How To Get PAID Brand Deals & Gifted PR as a Small Creator

As of December 6th 2024 I have locked in over 40+ brand deals. These deals have been both paid and gifted. 

In this post, I break down the 3 ways I get brand partnerships and you can too. 

Pitching Brands

• To do this you need to already have content out there. You can start by making content featuring products and services you already know and love. Once you do this then craft an email/message to the brand and you can cold pitch them. 
• Don’t be afraid to publicly shoot your shot. I  created content that shared my stats and growth and that I was looking for partnerships. This reel is one example https://www.instagram.com/p/DAWGm1ZOC46/

Inbound Pitches

• Brands are constantly looking for small and large content creators to work with. Make sure your social media is set up to receive inbound pitches from brand. Two key things I recommend that you do is 1)get a custom email such as [email protected] or [email protected] something simple to spell and clean and 2) in your profile bio include what type of content you focus on. 

Creator + Brand Marketplace. 

• There are dozens of websites that work as a two-way marketplace for brands and creators to connect and complete projects togetherHow did I find these websites? Instagram kept pushing me ads for certain platforms and I looked up others on Google, Reddit, and using chatGPT.

Here are some that I use and how I feel about them

1. Creator.co – This is currently my favorite partnership platform. I have gotten both paid and free partnerships here. The platform is super easy to use and you get affiliate links for most the items https://creator.co
2. Gumdrop – This platform owns a bunch of Shopify stores and they have 1 – 2 items available per store per week. You get the item for free and have 10 days after getting the product to create and post a UGC video. Use my code to sign up and we both get a comission  https://gumdrop.go.link/?adj_t=qsaohn7&adj_label=v0NxPWUED8
3. Stack Influence – In this platform you have to purchase the item then you have 40 days to create content. Once the content is created they reimburse you for the price of the item
4. Cohley – They have really cool and mostly paid campaigns which makes it more competitive. I haven’t gotten approved for any campaigns on here yet  https://www.cohley.com/creators
5. Aspire – This one is a little tricky. You can apply for campaigns but the one campaign I actually got from them it was the brand themselves that cold pitched me and they used Aspire to manage to files and payment  https://www.aspire.io/influencers
6. MiniSocial – A colleague of mine from a women’s Network I am a part of shared this earlier in 2024. They recently upgraded the platform. They are smaller than most of the others but still has many good opportunities. I have gotten gifted items mostly on here although they do have paid campaigns as well  https://minisocial.com/ – I
7. Fohr – Love this platform for its ability to provide really good analytics. I have been signed up for a while but only gotten 2 opportunities and they were both gifted items  https://www.fohr.co/for-influencers 
8. Metoric Partnership – They reached out to me via email but their website doesn’t really work https://getmeteoric.com/  

As I continue to learn and experiment I will update this blog post. 

If you found value in this leave a comment! 

What are some ways you lock in UGC deals?