$150,000!!! That is how much money I’ve made extra on top of my business working with brands.
And in this article, I’m gonna tackle how to get your first brand deal so you can start becoming an influencer like the Kardashians.
I’ll discuss more about being very intentional with creating your online brand and then attracting brands to you that will wanna work with you.
Now, one of the first things is that you’re gonna have to make sure that you have a very pleasant online presence.
Here’s a deal about a brand. So let’s just say they sell lipstick, and then you want to partner with a lipstick brand.
Well, they have a product. It costs whatever it costs, and then their goal is to be able to sell more of these products.
And so then they’re gonna be looking for someone that can showcase their products to an audience of people that are likely to buy.
So what does that mean? That means that if I have a personal brand online and most of my audience is masculine men that don’t wear lipstick, then a brand is not gonna wanna partner with me selling lipstick because they have their goal in mind.
Now I wanna make money, but so do they.
And so you have to make sure that if you’re saying to yourself, “I want to market lipstick” ,then you have to be building an online brand that makes sense for a brand to come to you and say, “We wanna pay you X amount of dollars to market our product”
Does that make sense?
So I’ve worked with a lot of brands, including TikTok.
And one of the reasons why TikTok chose to work with me is because I have an online brand that teaches TikTok to business owners.
And so once I was able to create content, marketing TikTok, I was marketing it to the audience that TikTok is trying to reach, which is more business people.
So first thing is you have to make sure that you have an attractive online brand.
I’m not saying you have to have a hundred thousand or a million followers. But you have to be attractive to a brand. Not your face or your hair, but your brand.
Now, if you want to get the attention of these brands, the easiest thing to do is to go after them yourself.
Yes, they can find you on Instagram and they can find you on TikTok and all of that, but the easiest and fastest way is for you to contact them.
For example, I hire a lot of people from the website, upwork.com, where you are able to hire people all over the world for different types of jobs.
And so because I give so much money to Upwork and I’m always telling everybody to use Upwork. I want to work with Upwork.
But they don’t know me, so I decided to go and send UpWork an inbox.
Message tip number one. I sent them a message on Instagram and said, “Hey, I’m Keenya Kelly. I have an audience of over 490,000 followers on TikTok, and I push all of my audience to Upwork to work with you guys when it comes to hiring. Who can I talk to about collaborations with?”
I didn’t pitch. I said, this is who I am. This is what I do. Who can I talk to? Immediately!
The person said, “This is who you need to talk to.”
Now I have the contact person to talk to about what it is that I want to do.
You don’t have to sit around waiting on brands. Some of them are gonna come and get you, but if you wanna make money right now, why would you not just go after them?
Now, the moment I went after Upwork, Upwork came for me.
What does that mean? Upwork came and looked at my Instagram and said, “Who is this?” They looked at my TikTok and said, “Who is this? Is this someone that we would be attracted to for our business?”
Another example is that I had a podcast I wanted to be featured on, and so I created an Instagram reel and pitched them in the reel.
The said reel was promoting them, telling them what I do before they ever reached out to me.
They looked at me.
How do I know? It’s when they sent me an inbox inviting me for a pre-interview, and they said, “I saw that you pitched us. It was great, but we get pitched all the time. But what we did was we looked at you, we looked at your website, and you had everything we were looking for”
And now I have been on this podcast 10 plus times because of that initial pitch.
So the easiest way to get your very first brand deal on TikTok or anywhere is reaching out to the brand yourself.
You may not have the email address, but now TikTok has direct messaging open.
You could send them a DM on TikTok.
Most people aren’t using DMs, so if you’re sending DMs, they’re gonna get it because most people aren’t using it, right?
Or you can send them a DM on Twitter, you can add them on Twitter or you can send them a DM on Instagram.
You just gotta be very polished and just aggressive about going and getting it.
Don’t get me wrong, you can subscribe to influence marketing agencies and put your profile in and all those things.
We’ll discuss influence marketing agencies at another time.
But specifically to get your first one, choose the brand(s), in plural, that you wanna talk to and go and inbox them.
Tell them who you are.
Tell them who’s in your audience, where you’ve got your biggest following, and ask them who’s the right person to talk to about collaborations?
Not to get paid as an influencer, but for collaboration.
The average person that is managing a social media account, is their social media manager.
So when I reach out to Upwork, it’s not the CEO, it’s not the person that handles influencer collaborations, but the social media manager can connect me to the right person.
So that’s what you wanna do.
If you wanna get your very first brand deal this year or next year, my strongest encouragement, make a list of the brands that you wanna work with.
Send them a DM and then get ready for them to reach back out.
If you’re interested in learning how to market your business on the TikTok platform, but need some guidance on how to do it. Be sure to check out the TikTok Marketing Bundle to learn the secrets of TikTok and how I’ve leveraged the platform to gain almost half a million of followers and amassed $1,000,000 in revenue.
This course will show you EXACTLY how you can too!