Get Rich or Reply Trying: Tis the pre-season for holiday brand deals ▶️▶️▶️▶️▶️▶️▶️▶️▶️▶️▶️▶️

Ah—Friday the 13th. In September. Spooky days are ahead.

If you're really on top of things, it's a good time to start thinking about your Halloween costume (I'm going to be Sabrina Carpenter).

It's also a good time to start thinking about holiday brand deals. Tis the pre-season, and we have a very early gift for you.

Our mission at Beacons is to help creators make more money (but you already know this). A lot of the features we talk about help creators monetize their audience directly: sales tools like Beacons Store and marketing tools like Beacons Link in Bio, Email, and Websites.

But creators also make money from brand deals, and this time of year is one of the most important for those partnerships.

So, you heard it here first: Beacons is officially partnering with brands & agencies to connect creators with paid opportunities & events.

In fact, we’ve already piloted a couple of these partnerships and connected creators with paid deals from brands like AG1, Kiehls, Amazon, and more.

So far, the creators who have done these partnerships have been pretty excited about the brands and products they're working with 😊

How do we match creators with these opportunities?

We use a proprietary AI search to look through our Beacons user base for the creators who are the best fit—which means that just by being a user on Beacons with connected social accounts, you’re automatically eligible to be considered for these brand deals.

You might be wondering—how do you stand out and get to the top of the list?

That’s what our newest feature is for: your brand deals profile.

Fall is the perfect time to give yourself an allover refresh—get a haircut, buy a new planner, and make sure your digital resume is up to date.

Put your best foot forward by filling out your brand deals profile on Beacons, so you can be matched with relevant brand deals for you.

You can now access your brand deals profile by clicking your username in your Beacons account menu and clicking "Brand deals profile."

Here you'll be able to edit the information that is shown on your media kit like your categories, location, and bio.

The new part is that you'll also be able to update even more details that won't be shown on your media kit, but can be used to match you with the best-fit brand deals.

This includes information like:

Occupation
Birthday
Family members
The types of brand deal partnerships you're open to

In my opinion, the coolest new field is for "personal milestones," where you can indicate important life events you have had recently or have coming up, such as:

Graduating from school
Getting a pet
Moving

We've heard from both brands and creators that these milestone moments often lead to the best and most authentic partnerships, because they're tied to timely and relevant moments in creators' lives.

Adding and updating your information ensures that brands who are looking to partner with creators like you can find you! It's win-win.

AND DON'T FORGET: Beacons affiliate links are now live for everyone on Beacons! That means you can create affiliate links for your products to earn commission. Check out Ivan's tutorial on how to set one up here.

🌟 Shoutout to @facelessempowered who sent us an awesome example of her own Beacons affiliate product last week! Her brand new affiliate product, Story Sequence Studio, just launched a few weeks ago. It's designed to help entrepreneurs and digital marketers create amazing Instagram stories.

She's dedicated a TON of hours, love, and late nights to this project—it has over 800 original images that she designed herself, done-for-you sequences, story strategy guides, a 7-day planner, and more templates than you'll know what to do with.

Check it out: Story Sequence Studio. And set up your own today!

👉 What do you think of the brand deal profiles? Reply here and send me your thoughts to be featured in next week’s newsletter!

It’s no secret that the last few months of the year are the most lucrative for both brands and creators. Plus, brands have to burn through the rest of that partnership budget before it rolls over on January 1, so it’s the perfect time to get some sponsored content onto your feed.

But our advice for HOW exactly to approach getting more brand partnerships may not be what you expect. The typical advice is to send cold pitches to brands you hope to work with, right?

WRONG.

It's surprising how impersonal and unfitting some cold pitches can be. When you don't mention anything about the brand itself, or why you specifically are a good fit, it reads to the brand as "ChatGPT did my homework."

There’s gotta be a better way, right? Instead of thinking about your outreach as a cold pitch to land a deal, think about making your goal to just get a response that starts building a relationship.

This way, you'll gain a real contact person at that brand who you can have a longer-term conversation with. Maybe they’ll even reach out to YOU when a good-fit opportunity arises.

To demonstrate how exactly you can do this, let’s play 2 Do’s and A Don’t (it’s kind of like 2 truths and a lie, but probably less fun):

DO: Get super specific about your experience with the product or service.

Nothing is worse than when someone reaches out saying they want to promote Beacons to their audience, but we open their media kit to find out they’re not even using Beacons.

Generic templates and bland offers are your enemy here. Brands want to know that you specifically use and love THEM, and they want to know why. Wrap your affection into a funny story to be memorable and engaging, like the time your dog knocked over a lit candle from your favorite brand (but everyone was fine). You don't have to come in swinging with a cold pitch from the start.

DO: Send a thoughtful follow-up.

It’s proven that people need multiple exposures and reminders to follow up on things, and second emails often get better response rates than first outreaches.

Being genuine is the best approach: acknowledge that you know everyone is busy, so you just wanted to bump your message to the top of their inbox. Just don't say anything accusatory or aggressive. Keep it demure and cutesy.

DON’T: Expect every email to turn into an offer this season.

Building relationships with brands (as a method of ultimately finding better partnerships) takes time. Don't be disappointed if not every outreach gets a response. Keep going!

As our CEO Neal likes to say, shoot your shot. You're building a pipeline, and you're going to win the long game.

For more great tips on landing those brand partnerships for the 2024 holiday season, and to learn more about the anti-pitch method, watch this full virtual training this weekend while you sip a pumpkin spice latte.

It’s performance review season here at Beacons, and our team loves a deadline as much as the next person.

So of course with the forms being due to HR by 5 PM on Friday, most of us saved the project for after lunch on Friday. This was exactly when our HR system experienced a system-wide outage 😅

Luckily, Staff Engineer Colton was ready to jump in with advice on how to succeed in the workplace.

The system came back online quickly after. But since only half the company got their reviews turned in on time, the deadline was extended and everyone resumed procrastinating.

That's all this week—if you're still reading, reply and let me know what your favorite fall drink is.

Or, if you've transcended and don't care at all about hot seasonal beverages, just drop me a line with what you're looking forward to this weekend. I might just feature it next week 🤭

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