE TO STOP WORKING FOR FREE AS A SMALL INFLUENCER!
I don’t care that you have less than 5,000 followers on Instagram. I don’t care that you don’t use a professional camera to take your photos. I’m gonna tell it to you straight.
If you want to make money from blogging and influencing, all you have to do is ASK. But before you make your ask, you need to know your worth! And GIRL it is so much more than you think!
Before we dive in, I wanted to let you know all about my FREE Mini Brand Pitch Guide for Micro Influencers!! This is going to help you out BIG TIME if you’re looking to get paid by brands but don’t know where to start. Included in the guide:
List of 100+ brands known to work with influencers with under 10K Instagram followers
PROVEN Brand Pitch Template that landed me a collab with my dream brand with less than 3K followers!
List of the BEST Influencer Marketing Platforms to join to help get you connected with brands and campaigns
Why You HAVE To Stop Working For Free As A Small Influencer:
How I Got DUPED:
I started blogging and influencing in 2019. So not that long ago! When I first started out I was totally clueless and totally desperate to prove myself! I was working my butt off at my 9-5 job and then coming home to create and edit content, grow my social media, and figure this whole making money from blogging thing out.
I learned A LOT of things the hard way. Like the first time a “brand” (yes brand will be in quotes for a reason for this little story) reached out to me and wanted to send me a watch to promote on my page—I was ECSTATIC. It was validation. I jumped for joy. I thought “OMG I CAN DO THIS! A real live brand wants to send me a watch because they value my content and my platform!!”. Turns out that “brand” was a bot. And that bot asked me to pay for shipping for the watch. Desperate-newbie-blogger-seeking-validation of course paid for shipping! The watch never came. I was duped! They took my money and ran.
This happens a lot in the influencer space. And while you might be horrified at this story and think GOSH! How unethical of them! Well-known and reputable brands are actually doing this every day to small and even sometimes big influencers- just on a less harsh level.
How Brands Dupe Us All The Time With Free Product As Payment:
You see, brands love to save money. Who doesn’t? But influencer marketing has presented them with the ultimate money-saving experience when it comes to marketing their brand! They reap the benefits of running a successful ad campaign minus the cost that goes along with it. (Hiring talent, hiring photographers/videographers, hiring graphic designers, scouting and renting out a location to shoot, hiring copywriters, buying actual ad space to run the ad, etc etc). And that’s only a few examples of costs involved.
And all of this to reach their general audience and convince them that they need this product or service or whatever it is they are selling in their lives. Ads are obviously ads and inherently less trusted than, say, your bestie who recommends a product that they swear by. Influencers combine the best of both worlds. They can supply a brand with a successful advertisement for their product with the added edge of the trust their highly targeted audience has in them. It’s more targeted and more authentic advertising that tends to be VERY impactful and generates sales and trust in their brand.
Even if you have less than 5,000 or 2,000 or whatever thousand of followers, if you didn’t buy them (AKA they are real humans, not bots, who actually choose to follow you). You have their attention. If you are being your authentic self and your audience trusts you, it doesn’t matter that you have less than 10K, 100K, whateverK followers or that you take all your photos on your iPhone. This attention and trust you have with your followers is worth a lot to brands.
Not only that, you then create content curated for your audience and act as the talent, photographer/videographer, graphic designer, copywriter, and many other things!
SO when a brand approaches you and says WOW we love what you’re doing over on Instagram and would love to send you our product for free in exchange for 1 IG post, 1 IG Reel, 4 IG Stories, and rights to the photo and video content in perpetuity to use in our ads and on our website… UM YEAH I’D SAY THEY’RE GETTING A BARGAIN.
When I had less than 3,000 followers, my DREAM boutique that I’ve been obsessed with for years reached out to work with me! I was elated. They sent me 3 items of clothing from their store. I worked my booty off to create the best content and showcase those items.
