How content 📹 creators really get paid, with Justin Moore

Welcome to Amplify. The personal brand. Entrepreneur show. Today on the show. Bob is speaking with Justin Moore. If you are relying on brands reaching out to you and you're essentially sitting on your hands and waiting for that to happen, then of course it's not going to be predictable. But my whole coaching and teaching methodology is how can you turn this into something that is scalable and predictable? Because it can be. And it comes from running the agency, Bob, candidly. It's that I understood how, hey, if I had full time employees, I can't just wait for brands or people to reach out to us. You have to develop a sales pipeline. Hi there and welcome back to the Personal Brand Business Show. My name is Bob gentle and every week I speak with incredible people who share what makes their business work, their secrets to building, marketing and monetizing their expertise and the mindset that it takes for your business to really grow and thrive. If you're new to the show, then while you still have your device in your hand, take a second to subscribe and consider sharing the show with just one person. If you are watching on YouTube, YouTube is fairly new for this podcast, then also standard, like and subscribe. I may say standard, but I really mean it. It will make a massive difference to me because subscriptions are few and far between when you're early in your YouTube journey, as today's guest can probably tell us. Now, creating content is fun and all. Spending hours, goofy around is fun. Engagement is rewarding. I love those dopamine hits. Everybody who creates content loves those dopamine hits, but it's time consuming. And as the saying goes, likes ain't cash. So this week we're talking about how content creators get paid. And I don't know anyone better to talk about this than with Justin Moore. Justin, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Bob. I'm super excited to be here. So Justin, you're from Creator Wizard. For the listener who's maybe meeting you for the first time, rather than me stamping all over your personal brand, can you maybe just tell us a little bit about who you are, where you are, and the work. You do? Of course. I have been a creator since 2009, if you can believe it. It's when my wife and I started our first YouTube channel. I was in medical devices before that, so I was very much not a, quote unquote, creative person, I guess you could say. I have very much learned that over the years, but yeah, very much it was a hobby at first. You could not make money on YouTube in 2009. There was no partner program. And it wasn't until several years into our journey of essentially doing this as a hobby that brands started knocking. So we make content that is a lot of different types of content. We have a cooking channel, we have a... My wife has a beauty and lifestyle channel, we have a family channel where we share our life. So over the years, we have been approached by and worked with lots and lots of brands and companies who have wanted to leverage our following, leverage our influence and reach to talk about their products, talk about their brands. And so brand partnerships was always the most significant part of our business as creators. And to quickly back up, it was not always smooth sailing. We have made essentially every mistake in the book that you can imagine because no one had any idea what we were doing. None of us creators. We were starting out early on creating content. Brand would say 100 bucks, 50 bucks. Sure, that sounds good. Exciting. That pays for our utility bill or something. That was cool. That was exciting. But as we got more experience and started talking, learning all the granting a brand the rights to use our content on a TV ad without them compensating us, all these mistakes, we started developing this checklist or these strategies around how to really do this right. Fast forward, several years into our journey and was sitting here thinking, Everything's going pretty well with our personal brand, our personal creator business. But what if that all vanishes overnight? What if YouTube demonetizes us? What if something happens? And so I thought we started thinking, Okay, how can we diversify our income, essentially? And so that was when I decided to start an agency to actually bring brand partnerships to other creators because I thought, Hey, we have all these great relationships with brands and advertising agencies and so on. Why don't I just go to them after we run a campaign and say, Hey, are you looking to partner with other creators? They were like us. And so that was how it started. And so ran that for about seven years, paid out millions of dollars to other creators. And so really developed this interesting experience set where we've been in the trenches as creators doing partnerships for many years, but also now have been behind the scenes working with these advertisers who are spending millions of dollars working with lots of creators. And it's a totally different strategy. They're trying to understand what platforms to be on, what types of creators to work with, the creative angles and all that stuff. And so essentially had this very interesting epiphany where I sat and thought, you know, this is actually interesting. I've now exchanged tens of thousands of emails directly with creators. I've seen every mistake in the book you can imagine. Crazy campaigns, just really difficult situations with creators and brands and agencies and all that stuff. And I was like, You know what? I'm going to start making some YouTube videos about this because I think it would be helpful. And that was it. It was not I was thinking, Oh, this is going to be my new business. It was just scratching an itch that I felt that I wanted this information to be out there. And so it just essentially took off beyond my wildest dreams. People started asking for more videos, and I started making videos around, Oh, how much to charge for partnerships, and how to negotiate, and how to pitch a brand? And all this stuff. And it turned into I know I do one on one coaching, and I have courses, and I have this newsletter with 10,000 creators on it. So it's amazing. It's all happened in the last two years. I'm just so excited to the point where I actually shut the agency down to focus 100 % of my time on educating creators. So that's the quick summary of how I've gotten to where I am today. So there's a lot in there that I want to unpick. But I think where I would like to start is not with the brand deals and the monetization. And I think a lot of people would probably like me to ask this question because I don't meet very many people who are really comfortable on YouTube. I meet a lot of people that are trying, that are struggling. But