All right, we're here at uploading and today we have Nick. So Nick, as you know and as everyone that's tuning in knows, brand deals can be an absolute pain in the butt. And for most creators, this is their number one source of income. And so at the same time, that is why it also can be a huge pain in the butt. The process of reaching out to brands, negotiating deals and then creating long term relationships with brands can be a task of itself. And so this is why today we're here with Nick Christensen, head of marketing at Appsumo, an eight figure company founded by Noah Kagan. And so Nick is an expert in influencer, affiliate paid marketing and really everything along those lines with community and everything else. So today we're going to be talking about how to get brand deals, how to make good money from them, the biggest mistakes creators make when negotiating with a brand and what brands look for.

So Nick, take it away, expand on that intro a little bit more. Did I nail it? What else are you up to on your daily and adaptsumo?

You nailed it man, you nailed it. Thank you guys so much for having me on. And yeah, I've been at Appsumo for almost seven years now. Started just like 6th or 7th employee and I have over a hundred now. But it's been an amazing ride. I've learned a lot, especially from Noah and the rest of the network in Austin where we're based. And it's been amazing to help and connect with people like you guys coming onto Appsumo, other SaaS, founders, freelancers, consultants. I have a couple of businesses on the side that I run, a consulting agency and also an in office teeth whitening clinic that I purchased and have been running for a couple of years and able to use what I know about marketing for small businesses.

So that's really my passion is helping people that may not have a huge team or a huge budget grow, find customers and do it in an efficient way. So really excited to chat more about the other side of the coin of creators. And we do a lot of this at Appsumo as well. We have an eight figure affiliate and influencer program that I started about five years ago. Started with really just referral marketing, expanded to affiliate, traditional affiliate marketing, and now kind of the final stage is what we call ambassador or influencer marketing. So recruiting people that have a little bit of a following, not huge followings, I would say in the 50 to 100k subs followers, depending on the channel. We're really focusing on YouTube creators, long form YouTube creators in the software space and this is something I'm really excited about because there are more creators than there ever have been, but I think the quality of the content can be there. But there's also a lot of low quality content out there.

So I think it's from the brand side, partnering with people that fit your content, niche, content, themes, but also from the creator side, which I'm excited to go into a little bit more. How do you find the brands? There seems to be a lot of competition of, of creators, a lot more creators than there are brands. So you're kind of competing against everybody else. So got some tips, maybe some ideas that could help some people on this front. But yeah, that's a little bit about what I'm doing personal.

And then at Appsumo, Nick, I'd love to go a little deeper there, specifically on creators. Like you mentioned, there's more creators than ever and connecting with brands is not the easiest thing. So I'd love to hear from your perspective.

Right.

You're at the brand level. How do you identify who's a good creator, who's someone you want to work with when there's so many people creating content?

Yeah, it's a great question and I think about this from the brand side and I'm going to go into that first, but then from the creator side I'm going to touch on as well. If I was a creator just starting out, what would I do to monetize my channel or following? And you can wait for brands to come knocking. We do at Appsumo, we do a lot of outreach, cold outreach on YouTube, just creating our own lists based on the content of the channel. So like I said, a lot of software reviews, tech reviews, people that are creating long form content around things within our space which are normally in the marketing sales productivity tools space. We also use our internal network of people that are using appsumo tools. That's a big one. We recruit from our customer base. We recruit from Noah's network.

He has an awesome network of creators. So those warm intros really help, especially if we're trying to go up and sponsor some larger channels. And I feel like that's all kind of basic stuff. Everybody is doing this. They may not have the access to the network that I mentioned, but this is all stuff that you should be doing as a brand. But from the creator perspective, do you just wait around for somebody to come and sponsor your channel, especially if you only have maybe 10,000, 20,000 subs or followers? That's not what I would do. And I can just speak from the most successful interactions that I've had with creators from my side and kind of how I react when creators reach out to me directly, which almost never happens. And I think this is insane of why creators are not doing this more.

If you're starting out and you have, let's say 5000 subs on your channel, I would look at your content and build a list of brands that you love or use. And this could be software companies, it could be Ecom, whatever it is you love and you use. And then also your audience would love. Build a list of like 50 of those brands, right? Create a quick loom video on how you would promote their product. This has happened to me maybe three or four times. Very few times they email me and they're like, hey, I love appsumo. I just used product x, whatever, here's how I would promote it. Would you be down for some kind of partnership? Every single time I'm like, yes, this is awesome, let's do it.

