The truth about brand deals (and how to flood your inbox with them)

I have $110,000 worth of new brand deal offers sitting in my inbox right now.

And I don’t say this to brag, it honestly blows my mind how much money is available for creators if you know what you’re doing.

For reference, I started making content full-time only 16 months ago.

To me, these deals represent freedom — the freedom to fund my life and any creative project I want for the rest of my professional career.

I want to help more people unlock this freedom.

To help lay the ground work, here’s the secret behind how brand deals work and the moves you should make to land more of them.

How Brand Deals Work

The beauty of social media platforms today is that anyone can go viral at any time.

This means you don’t actually need a huge following to have a viral hit. You could have 10 followers and peel off a video with 1M+ views.

But here’s the problem…

Legacy brand marketers still use number of followers as a core KPI to determine how much they'll pay creators for a brand partnership.

And they do this, largely, because followers were the legacy rails that the social media creator value system was built on.

When you break it down, there are 3 core metrics that matter to a brand when they’re considering paying you for a brand deal. They will typically try to exploit the weakest of these three and pay you less if any are below market averages:

1. Number of followers - a proxy for content <> audience fit…needs to be big enough to justify giving credibility

2. Avg. number of views - a proxy for potential reach

3. Avg. engagement rate (likes + comments + saves + shares / views) - a proxy for conversion potential

The reason I have six figures of brand deal requests is because I figured out how to average 1M+ views per video, with ~10% engagement, while only having 260K followers on IG (the same trends are true on TikTok, LinkedIn, and everywhere else I make content).

So for you to unlock similar deals, you also need to develop a content strategy that helps you maximize all three metrics.

Here’s the type of content you need to make in order to maximize each of them:

1. Number of followers - broadly applicable, content aligned with bio

2. Avg. number of views - broadly applicable

3. Avg. engagement rate - high precision within a niche

The process is to a) pick a viable niche (one where brands are willing to pay to get access to your audience) and then b) create targeted content that consistently activates the masses within that niche.

For example, if you make content about tech, you want every video to be targeted to potential tech fans and designed to activate as many of them as possible without spilling over into non-tech fans. This creates “precision at scale” and will grow all 3 metrics the fastest.

This sounds obvious but requires extreme discipline in topic selection. If you pick the wrong video ideas and stray too far outside of your topic niche, it’ll cause engagement rate to go down.

To be tactical, you need to make content that optimizes for these two things:

1. On-target virality - this is content that is designed to go as viral as possible within the scope of your niche (e.g., if you make content for designers, your goal is to have every potential designer see the piece without having tens of millions of non-designers see it (and dilute the engagement rate))

2. Audience matching - this is the algorithmic tailwind you unlock when you consistently serve a niche audience over and over and over (serve designers daily for a year vs designers one day and tech fans the next)

When you can do this consistently…and deliver banger after banger for the same niche, I call this a Bullseye Creator.

Bullseye Creators are the ones that own categories and brands pay a premium to work with.

And the beauty of becoming a Bullseye Creator is that you don’t need to have the most followers in your category, just enough to pass the credibility test to a brand (this required level varies from space to space but usually is around 50-100K followers).

Here are a few ways that people get this wrong and end up stunting their growth and income potential:

• Pick too many topics to cover (no clear niche)

• Poor discipline with video topic selection (too much variety in video topics)

• Narrow storytelling (videos don’t apply broadly within niche)

Get these things wrong, and you'll build an audience that struggles to be monetized (like I did initially).

Get these right, and you'll have brands fighting to work with you at premium rates.

P.S. Want to know exactly how to execute this content strategy for your niche and get the guides & templates I use to close $20K brand deals? Reply "bullseye" and I'll send you details about Short Form Academy, where I'll personally help you implement this framework.