when I look at you and what you're doing on YouTube, you've embraced what I would call the YouTube lifestyle, where it's just part of your life. It looks like it's breathing and you make it look really easy. You've got multiple channels. Your whole family is involved in this. How did that happen? And I can't imagine that it was always natural. It was always easy. Oh, my goodness. What does that journey look like? It's a great question. And you know what? Not one I've ever been asked before, so great work. Honestly, it was 100 % a process. We were so uncomfortable and stiff on camera. If you go back and watch some of our early videos, they're still up. You could go and watch them. We feel very the way in which we're talking. It doesn't feel very... It does not feel like someone who's a natural public speaker. It very much was a learned skill. I think this is a comment I get a lot. It's, Oh, you're such a natural on camera. You have this energy, this vivaciousness. That's never been. That was not me. That was not me in the beginning. And it very much came from just years of having a camera in my face, honestly. It came from the repetition of getting comfortable speaking on camera and comfortable talking about, engaging and interacting. Like you mentioned, the whole family is involved. My wife, my kids, we have a channel, a family channel where it's very much... My kids basically grew up on camera. And that's not, I'll say that's not for everyone. That very much was the life that we chose. This is actually probably an interesting separate conversation is just what does that balance look like when your work is your life? Because that very much was us. We derived our livelihood from sharing our life and sharing intimate parts of often about... Our birth video is on YouTube, Bob. Pg version, obviously, of course. But that's not for everyone. I understand that. But for us, we have very much grown up, even ourselves, our marriage, and we got engaged, we got married, we were pregnant. All of those life milestones have been shared on social media over the years. And so a lot of the expertise that I have developed and a lot of the comfort sharing on social media, sharing content, all that stuff came from the repetition. I think a lot of people just want to fast forward through that part. They want to fast forward through the I just want to be really natural. I'm going to hire a speaking coach, or I'm going to hire this, that, and all that stuff can help. But nothing quite helps as much as just pressing publish a thousand times. Yeah. Looking back to when you started this journey, there was no monetization. You didn't have a business off the back end of this. There was no reason for you to do this commercially. I'm curious to know, what was the motivation at the very beginning? At the very beginning, I'll credit my wife 100 % because she was the one who initially had the idea for the first channel is that she really loved beauty skincare, cosmetics, and she didn't have anyone in her real life, quote unquote, that was into that. S he found this community, found this love for sharing products that she found, hair tools and all this stuff, reviewing those products online, and was able to connect with the community who felt similarly. And so it very much was a passion initially. It wasn't like, Oh, I'm going to go make a bunch of money doing this. Initially, it was like free stuff. The brands would offer to send her free hair curlers or something, and she was stoked. I f that was all that ever happened back then, she would have been stoked. And so it's very different now because being a creator, being an influencer has very much pervaded the cultural circus where it's like, people know that you can make money doing this now. You see in your Instagram feed, paid partnership with X brand or whatever. People get it now. They understand it. But for years, Bob, people would ask us in the comments section, What is your job? We would say, We're creators. We are YouTubers. And people would be like, What are you talking about? How do you make money from YouTube? When you go to family gatherings, people would say, How do you make money doing that? And so things have changed a lot now in terms of the stigma of it, I guess you could say. But like you said, it very much came from being passionate about the creativity, I guess you could say. Fast forwarding to now, I think people probably have enough background now. They understand the context of you listening to the show. There are probably lots of different kinds of people, but I'm going to take two particular categories. On the one hand, we've got the person who perhaps has an audience, a significant audience, and they might have a coaching business around this. They might have services, but they have an audience that they're not using brand deals at all. So that's on the one side. On the other side, there's maybe somebody like me, and there are many people like me who have a small audience and probably instinctively think I'm too small for brand deals. And I'd like to maybe look at both sides. If we start with the obviously successful content creator first, when people come to you for brand deals or to work on brand deals and they have done nothing, or they've tried and they've not made any progress, what should that process look like for them? 100 %. So the first mindset shift I want to discuss around working with partners is from the creative angle because I think a lot of creators, a lot of people who have built audiences are nervous about working with brands, working with customers for several different reasons. One, they feel as though if they were to partner or integrate a brand into content or work that they're publishing or writing, that somehow their creative latitude is going to be interrupted or hindered, or there's going to be people in there trying to make them change aspects of their work that they're not comfortable with. And it's a valid concern. I understand that. However, in my experience as someone who has done personally over 500 sponsorships and done thousands through the agency, that in my experience is very is quite rare when you can find partners who really understand that, hey, the reason we're tapping into your audience or your expertise or your following is because we acknowledge that you have built this intimate connection with them and we don't want to cramp your style. We want you to do that. The first thing I want anyone listening to hear is that that is a myth that the reason that you should not do partnerships is because brands are going to mess everything up. That's number one. The second thing is that I don't quite think that most people realize how lucrative it can be to partner with the right companies, the right advertisers. Because if