And then I think from there it's like, okay, what do I offer? How do I structure a deal with this brand? I think the most successful ones at first are either performance based at the beginning or a mix of fee plus performance. So you can say, hey, for the first three months I'm going to promote this on your affiliate network and I want some terms. Let's say 30% of every sale or 100% of every new buyer, right? And then after that I want a fee. If this works, let's say $2,000 a month plus the commissions. Ten times out of ten, you're going to get a yes from brands, especially if the first three months are more of like a test and then invest where there's no skin off their back. They're like, do it right. You create a couple of videos, you get some commissions, it does well, and then boom, you're in this relationship with a brand that you love. That hopefully will be a long term, fruitful partnership.

But I think it all starts from what you are using or what you love that you think you could genuinely promote on your channel for a long period of time. I think the best partnerships are ones that are more of a partnership. It is a long term commitment, not a one off video. If you're saying like, hey, I want to make a quick buck from this brand, and you may be able to do that, but it's going to be a lot of work to do this and reach out to all these brands to try to do this over and over again, versus having three to four that you love. They love you, and you're creating videos every single month or post whatever it is on what channel and you're developing a deeper relationship with them.

I think this is really valuable information because, well, first of all, there's two ways as a creator that you can get a sponsorship deal. One is either inbound and the other one is outbound. And a lot of creators, they kind of wait too long to start the outbound process thinking that their content is just going to be so good that the deals are going to be flowing to them. Or they might have this internal belief that they think that because they're doing outbound that they might seem desperate. And so, like, on the inbound deals, you get the negotiation leverage. But being on the side of actually activating creators, I wish more creators would reach out. Like, we're actively looking for these creators. And so you'd be surprised at how many responses you can get.

And if you craft this outreach correctly, there's no such thing as seeming desperate. You are providing value to them, which is exposing them to your audience. And as long as you come out professionally and stand out, then you'll be able to still keep your negotiating power and your rates, et cetera. And so I'm curious, Nick, on that front, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you've seen creators do on their outreach that they shouldn't do and they should consider before doing their first sprint?

Yeah, it's a good question. And I think the biggest mistake is they just come in too hot, right? You just got to ten k subs, you're the king of YouTube and it's like, yo, I'm coming in with $15,000 per month fee, right? And it's an exaggeration of an example, but I've seen some insane rates being thrown out to where not only are you not trying to align with my goals, but the outreach is just so transactional. And the number is so astronomical that it's almost like you rub the person the wrong way immediately and it's just a note. It's just like, yeah, I'm going to pass. Instead aligning your goals with theirs of like, what are you trying to get, Nick? Like, oh, I'm trying to get new customers. It's like, okay, here's how I think I can get you a lot of new customers and here's how we're going to structure the relationship right instead, which I think this happens all too often, is you see this as a transaction. You're going to them and being like, hey, it's this all business. This is my rates, here's my PDf deck of all of my rates and sponsorships.

What do you think? Versus like, hey, have you actually looked at their website? Do you actually know how you would promote it? Don't send them some general pdf with some crazy numbers in it. Send them a real email and say, hey, I checked out castmagic or I checked out Appsumo and I loved this part of it, or I loved this tool. I would really love to promote this in this and this way, or the loom video that I mentioned of. Here's just a quick example of how I would do it versus being like standard email. Maybe it comes from some kind of sequence. You throw out rates that are crazy and then you just kind of turn them off from day one versus all you got to do is get them to say yes to where you can start to build value. And then what we do at Appsumo is charge on a CPM basis. And if your right, if your views are going up on your videos, we are going to pay you more.

We will renegotiate contracts with influencers or with ambassadors based on the success of their channel. And that's what I think a really good creator and brand partnership is. You're growing together. As you send me more customers, I pay you more money. Our goals are aligned and we're both winning versus you don't know who I am. This is impersonal outreach and you're asking for way too much. And I can't even make this work with my budget. Right.

So I would think on longer term versus short term.

The beauty about the CPM component too is that it derisk it for it's coming from the creator, from a professionalism sense of understanding the risk there is in this partnership for the brand. And so another thing is, when doing the outreach, what do you recommend to creators sort of sharing their stats or their following count, is that something that they should not do in the beginning and just more so talk about the partnership in itself. I know you have a story that I want you to share on Ari. The shirts that 2 million followers and 36 shirts were sold. You put something out about that. So I'm curious on your take on follower count versus success of partnership.