Brand awareness isn’t quantifiable of course, but I certainly got them that! And then on top of that the sales I made through affiliate links showed me that 5 people made purchases through their website, just from my link!
So let’s say the clothes they sent me cost them… $10 a piece to source (they of course normally sell it for more than that to make a profit). So they literally spent $30 to work with me. Call it $35 since they did actually pay for shipping. 5 different people (my Instagram followers) then went on to make a purchase from their website after seeing my posts. Hypothetically, let’s say they all only bought 1 item, and the average price for an item on their site is around $40. So worst case scenario of these 5 people only buying one item from their site the brand spent $35 to make $200 (Oh, and we’re not counting general brand awareness that leads to future purchases or people that simply didn’t use my link and went to the site on their own to make a purchase).
And again, that’s the initial and worst case. Now compare that to the cost of marketing the old fashioned way… I think at the very least they could have paid me AT LEAST $100.
But even $100 doesn’t even seem to be enough, right? If you really think about it. Aside from the fact that I most certainly made them more than $200 in sales. Because they also asked for the rights to my content to use in paid ads and on their website and social media. So they are using my content to make even more money! So again, do we agree? I still got duped!
If this sounds like you— trust me I get it. These brands, especially the ones we LOVE, know that we really want to work with them. But just remember that these brands need us more than we need them! Even if you ask for what you are TRULY worth, they are still getting a BARGAIN. So don’t be afraid to know your worth, and then ASK FOR IT.
How To Successfully Get Respected By Brands And Paid Your Worth
For me, it wasn’t so simple at first. Figuring out my worth and then knowing how to phrase my emails so that I was coming across as assertive but professional was hard! Especially since my background is originally in healthcare not in PR or marketing or anything like that!
If you feel the same way, I 100000% recommend to any influencer big or small to check out Pitch It Perfect. It’s an online course that literally changed my blogging career! It’s what opened up my eyes to how much more success there is out there for me! Truly, I would still be accepting free products as payment and not thinking twice about it if it weren’t for this course. This course not only totally shifted my mindset, but then actually gave me actionable steps to start pitching brands the right way and getting the payment I deserved! I went from getting duped and getting free products to consistently making MONEY for the content I was creating!
This course is literally the blueprint that will take you to the next level! It teaches you the top strategies to land high paying brand deals. No massive following on Instagram needed. Just a willingness to learn the right things to do and a willingness to do the work! I’m telling ya, it’s a game-changer! I now partner with brands all the time on my blog and my Instagram and I am negotiating to get paid what I am worth like a pro! It’s crazy to me when I can get paid $750 for something I used to just accept free product for!
If you want to learn more about how Pitch It Perfect works and how it can help you, check out this link here! (this is an affiliate link btw! I 100% back this course!) I truly think this course is such a game-changer and honestly if you do the work and apply the lessons, you will more than make up the initial investment of $699. (Julie, the creator, also has payment plans you can sign up for!)
Definitely check out the information and make an informed decision by visiting the link here. But if after reading about it you’re not feeling QUITE ready to make the leap- Julie does have an amazing Podcast called The Influencer Podcast you can listen to that has a lot of great insights as well! (I recommend listening to the first season- the more recent seasons are great too but the first season has a lot more actionable tips for new bloggers!) I also created my own totally free resource you can check out below! It includes a free pitch template (the EXACT pitch I used to land a dream collab at a little less than 3K followers!), a list of 100+ brands that have been known to work with influencers with less than 10K Instagram followers, and a list of free platforms to sign up for that will connect you with brands to work with!
The more of us that clue in and realize our worth and DEMAND it when working with brands, the more brands will realize they need to start paying influencers as a whole more! If nothing else, If you take anything away from reading this blog post I hope you at least come to realize that your hard work should be valued, and any brand that doesn’t see your value doesn’t deserve to take advantage of it!
Love these tips? Check out these related blog posts for more!
Happy Blogging!