you are able to find the right brand and help them understand that you are actually the conduit for them to reach their prospective ideal customers, then it's going to make a lot more sense for why they're going to pay you $20,000 or $50,000 to be your title sponsor on your podcast or on your YouTube channel or for the conference that you have because they want to be associated with you. The first couple of tips I have are not tactical. They're strategic. It's understanding that there's so much money to be made and that can have such a profound impact on your life and business that I don't quite think most people understand that. That's number one and number one and two. And number three is that a lot of people think that partnerships are just not predictable. A lot of people say, Oh, I get these partnerships in my inbox and it's cool when they happen, but I can't rely on that income. I have to rely on these other more predictable coaching or digital products or YouTube adsense or other types of avenues that are more predictable. And that is also 100 % false. If you are relying on brands reaching out to you and you're essentially sitting on your hands and waiting for that to happen, then of course it's not going to be predictable. But my whole coaching and teaching methodology is how can you turn this into something that is scalable and predictable because it can be. And it comes from running the agency, Bob, candidly. It's that I understood how, hey, if I had full time employees, I can't just wait for brands or people to reach out to us. You have to develop a sales pipeline. And it's what I call, my framework is called a sponsorship wheel. There's a predefined set of steps that you have to go to to fill brands into your pipeline and have conversations and active deals at every different phase of this pipeline so that you know if things are starting to feel a little bit dry in terms of your income, where you just go straight into your pipeline and see where do I need to shake some trees? Where do I need to grease this pipeline so that I can get things moving again? And so that is a foreign concept for most creators, for most online business owners, because they did not get into this thinking, I want to be a business owner. I want to do this. O ften times it's for the creative, the love of the craft. And so those are the three main mindset shifts I want you to have is to start thinking about working with brands. It does need to be something that is more strategic and not serendipitous. So I think a lot of people, and I think this is probably true for a lot of people with larger audiences who maybe haven't monetized through partnerships. It's certainly true of the smaller creators that... Just the question, who's going to want to partner with little old me? Especially when you're the smaller creator where you don't see lots of people who have brand partnerships. A lot of people, especially when they're quite small creators, they're probably very niche. The more niche you are, the smaller the audience that you're going to have is. So I guess an important question is how can niche creators approach brand partnerships? Because the truth is, we're not going to be partnering with insurance companies and food brands. 100 %. So I'll give a very simple example, Bob, me. I am a sponsorship coach. I don't know how you can get more niche than that, honestly. It's a very narrow niche, right? And yet I have tons and tons of companies knocking on my door because I have an audience of business minded creators. These are people who are trying to make money with their content or with their work or with their expertise. And these are tools like the obvious ones is like circle or convert kit or Kajabi or Thinkific or Podia or FreshBooks or any of these companies, SaaS tools, creator economy brands who are trying to tap into this audience. I never started this thinking, Oh, I'm going to be doing sponsorships for these brands. And yet I have this very dialed in persona, a very interest... These are not people who are messing around on TikTok, Bob. These are people who are trying to make money from their business. And so even though my audience is, I would say, quite modest, I don't have millions of followers. I've got tens of thousands. And when I started, I had no email list. I didn't have 10,000 people on my news. It was very few. And yet when I had 3,000 people on my newsletter, 3,000 business minded creators, I was charging $2,000 a month for four placements. So basically $500 per placement for my newsletter. And that was the story I was telling. I said, yeah, you can go and partner with these million subscriber email list. But if you want 3,000 creators, pay me two grand. That's the cost of admission. And so I was very clear with that. And I knew my value. And I think that's one of the big differences with anyone who's listening, who has a very narrow focus or a very narrow niche, but they have expertise in that. You have to understand this concept called your BATNA. And so what your BATNA is, it was invented by a Harvard negotiation professor. And there's a really good book you should read, by the way, it's called negotiation genius, if anyone wants to go deeper on the subject. And what a BATNA is, it stands for your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. And both parties in a negotiation have a BATNA. And so the reason I'm bringing this up is that when a brand approaches you or you're pitching a brand, you have to think, okay, well, what is this person's, this other entities, what is their alternative if they do not hire me? So let's say that you are an expert in some aircraft machinery, I don't know, aeronautical engineering, and you're an expert in it, and you write blogs all around aerospace design and all this stuff. Well, if there is an air defense contractor and they want to spread the word amongst your community around some new technology that they're doing, there's not very many people who have blogs around this topic or have a podcast around this topic. I literally just made this up. But do you see what I'm saying? So it's like, you have to understand that, okay, if they don't hire me for this, they don't hire me to be their keynote speaker or to do a webinar for them, who are they going to hire? Yeah, maybe there's a few other people in the industry, but really not really that many. And so I think that this example can be extrapolated to anyone listening where it's like, yeah, there may be other... They may have peers in this industry, but if you have an expertise around something very specific, that is very valuable. And so that is the realist. You have to think about that when you are understanding how much to charge, the packages you're putting together, the conversations that you're having