Yeah, I think if you've got the followers and you've got the engagement, I think that's something that you can tout. But I think it's almost like cart before the horse. If you don't have that and you're trying to monetize your channel or you're just trying to get some funds so you can keep this going. Like you're not trying to make any money, you're just trying to pay for editing or pay for a new camera, whatever it is. Then I think that it's really key to, first, if you've got the follower counts and you've got the views, like I said, what are the advertisers looking for? What are the brands looking for? Well, I'm looking for good engagement, not just views. I'm looking for real followers and real comments. Bots are huge on YouTube. All social media channels pumping up these creator channels to make it seem like they have these insane followings and insane engagement.

And then you go and there's a couple spam checkers that we use and actually go look at their channels. It's just bots, it's fake. So it's like what I want is genuine followers, real connections and real engagement. One ratio that we use is a CPM based on the last ten videos, the views of the last ten videos, and then a ratio of follower to view to comment accounts, right? So it doesn't matter if you don't have a lot of followers or you don't have a lot of subs. If your sub to view count to comment ratio are really good, let's say you have 100 followers and you get 80 views on your videos and of those 80 views you get like 20 comments. That's a really good ratio, right? That means you have a great channel of people that are really engaged. So that alone without the high numbers, to me is more interesting than someone who's got 500,000 subs, but their comments look really shady or they have really low views, right? That means their followers are not very engaged and they're not watching the videos when they come out. Because as a brand, I want to do a deal that is going to ROI for me.

So if I sponsor your video or I do a dedicated video with you. I want to see that traffic come to my website and that traffic convert to sign ups or to new customers. And if I can't see that in your last ten videos or guarantee that that's going to happen when you release this video next week, then I'm going to be very weary. But if you can tell me like, hey, I have high quality engagement, I have good ratios. Are we going to drive a million new customers? No, we're not. But over time, I want to grow with you and I think I can drive some really good conversions and I can provide some great content highlighting your brand because I love it. That's a yes every single time. And like I said, would grow your fees as your channel grows.

On that note, there is this big push and pull between brands and creators on the flat fee and then the affiliate and the commission, et cetera. But the rewards can outsize the flat fee when the partnership is well structured and there is alignment between both of the audiences, often for the creator. So I'm curious, what's an example of a really successful campaign? You've seen that even it took the creator by surprise in terms of how much more they made on the back end of the commissions, et cetera, and they ended up making more by structuring that way than with a flat feet.

Yeah. So there's a couple over Black Friday just a month ago, it's our biggest time at Appsumo, biggest week, biggest day. And we did this with a few where we had a flat fee of, let's say a couple of thousand that we would do per dedicated video, but with some of the top creators negotiated a flat fee of, let's say, 15% to 20% of gross sales. So instead of looking at the new or returning customer counts, they knew that they could drive views, especially in this time of year. And also this time of year, people are naturally going to convert more, right? People are conditioned to buy during Black Friday. And so if I was a creator, I would go really hard on Black Friday, lowering my fee amount and increasing the commission amount of saying, I think if there's any time for me to do this and adjust my ratios, this is it. And so we had a couple of creators that had videos that went viral, 2300,000 views on a product that they reviewed on Appsumo and sent a bunch of customers and had five figure payout days that were from one video. And for me, that upside is what I am looking for as an advertiser, as a brand of who? Can I really work with that? Yes, they've got solid video views, they've got solid ratios, let's say.

But if they do really well, maybe one in ten or one in five, I have the opportunity to outsize my return. And that for me, is the ultimate marketing metric, which is marketing efficiency, or to use a fancy acronym, LTV, to CAC is how we track all of our paid returns at Appsumo. The LTV, meaning the customer profit that I am getting from them. The CAC being how much I am paying to get that customer. For influencers, it would be the $2,000 of fee plus the commission. And then if they're sending me a bunch of these customers, the CAC is going to be very low, right, on a $2,000 spend, and let's say only 15% of the commission. But my LTV on all these customers, especially during Black Friday, high aovs, I know that they're going to repurchase, is going to be really high. And so that's how we measure success.

That's what I would do if I was a creator, is like, where can I really hit a viral video where I know people will purchase? Like, Black Friday is a great one? Or if they have internal sales, we have sumo day in the summer. That happens kind of like our own sale event. And we have a lot of really good deals. If you see an offer on a brand's website that you think you can promote and you think people will buy on, jump on it and negotiate a deal with them, that has a really big upside. On the commission kicker, you could even do tiers, which we've done before. If your video gets 10,000 views, 50,000 views, 100,000 views, I want more of the commission. Right.

