So you want to book your first sponsor

Leverage your word of mouth with featured sponsor Senja

*Jordan Belfort Wolf of Wall Street voice*

Give yourself no choice but to diversify your revenue streams.

I turned down various types of revenue for years like a dumbass because “it wasn’t how I make money” but I’ve wised up, kid!

Now I know that even this little note I’m writing to you right now…it’s a moneymaker.

This email will make me about $58 😂 

Ok, I know, I know. Stay with me. I’m here today to share with you everything I know about sponsorships. A LOT OF YOU HAVE BEEN ASKING.

I would never pretend to be the authority on sponsorships, as $58 an issue will attest to, but I do know some stuff and so I’ll tell you what I know and then, you can turn my $58 into your $116 and we can all go to Cancun together.

Today, I present to you The Sponsorships Issue™

P.S. Want to find your next client? Get my new training. You get 50% off for being a newsletter subscriber which makes it LESS THAN $10 USD (use code LEL50YOLO). Isn’t life grand?

Everything I know about booking sponsors

The sponsor market is 🔥 HOT right now. I get 1-2 inquiries a week on my tiny little newsletter and other creators I know are booking exciting deals with companies like Relay, Notion, Figma, Framer and more.

If you have an audience anywhere, you can probably be booking sponsorships.

How I started

Back when I was in the LA and San Francisco tech scene, I used to run a lot of events. This is how I started learning about sponsorships. Tech companies would sponsor us—meaning they’d host at their office, pay for food and drinks, provide swag and sometimes pay cash to us. Those were the days.

This scene has changed quite a bit after 2020 office shutdowns but companies who are looking for lots of new talent often think of it as a recruiting event. Companies who do volume sales look at it as a lead gen activity. You just need to figure out whose motivation you’re playing to and get a note over to them.

Intros work best like always. Industry communities are your friend.

Fast forward to this year, I realized I wanted to get more serious about this newsletter being a business so I opened up my first sponsored slot on this newsletter.

Market researcher Abhishek Kumar (who is also a reader of this newsletter) took me up on it. I charged him $10 for one classified ad and boom…

✨ My Passionfroot page was born ✨ 

How sponsorships are priced

This is the fun part. It’s all made up 🤡 

It’s a game of how much it’s worth to you and how much it’s worth to them.

Go to Passionfroot’s Creator Gallery to quickly get a sense of what people are charging based on channel, audience size and engagement.

For example, Your Average Tech Bro has 35k followers on Instagram, 195k on TikTok and charges $5k for a post that goes to both.

I also really love Chris Nguyen’s page because he does a cross-channel package called “Own the month” which sets him up for much richer, more in depth partnerships and a better return for the brand.

For my past events, it was always like $500 or less (going back to “this isn’t how I make money” mindset).

For example, here is an INCREDIBLY OLD sponsor pitch deck I sent Atlassian for a few hundred bucks for my meetup and one from 2018 for a film festival I co-founded. We landed an $800 sponsor that bought popcorn and coke for the entire audience 🍿🥤—a crowd pleaser! For fancy events, sponsors are paying $1k (local one night event) up to $50k (Sundance).

For newsletters, sponsorships tend to be priced on CPM (cost per mille aka cost per thousand impressions). If a newsletter gets 1000 opens, that’s 1000 impressions. A commonly quoted rate for CPM on newsletter is $50 per 1000 opens.

That is how I calculated my rates and it’s why Abhishek paid $10.

My rates are currently:
$79 for 1 featured ad
$19 for 1 classified ad
25% discounts on both for buying multiple

Compare this to Kaitlyn Arford who charges $50 a classified for her list of 12k with a 64% open rate and Josh Spector who charges $350 for a semi-feature with 40k subscribers and a 51% open rate.

My list is 1.4k with a 59% open rate.

So are mine priced too low? I didn’t used to think so, but now I do and here’s why.

What they don’t tell you about sponsorships

Sponsors ARE EXCITED to work with you and many also have NO IDEA what they’re getting into.

You may have to educate your sponsors on:

• How to think about placements with you (is it awareness? is it sales? is it both?)

• Whether or not your audience is also their audience

• What expectations they should have for performance and what metrics to care about

• How to provide high quality creative in terms of copy, logo, graphics or video clips

I met a founder last year who proudly told me he was sponsoring a golf tournament to get his law firm app out there and I told him he was lighting his money on fire. What’s a waste of money to a micro business is a completely different story to a company like Salesforce.

Why? Because Salesforce shows up more than once to reel in a prospect. They can afford to retarget and remarket. They’ll put ads in the airport, on billboards, on Spotify, on LinkedIn and the golf tournament is just one touchpoint of many.

This is what most new sponsors will not understand. Don’t let them bet their house on you!

I complained about this to Chris Nguyen from UX Playbook (who I think is one of the best at sponsorships) and he suggested I turn all this education into an onboarding guide. He’s so smart.

Where I book and track sponsorships

I use Passionfroot to run all my sponsorships. I just crossed over $1k in sponsors booked for this year (starting in March).

When you bring your own sponsors into Passionfroot, PF recognizes that you’re booking stuff and they send partners your way too. My featured partner Senja came from me reaching out to Olly (who I had a prior relationship with) and HoneyBook reached out to me (I know, I was shocked too).

[By the way, Olly did a great post on how all their newsletter sponsorships went]

I’ve now booked 3 sponsors that Passionfroot matched me with (and I turned down probably 5 more who weren’t a good fit). They also have a network where sponsors can announce that they are taking pitches. Notion and Riverside have both appeared in there before.

What I like most about Passionfroot is the way they manage the whole transaction and booking. I don’t care that they take a few bucks every time. They make my life easier.

If I want to book bigger sponsor deals (above $1k), I know I need to get them on my own though.

I personally don’t bother much with cold pitching unless I REALLY LOVE THE BRAND. I did cold DM Tyler Denk from beehiiv last week.

But mostly, it’s all about who do I already know who would make a great fit to sponsor what I’m doing. Or who do I know who knows someone.

My takeaway after 5 months on sponsorships

For the first four months, I was like this is great to be getting paid extra to market and sell my own stuff.

Now that I’ve wound down my main revenue stream, selling sponsorships for below $100 is less worth it to me. It’s more of an opportunity cost for me to manage these sponsorships and report back on them.

That means that I will likely break the CPM mold and make sponsor rates something that’s at a higher minimum “worth it” level, even if it means I get less sponsors.

As for you, I’d invite you to consider that minimum for yourself and to strike a balance between that and either the going rate for your audience size on that channel or the result you think you could offer your potential sponsors.

If you’re getting into sponsorships, you’ll want to follow:

• LaShonda Brown (YouTube coach and brand deal powerhouse)

• Justin Moore (the go to for all things sponsorships)

• Chris Nguyen (watch the master at work)

Phew, we made it to the end. Are you still here? I’m not. I’ve got a plane to catch 🛫