with these brands. And a lot of it does come down to stuffing that imposter syndrome back down into that part of your brain and realizing that you do have worth. And what does your business need from you today? I. Think something I often find useful is there's Bob and then there's business Bob. Business Bob has a job to do. And like you said, it doesn't matter what you're selling, whether it's I need podcast guests, whether it's I need clients for my coaching business, whether it's brand partnerships, you need a process, end of story. And just because it's awkward, well, because it's awkward, you probably need more process, more routine, more discipline. I think that's a really good lesson. One question that keeps popping into my head is this whole thing of minimum viable audience. It's very clear when you're very niche and you have a big audience, that's clearly monetizable, but how small an audience is too small for brand deals? At what point should you be focusing on... Now you just forget about that right now, just focus on growth on the audience side of things. I have a video on my YouTube channel called How to Get Sponsorships with Zero Subscribers. I wanted to make a... This is the. Best place to start. I wanted to make something that was hyperbolic because I get this question all the time. Is it 1,000? Is it 10,000? How many follower, how many people do I need to have in my audience to convince a brand or partner company that they should work with me? One of the thrusts of that video is that when you are at the outset of your journey, trying to build your influence and reach and all that stuff, the thrust of your pitch to a partner is not, I'm going to talk about you to my 300 people on my YouTube channel or 300 people on my newsletter. That's not going to move the needle for the partner. And so what you should be pitching at this phase is, hey, brand, I actually am a huge fan of you. I've been using your product or your service or whatever for a few years, and I have done an analysis of your social footprint. And you know what? Over here, I see that you don't even have a YouTube channel, or you're not posting frequently, or you don't have a TikTok, or you don't have a blog that's like... There's a lot of opportunities from an SEO perspective for long tail traffic on your blog or whatever. I would love to help you change that in the following ways. I can create consistent content for you. I can write for your blog. I can make YouTube videos for your channel. Oh, by the way, here is my platform to serve as credibility. This is my portfolio to show you that I know what I'm talking about. And that can be such a lucrative way to make money in the beginning of your career. You're building up your experience. You're working with brands. Yeah, the thrust is not I'm going to talk about you on my platforms. That could be part of the deal, of course, but that's not the thrust of the pitch. And so I think that that is a huge unlock for a lot. And by the way, this does not have to be huge corporations or this could be a business in your local community. If you are a local coach or you're a local business owner, or maybe you're a coach within your local community or something, there's lots and lots of businesses and companies who need help driving foot traffic into their locations on main street or whatever. And so this does not have to be this giant corporate strategy. There's lots of people who don't have full time marketing people, probably in your local community, and you could be their freelancer to help them do this. And so, again, a lot of it comes down to understanding what it's like working with another partner and the expectations and submitting content or work to be reviewed and getting feedback and revising it and publishing it. That is all skills that you will need down the line. And so I'm a huge fan of just getting those reps in now, and this is a really easy way to do it. That is a really interesting perspective, stuff that I'd never considered. But I think a lot of people when it comes to things like brand partnerships is you don't know what you don't know. And the first one is always going to be the hardest. I guess it's a little bit like murder. The first one is always. The hardest. Is this a true crime podcast all of a sudden? I don't know. My accountant told me this. But actually taking a different perspective on it, it's not product placement here, but it really is. This delegated content creation is tremendously valuable. Something that I often look at is the commercial dynamic in a business where you start off with a service, you create content to raise the profile of that business to promote that service. But I sense that there comes a tipping point, and you described that where the tipping point happened where the service can almost stop because the content creation and the partnerships supporting that and the monetization means that, as you described earlier, you can become a full time content creator and not have to worry about the service side of things. The journey that you described there, I can actually visualize how that could become possible and actually motivate you to really lean into the awkwardness of that comfort, of that content creation and get those reps in seeing what could potentially be on the other side. I really hope that motivates people. I'd love to talk about to pull this thread a little bit because I am somewhat taking an opposite approach to that, actually. So yes, obviously, we have been making content for many years and done partnerships and been very successful. And yet I'm now at the, I would say, the other end of the other side of the bell curve of our personal content creation journey. And yet the thing I'm most excited about now is a service business. I am most excited about working directly with creators. I have, if you look at my whole offer ladder and the ways in which you can work with me, I have one on one coaching. I have several courses. I now have this ongoing coaching offer where our team can be your backstop for negotiating with different partners and all this stuff. And so a lot of people want to talk about super high leverage, like, how can you have a SaaS product or how can you make digital products and courses and templates and all this stuff? And it's just like passive income and it's all this stuff. And yet here I am starting to design this business where it's... Yes, there's their scalability in terms of some of my courses and stuff, but not the one on one stuff. And I love doing that. And so I think that one big lesson and one take away is that that doesn't have to be your ultimate goal if you don't want to. I really love working with people one on one. And so I'm excited about designing a business where I can do all of the things. I