That case study is going to change your media kit forever. Exactly. So I want to take this a step further and let's say I'm a creator, tuning in, pen to paper. How do I actually put my rate together? I'm ready to monetize my content, Nick. I have 5000 followers. 10,000, and I'm ready to set my rate. I like what you're saying, but how do I know what's an acceptable commission rate to take? And what should my flat rate be? I'm ready to do this.

Yeah. Well, I think it really depends on what stage you're at as a creator. Are you really established? Do you have in the tens of thousands of followers or not? If we're taking this example of, let's say it's ten k and below. Right. I feel like I'm starting to get some traction here. The videos are starting to pop off, but it's requiring a lot more time and money for me to maintain this channel. Well, I need to make some money. How I would approach it, if you want, like an immediate yes from these brands is performance.

So commission based, first as a test, either one month or three month, and then the fee kicker comes in after that time period where the brand can choose to renew. So I would immediately look at the average CPM switch. I don't know if we can post, like, image overlays here in post, but I can send a graphic here which just has. And anybody can look this up of cpms by category, right? It could be entrepreneurship, business entrepreneurship. That, for example, is in the 100 and 2100 and ten, 120 cpm range. That's the category that Appsumo is in. You could be trying to promote gaming, could be around $66. Right? Outdoors, $47.

All of the different channels YouTube has this information public of. Some of them are more monetizable than others. Right. And so the CPM ranges will differ. So if you're in the business and entrepreneurship range, I would look at the average and you can kind of guess, okay, this is about how much brands are paying. If I'm coming into this brand new, I want to offer a deal to this brand. So I would go $1020 less than the CPM. So if the average CPM is $120, I would offer in the $90 to $100 cpm range and be like, hey, I would like to lock you into this rate.

Let's say for the first six months or the first ten videos where you're getting an amazing deal. And the first one month of it, I don't even want any fees, I just want commissions. And then after that, this is the CPM that we agree to. And it's so risk free on both sides because I have one month, which maybe a couple of videos, you're not really putting in a ton of work. But the upside is, if it works, the brand will be like, I want to invest in this creator, and you can sign a six month or a twelve month agreement with them at the CPM that you want. And maybe even the kicker of if videos go viral, I get a bigger CPM or a bigger payout. And then as my channel grows, like I said, the CPM that is locked in, let's say at 110, $120, you're going to get more money as more views come onto your channel. And so I really would look at what would be a no brainer for the brand.

And I think that motto which you have at Appsumo is test and invest of like you don't know me, I have kind of a small follower base but I know I can produce for you and this is how I would structure the deal of making it very low risk and just like a no brainer. Yes. Let's work together by looking at the CPMs by category and then offering a really competitive proposal to this brand.

I mean that'll put you in the top 1% of creators in terms of making the brand know that you know where you're talking about and you're not just like sending a media kit with a flat rate. You know what the risk for the brand is. And I especially love this for the growth we're seeing in b to b creator content where SaaS, the affiliate commissions can be recurring and there's massive upside to that. Completely changes the game. Influencer marketing was more ecommerce and now we're seeing more of this. And my one question to you Nick is what is the difference between say if I as a creator, I'm emailing with someone and their signature says affiliate head of affiliate or affiliate marketing versus head of influencer partnership partnerships, what does that mean to me as a creator? What should I know about that?

Yeah, you really would only separate out those roles at larger companies. I would say that have that separation within their marketing department. Ours, for example, is within the same team. Right. The affiliate referral, affiliate and influencer are all handled by the same people. If you are going after a larger brand and you see an affiliate title, those are usually people that are trying to recruit commission only based creators or affiliate marketers. There are professional affiliate marketers out there that just operate off of commissions. So if you're approaching someone that has affiliate marketing manager in their title, you can expect to invite them or for them to invite you to an affiliate program, right.

So a big one we use is impact, other ones, partner stack, tap affiliate, their first promoter. There's a bunch out there, they'll most likely invite you to that program where they're like, hey, join, sign up. Here are the terms. You can get all of our assets and you can get our links from here. And then it's kind of like self serve. From there you are doing the promotion. You can track all of your earnings within this platform and that's it. Right.

If you're approaching somebody that has an influencer marketing manager, that's what you can expect to do a little bit more of the negotiation of you're probably not going to be in the platform, they're probably going to pay you separately, directly, ach, or through whatever payment system that their finance team uses and they're going to negotiate a longer term contract with you. So like I mentioned earlier, it could be a hybrid of fee plus commission. It could be just fee. We work with a couple of larger creators that don't really want the commission. They're like, hey, I know what I'm worth. This is what I want. And if it's quality, then we'll do it. Right.

