How to get paid to promote brands

There are two ways to get paid to promote brands, and they work very differently. Affiliate commission pays you a percentage of what your audience buys through your link, starts immediately, requires no approval from anyone, and scales with how much your audience trusts you. Brand deals pay a flat fee agreed in advance for a specified post, video or placement, and generally require enough audience or enough niche credibility for a brand to commit budget. Most creators who earn steadily run both: affiliate income underneath as a base, brand deals on top when they come.

The reason to be clear about the difference is that the advice online conflates them, and the conflation sends small creators chasing brand deals they cannot land yet while ignoring the income they could start earning this week.

Affiliate commission versus brand deals

What do brands actually pay creators?

Rates vary far too much for a single honest number, but the structure of how brands calculate is consistent enough to be useful. Most brand budgets are built from a cost per thousand views or impressions, and the multiplier moves with how niche and how commercially valuable the audience is. A general lifestyle audience sits at the low end. A narrowly defined professional audience, engineers, accountants, marketers, people who buy expensive software with company money, commands multiples of it, because a brand selling a $200-a-month product needs very few conversions to justify the spend.

Three things move your rate more than follower count does:

• Audience specificity. Ten thousand people who all do the same job is a far more valuable list than a hundred thousand who have nothing in common.
• Usage rights and exclusivity. If the brand wants to run your video as a paid ad, or wants you not to work with competitors for six months, both are separately billable. Creators routinely give these away for free by not mentioning them.
• Evidence of conversion. This is the big one, and it is where affiliate income becomes leverage. A creator who can say a previous campaign drove 140 tracked signups is negotiating from data. A creator quoting follower count is negotiating from a guess.

Start with affiliate income, then use it as proof

The sequence that works for most creators is to run affiliate links first, for months, before pitching anyone. It costs nothing, needs no approval, and produces the single most persuasive thing you can put in a pitch: a record of your audience buying things you recommended.

Software recommendations are unusually strong here for two reasons. The commission rates are several times retail, commonly 20% to 30%, and many software programs pay recurring, meaning the referral keeps paying every month the customer stays subscribed. Our guide to recurring affiliate programs covers how those terms work and where they hide the caps. The practical effect is that a modest audience of software buyers produces both income and a track record faster than a much larger general audience does.

How do you pitch a brand?

Short, specific and about them. The pitches that get answered do not open with your follower count. They open with a reason this particular brand should care, name the exact placement you are proposing, and give one piece of evidence.

A workable structure is four sentences. One: what you cover and who watches, stated narrowly. Two: why this product fits that audience, ideally because you already use it. Three: the specific deliverable, a dedicated video, an integrated segment, a newsletter placement, with a date. Four: one number that proves your audience acts, such as tracked signups from a previous recommendation.

Send it to a person, not a form. Partnerships, influencer marketing and growth roles are the usual owners, and they are findable. Expect a low reply rate, follow up once after a week, and keep a list rather than sending one pitch and waiting.

What should I charge?

Set a number before the conversation starts and quote it plainly. The most common and most expensive mistake creators make is asking the brand what their budget is, which caps you at whatever they were already planning to spend on someone else.

Build your rate from your own numbers rather than from a rate card you found online: your typical views on the format being asked for, a cost per thousand appropriate to how commercial your niche is, plus separate line items for usage rights, exclusivity and revisions beyond one round. Then, when the brand comes back lower, which they usually will, you are negotiating from a position you can actually defend rather than guessing whether to hold or fold. The fallback that keeps most deals alive is to reduce scope instead of price: drop the usage rights, shorten the exclusivity window, cut a deliverable. Lowering your headline rate is very hard to undo, because that brand will anchor to it forever.

Getting paid without a big audience

If brands are not approaching you yet, the honest answer is that flat-fee deals are a poor use of your time at that stage, and affiliate income is not. Three things are worth doing instead:

• Narrow what you cover. Being the person who covers one specific category is what makes a small audience commercially interesting. Broad channels need scale to be worth anything; narrow ones do not.
• Put every recommendation in one place. Scattered links across captions and descriptions cannot be measured, and unmeasured recommendations produce no evidence to negotiate with later.
• Recommend things that bill monthly. Recurring commission means the work you do this quarter is still paying next year, which is what turns sporadic content into a base income.

Disclosure applies to both

Paid promotion and affiliate links both require disclosure under FTC guidance, and the standard is the same: clear, conspicuous, close to the recommendation, in plain language. A hashtag at the end of a long caption is weak, and a note only in a video description is explicitly insufficient when the recommendation happens on screen. Our FTC affiliate disclosure guide covers what actually satisfies the requirement. Brands increasingly check this before signing, so getting it right is a commercial advantage rather than only a legal one.

The short version

Getting paid to promote brands is two businesses wearing one name. Affiliate commission is available to you now, at any size, and compounds if you pick programs that recur. Brand deals pay more per placement but need proof, and the fastest route to that proof is a documented history of your audience buying what you recommend. Run the first to earn the second, keep every link somewhere you control so the record exists, and price from your own numbers rather than from theirs.

See how Favly works, or claim your favly.com/@you storefront and start tracking what your audience actually buys.