can have content, I can have passive streams, I can have one on one stuff. And it's just a matter of designing the business and the life that you want to lead. I think where I was coming from was things come full circle. You began in medical devices. Youtube created a bridge to a new life. You've crossed that bridge now. It may be that you loop around again and there's something else in the future. They have new goals, new ambitions, and you come back to content creation to cross that bridge again. It's just a very interesting way that building an audience can allow you to move. Into a new life. Let's get real. Let's get candid. I shut down the agency I mentioned two years ago. I shut it down actually several months ago, but I had to let go of all my employees right at the start of COVID. It was really traumatic for me. I had spent five years trying to build up this agency that I thought was going to become this big profitable venture to help diversify our income as a family. And I made it several big missteps along the way in terms of hiring and investments in software and all this stuff. And in fact, I have a channel of video on my YouTube channel all about why I shut it down and all the failures and stuff. But to your point, I thought that was going to be the thing. I thought we'd cross the bridge. Now we have this other diversified business that we can do. And it didn't turn out the way I thought and lost a bunch of money and it was really traumatic. And yet from the ashes of that, this whole new business of coaching people how to do it and being selling the pickaxes and the shovels almost in the creator economy, I was able to go back and rely on my experience creating content to articulate how I can help people in this new way. And so you're 100 % right that I do believe that having this skill set around just being able to tell a story and articulate how you can serve people, that is going to be so invaluable, regardless of where you're at and what chapter of life. So something I guess I'd like to look at is what's healthy. So from a content creator's point of perspective, what does a healthy partnership ecosystem look like? The Goldilocks. Point, I guess. As I alluded to earlier on, your goal as a creator is to find the people that respect and appreciate you as much as possible, as quickly as possible, and stop working with the ones that don't as quickly as possible. A lot of people who are very jaded or soured about this whole process say, You know what? It's just not the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Every single time I try to work with the brand, it's just such a headache and all this stuff. And I ask questions and digging into a little further. And oftentimes, the creator is not negotiating with these brands. They are accepting whatever the brand is saying. They're not pushing back. They're not providing constructive feedback. And I basically sit them down and I say, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Street. If you want to forge fruitful partnerships where you are respected by these folks, they have to respect you and you have to give them a reason to respect you. Because otherwise, you're going to be commoditized. You're going to be looked at as, Oh, just another podcaster. Oh, another coach, another creator, whatever. And we're just going to pay them and they'll make it and they'll go away. And you're like a vendor. You're not a partner. And so a lot of what I teach is how can you differentiate yourself as quickly as possible to help them know that you have expertise in lots of other ways, regardless of how many followers you have on your platform or how many views or downloads you get on your podcast. And so the perfect Goldilocks partnerships come from effort. The onus is on you to actually forge them and help people understand like, hey, this person deserves respect, and we're going to give them... They've shown us that they're professional. They know what they have a process in place. They're providing us a concept, a written concept of how they're going to bring the partnership to life. We didn't even ask for that. Wow, this person knows what they're doing. And so it's like, these are, like you said, process. It's systematizing the way in which you do these things so that anytime you interact with a partner or a brand, you are constantly showing them that you are different than everyone else. So something else I would like to ask about is affiliates. So we've spoken about partnerships where you're being paid directly by the partner, but a lot of people are, I would hope most people have heard of affiliate marketing where you promote a product and if it's sold, then a portion of revenue comes back to you. What is your perspective on that? Does it have a place in your landscape? 100 %. My wife and I have a pretty significant income every month, specifically from Amazon associates. It's sizable. And this is something we've built over a decade. But we have other affiliates to software products, all this stuff, too. But for sure, that should play a role in if you have built up influence. The interesting development I've found over the last probably six, seven years is that I actually have a non trivial amount of people messaging me on a daily and weekly basis saying, Hey, I want to sign up for ConvertKit. Can you send me your affiliate link? They have followed me for a certain amount of time. I've developed the no like and trust factor to the point where they're about ready to make a decision on investing in a piece of software or something, and they go out of their way to say, I want to financially reward you for all the help that you've given me over the years. And that is not something that we saw a decade ago. And so I think there's like I said, again, it's become de stigmatized, like, no, this is an acknowledgement, a way in which I can support the people who I appreciate and love. I think that should be part of everyone's business. And be ruthless about it. Anytime I'll talk about something, I'm dropping that affiliate link and I say, Hey, here's my affiliate link. I have no shame. And you shouldn't. Because this is the way in which people get this now. It's not you shouldn't feel like a shill. You're not selling out. If you're providing expertise, if you're providing help, heck, I have a place in my community now that's called partners. I have a room in my circle community that just says partners. And it's just like a bunch of posts of all the stuff I use. So if anytime anyone ever wants to sign up for a restream or sign up for Descript or whatever it is, here's my affiliate link. And it's just like, I have no shame about that. I'm very clear. I'm very upfront about it. And it can have a really... Again, it's all about diversification. Sponsorships are great, but heck, I have courses, I have digital products. I have all these other things too. Any creator with their soul, if you're building a business online, you should have all of these things, including affiliates. I think a lot of people, myself included, probably feel a little bit dirty when it comes to affiliates. And like you said, this is about being comfortable with being uncomfortable. You need to move past that. You need to move through uncomfortable before it becomes normal. And that's like anything. That's like with selling yourself, with selling your brand, with approaching people, you need to pass through uncomfortable in order to normalize these things. I have a really easy way to normalize it. You ready, Bob? I'm. Ready. Sponsorships, affiliates, it's all about partnerships that are win, win, win. And it's that third win that most people forget. Obviously, the first win is you. You're winning because you'll probably get money out of this, right? The middle win is the brand or the company is obviously going to win. They're going to get exposed to your audience. They're going to get sales, they're going to get brand awareness, they're going to get some benefit, obviously. And then that last win is your audience should win. This person that you're sending the affiliate link to, they're going to get, maybe they'll get a discount, maybe they'll get a free trial of something. Maybe it's a seasonal promotion. You'll give them a discount code. And so if you come at it from a service mindset, you're actually serving them. They're going to make their life better. Then this whole discomfort with providing affiliate links or doing sponsorships or whatever. This conversation comes up a lot where people be like, I only want to do one sponsorship a month or whatever. And I ask them, How many free pieces of content are you actually publishing a week? You're doing it like a weekly or daily newsletter or blog on YouTube or podcast or whatever. And the vast, vast majority of them are not sponsored. So even if you do two or three X the amount of sponsorships or the amount of affiliates that you're talking about or whatever, you'd be just fine. Trust me. I think what I'd like to look at, if it's all right with you, is I sense a lot of people who don't have partnership deals like this, their businesses are probably doing okay. What I'd be interested to hear from you is examples of the difference that these can make. Why should people be thinking about this? And what difference could it make for a small business and from a larger creator who has an audience but hasn't really made the effort or gone through that uncomfortable space? 100 %. I mean, six figures a year for a larger creator, easily. If you're in the right niches, what would six figures in your business do? If you could forge partnerships with companies and brands that are fully aligned with your business, with your audience, and you basically come to them with a very compelling pitch or proposal in hand saying, Hey, here's how I can actually help you accomplish your business objectives, brand. I'm really glad we got to this point in the conversation because this is a huge mistake that a lot of creators and a lot of business owners make when they try to pitch a brand is they come at it and they say, Hey, I have this big audience. I have all these YouTube subscribers. I have this many downloads on my podcast a month. You just keep talking about yourself all the time. And you know what happens? Delete on that email because the brand or the company, they don't know who you are. They don't care. Delete. Okay? Sorry, I'm giving you a little bit of tough love here, if you can tell. But this is how I approach things. It's like, They don't care. They don't know you. Now, if you can be very low ego about this, you can be objective, you can understand, Okay, you know what? It's not about me. It's about how can I help this brand or this company win? How can I help them accomplish their own marketing objectives? Because guess what? They have budgets that they've allocated to their own initiatives. They don't have random budgets that they're just going to pay random people that reach out to them. But what they do have is money for their own stuff. And so if you come to them and draw a line between that, you say, Oh, you're trying to do this? Based on my research, based on the job postings that I saw on your board, you're trying to hire a marketing manager to do this? Hey, guess what? You can hire me and I'll do it for you instead. If you can do this research based assumptions, they're going to think, Wow, actually, maybe it makes sense to actually pay this coach over here who has a bunch of this podcast coach who has a bunch of aspiring podcasters in their audience. Maybe it makes sense to pay her 20 grand instead of using it for YouTube ads. Maybe that makes more sense. So it's your job to make that pitch or that proposal. And so this is a very important concept because if you can remove your ego from this conversation, it can have a hugely material impact on your business. So that's the big audience perspective. And then your other question is like, Okay, yeah, but what if you're at the outset of your journey and you don't have a lot of followers or whatever? Shouldn't I just wait until I can make a compelling pitch about, Oh, I've got 10,000 people on my newsletter, whatever? No, you should be starting to do that now because you have a unique advantage when you're at the beginning. You probably have a more engaged audience. You're probably able to respond to every person who emails you back on your newsletter because you have that smaller audience. And so you oftentimes do have more sway over a concentrated few. And so being able to tell that story. Again, going back to that example when I didn't have that many people on my newsletter and I was able to negotiate some significant sponsorships because, again, you have a unique value proposition. You have a concentrated audience, you have expertise, you have a niche. And as long as you can get good at telling that story story. So much of it is storytelling, Bob. So much of it is helping the brand understand why this smaller audience that you have, it's a smarter investment for them than going after and hiring an Instagrammer for a YouTubers for 500,000 subscribers. Makes way more sense to hire you. So I think that's really the mindset here is having the confidence to know that when you say and when you promise things to a partner that you can deliver. That all makes perfect sense to me. And I think listening to you as well, I'm thinking that cold email is probably the last thing you should be doing, that there are lots of roots in to understand who in an organization. Spend a little bit of time understanding the organizations, who in those organizations are likely to make the decisions. Do you have connections in common? Look for introductions rather than cold emails. I guess you must have lots of different approaches for making. The approach. Cold emails can definitely work, first of all. You're 100 % right, though. It should not just be press@brand. Com or DMing them on Instagram or something, whatever. Yes, those will get deleted. That's not what you should do. You're right. You should be spending time doing research, understanding that, hey, you know what? The social media manager at this SaaS tool or at this consumer brand or enterprise brand, that person has nothing to do with paid partnerships. They don't have a budget. They don't have that budget. It's the partnerships manager actually now, thankfully, a lot of brands have what's called an influencer marketing manager now. That was not a thing seven years ago. So it's way easier now to find out who this person is than it was a decade ago. That's one thing. But you're right. I'm sure, Bob, that you've gotten... You can remember, probably count on one hand or two hands, the number of cold pitches that you got that were like, Wow, this is a really good email. Wow, this is a really good pitch to be on my podcast or whatever. I'm going to respond to this person versus the hundreds or thousands where it's just obviously terrible at spam. They're sending it out to hundreds of people. I sit down people and I sit people down and I say, if you could spend 15 to 20 minutes on your research based pitch and you'll get a 40 to 50 % response rate, would you do it? People will say, Yeah. I said, Okay, well, I'm going to teach you how to do it. It's not rocket science. I have a pitching methodology that I teach in my course called the ROAP method. And R stands for your pitch has to be relevant to a campaign that they're either running right now or have run in the past. O is your pitch has to be organic. You have to show how you have posted organic work or content before to give you credibility. P stands for proof, so you can show how you've helped other brands achieve results. And E stands for easy to execute. So you're not just saying, Oh, I'd love to collaborate with you. What do you think? And you're making them do the work. You're saying, No, I'm going to do this, this, this, this, this for you. It's not rocket science. It can be boiled down to a process, to a system. And if you are emailing out 100 people and you're only hearing back two or three times, well, of course you're going to get demoralized and you're going to be like, Well, cold pitch, cold emailing doesn't work. But if you send 10 out and you hear back from four or five, I bet you'll keep doing it. So the obvious question for me is, how do you work with your clients? What does engaging with Justin Moore actually look like? So I love talking about this. I'm excited you asked me is that I literally am still trying to figure out what my offer ladder is right now. So the first thing that I did, let's talk about the journey of how I started to offer ways to pay me. The first way was one on one coaching. I literally just one day I was making all these YouTube videos, all this stuff, and someone DM me and just asked me, Hey, do you do coaching? I was like, What? Do you have a course? I was like, What? No, I don't have it. What are you talking about? You want me to pay me for this advice? And so that was the first thing I did is I made a post on Instagram. Hey, I've got two more coaching slots for this month, literally just made it up. Someone DM me and they said, Oh, yeah, tell me more. What does that entail? I was like, Okay. I had to design. I designed a six week coaching program where it was like I designed a framework. I said, Okay, this is what I think I want to teach. And I just did it, Bob. I just figured it out. And so those early one on one coaching clients were the baseline for what I ultimately ended up teaching in the cohort based course. And so now I started out doing the one on one private coaching. Then the next thing that I did was I created this four week cohort course called Brand Deal Wizard, where it's a group of people. It's live where I walk through my methodology, how to develop a nuts to bolts sponsorship strategy, make a lot more money working with partners and repeatable and all that stuff. And so then that program I intentionally made for people who were intermediate to advanced level folks. And I said, you know what? I can really knock it out of the park for these people who are already making money with partnerships. They understand that they probably could be charging a lot more. They're leaving a lot of money on the table. That's who I'm going to serve first. However, I had a much larger segment of my audience who was beginners, who was the outset of their journey. And I was like, You know what? I'm going to help them down the line, but not yet. And so for a long time, for a year and a half, I didn't have any way that I could help them other than my free content, obviously. And so now, this is recent, two, three months ago is when I finally came out with my evergreen course, which is called gifted to paid. And that's focused on folks who are getting a bunch of free products or offers of trials for software or whatever. Just talk about it. Make a blog post about it. Make a blog post. Free access. And that's for those folks. How do you get to convert those into paid partnerships? And so this is an on demand course now, fully you could binge it basically in 90 minutes. How do you have those conversations to articulate why they actually have to compensate you? And then like I mentioned, this last offer that is recent is now I have a way in which people can hire me on a monthly basis, me and our team now for asynchronous coaching. I have this thesis that there is this gap between having a manager and having no one. And there's something in the middle, which is what I'm calling ongoing asynchronous sponsorship coaching. So it's essentially $1,000 a month. Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, you can send us questions. Hey, this brand emailed me. They want me to do this. What do I say? What do I offer? What packages, pricing? Hey, I'm midway through a negotiation. The brand is threw me this curve ball. I don't know what to say. Should I agree to this? Should I not? And so I feel like there is a place for someone who's completely removed. I have no dog in this race. I'm not making 20 % on your deals. But you have a backstop now. You have a coach in your pocket. And it's not just me now. Now we're talking about scalability. I have another sponsorship coach now on my team in there as well answering questions. So now I'm thinking, okay, yeah, this is new, Bob. I just launched this a month ago. And so we've got two people in there now. It's not 50. But I could see how this becomes 50 in three years or two years or six months. I don't know. I don't care. It's fun. This whole process of figuring it out, figuring out all the ways in which I can serve my community. That's where it's coming from. This is a direct response of people saying, Hey, I took the course. Now what? I still need help. This type of thing. I don't know what's going to happen in the next five years, but I'm just having such a blast doing this and really doing it in response to what people are asking of me. I think it's a really important thing to do because people love great content. And the more people can be compensated for making that great content, the more great content there will be. And that's really important. I just watch how YouTube, for example, is growing. I pulled the antenna for my TV out of the wall the other day. We don't have a hard connection to the world for the TV anymore. It's all online. There's YouTube, Netflix, that thing. We don't even have cable. The whole world is going that way and it wants real content, authentic content, raw content, intimate content. But that can only happen when the people who create it get compensated and incentivized to make it. So it's really important. And I think some people are probably listening, thinking, $1,000 a month? That's too much for me. Other people are listening, thinking, Is that all? Well, Bob, thank you for bringing this up real quickly. I want to mention it because you do not need every person in your audience to pay you. I am more than happy for the majority of folks who consume my content to never pay me a nickel. And this is where I was coming. If you're at the beginning of your journey, your YouTube channel is awesome. You have a course. You don't need a coach if you're not at the point where $1,000 a month isn't going to hurt. This is spending money to make money. I would imagine anybody who's working with you at that level is already making significant money. And your free content will get them to the point where there is things happening. You just want to move it faster by working with you personally. I think you have a fantastic value ladder there and I wish you all success with it. If anybody's listening and they want to work with you, what should they do? Sure. So probably the easiest way to stay updated on everything going on in my world is to join my free newsletter. But the actual reason, the real reason that you should join the newsletter is that I send you paid sponsorship opportunities every single week. So in addition to strategies and tips and all this stuff about working with partners, literally, I'm sending it in your inbox like, Hey, this brand wants to work with creators. You should apply to this. So it's just creator wizard. Com join. I'll tell you the other reason you should join that newsletter is because I'm on it. I've been on it for a few months now before I contacted you, I think. And it does an important thing. It normalizes partnerships. When you join that newsletter, it's a big idea. It's a big mountain to climb. When you see these opportunities coming through week after week, you start to see yourself as somebody who could actually make that happen. And that's a powerful thing. Justin, I need to ask you one more question, and that is simply this. What's one thing you do now that you wish you'd started five years ago? Oh, my goodness, Bob, that's an easy one for me. I wish I started the newsletter. We had a newsletter early on that we had started from our YouTube channel stuff, and we quite easily got 30,000 people on that newsletter and let it wither and die on the vine. We stopped emailing them. We didn't do it regularly. And that was such a huge mistake when my wife... We basically decided to restart it recently and did a reengagement campaign, basically said, Hey, 30,000 people, haven't heard from us in a while. Do you still want to hear from us? And of the 30,000 people that initially raised their hand, 1,000 opted in. 1,000 out of 30,000. So it goes to show you, and now that I have seen how profound having a email list, a regular way in which you can directly contact the people who said that they... Because with social algorithms, it's unpredictable. You don't know whether I post a YouTube video, I post something on Twitter or whatever. You don't know whether it's going to actually be seen by the people who initially said they wanted to hear from you. But with email, it's totally different. You have an excuse to be in their inbox. So going back, now that I've seen how profound... Just a quick anecdote. When I launched that gifted to paid course that I mentioned, I had a five day launch period and I made $ 19,000, Bob, and I did not talk about it on social media once. It was 100 % on my email, like an email marketing strategy. And so that is hugely powerful. And so if five years ago me, I would have gone back to Justin and be like, What are you doing, dude? Why are you not leveraging this big audience that you have on all these social platforms? And so for honestly, the lesson now is that every piece of content I make, every tweet, every YouTube video, everything, it's Join My Newsletter. Join My Newsletter. You saw the call to action I just made on your podcast. Join My Newsletter. I didn't say my social handles. I didn't say anything. I have a podcast, but I didn't say that. It's Join My Newsletter because if you're on my newsletter, I'm going to talk about all that stuff eventually. So you got to be on message, on brand. Get that. I'm telling you, if you're listening to this and you don't have a newsletter, and this should be your reason, your excuse, your final motivation to actually do it. Justin Brown, creator wizard. I have had the best time. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I really. Appreciate your time. Thanks so much for having me. It was such a blast, Bob. That does bring us to the end of another episode. Thank you to you at home for listening, or if you're watching on YouTube, again, thank you. Like and subscribe. Don't miss that. If you are listening on audio, then I would gently encourage you to leave a five star review. That's one, two, three, four, five, not one or two or none of those, and to share the show with just one person. If you did enjoy the show, then you will also love the Personal Brand Business roadmap. It's 100 % free as a gift from me. It's 50 pages of everything that you will need to start, scale, or just fix your expert business. You can tap the link in the show notes or visit amplifyme.agency roadmap. Thanks again, Justin, for your time and for you at home. Thanks for listening. If you're watching on YouTube, you're awesome. See you next time.