And that's really where the influencer marketing manager will come into play. It's a lot less of them, right? Like our ambassador network is very small compared to our affiliate network, which is over 17,000 affiliates. We select the ambassadors or the influencers that are highly relevant long form video content. So not everybody fits or checks that box, right. And we want deeper, more selective relationships with them where we can say, hey, we want to work with you long term. At least three videos. I think like I said earlier, the one off does not provide you with enough data to cut through the noise of what is actually happening here. Right.

It could be an off video, it could be an off time of season for the brand, at least three videos, preferably longer term partnerships, six to twelve months where you are basically an extension of their marketing team and paid on retainer. Like I said, the fee or a hybrid fee plus commission. If I'm just starting out, yeah, you could approach one of those big brands and do that. But I would personally go after the appsumo size companies that are 100 employees and less to where you could be a really valuable asset to them. They may not have this program off the ground yet, but you can come in early, you can negotiate a rate that works for you, and you can have a very fruitful relationship with this company where you can make a lot of money, especially as your channel grows. And we have some ambassadors that are making six figures a year. We're going to pay out $2 million, over $2 million in fees and commissions. And so people are doing this as their full time jobs.

They don't have massive followings. These are not the Mr. Beasts of the world. These are under 100,000 subs that are making six figures a year just from these partnerships. And so it's a very lucrative industry, I think, and especially now as a lot of advertisers are shifting their budgets away from traditional paid channels like the metas, the googles of the world that everybody is doing. There's a lot of competition. CPCs and CPMs are really high and they don't really feel like they have a lot of control where affiliate referral, influencer, you control the rates, you're working with the influencers directly and it's just a lot better. It's a lot better quality customer.

The LTV CAcs are higher and I feel like I can control where my money is being spent versus I write a $200,000 check to Zuckerberg and then he buys a bigger ranch in Hawaii and it's like, great. Did that get me anything? What happened here? And so that's really the trend that I'm seeing. That's what we're doing at Appsumo is really investing in the people that love our brand and our products a lot more, and then deepening the relationships with them, paying them more as an extension of our marketing team. So I went on a little bit of a rant there, man, but I hope that answered your question.

No, I love that. And Nick, one thing, just to kind of piggyback on that one thing that we've even been seeing, like we had mentioned before, I think now is such an amazing time to be an affiliate because you can be an affiliate for a SaaS. The SaaS is making monthly recurring revenue and you're making money just by promoting that every single month. So it's not like a one off deal. Like, you get some of these, you get audience to convert, you're getting paid every single month for 18 months, 24 months, whatever the lengths of the terms of the program are. And I think we saw this. Ramon was working with a creator and had him do a video. I think the video did like maybe 60,000 views on Instagram.

And that creator was asking for. So for the brand to want to approve it, they were asking for like, oh, will you pay me like 500 or $1,000 to do the post? And we're trying to figure it out. Meanwhile, he ended up doing the post and would have made $2,000 every single month for 18 months as an affiliate. So it's kind of like just an amazing opportunity right now, if you are a creator, to be an affiliate, especially for these sort of SaaS tools. But kind of, as we wrap up, I want to hit the lightning round with you real quick.

Okay.

And so let's do it. I know for creators, having people who create great content can be a great way for them to learn and understand who's doing it really well, so that's going to be kind of the theme of today's lightning round is like, creators that are doing things really well. So let's go rapid fire right through it. So who is the creator that you admire the most and why?

Good question. A couple come to mind. I would say the one that I think I admire the most is Justin Welsh. Probably one of my favorite Twitter follows. Another one is, you know, both guys, I think, have built these one person businesses or very few people. They may have a couple vas working for them, but it seems very low complication, at least from the outside. I don't know them personally. I met Justin a couple of weeks ago, and he just seems kind of like a low stress kind of know.

He travels a lot to Europe and just seems to live his life while at the same time building this multimillion dollar creator business that doesn't really consume his life. I feel like him and Dan and there are several others that seem to be living life on their terms, right. They're not a slave to the brands that they are promoting or the content that they're creating. They have created a lifestyle for themselves that seems to be put first, and the content or the content creation is helping them live their life. So I would say that people who can live life on their terms, how they want it, but still make money, and then just be generally pleasant to be around. I think that's who I admire the most.

Cool.

Next question. Which is your freak favorite creator brand?

Good question. Good question. I would probably say I'm a fan of Nick Shackleford. I like the drink Brez brand that he's created. I think the whole alternative medicine like micro dosing cannabis and psilocybin is super interesting. I think it's blowing up. I think he represents the brand really well, and I love his content on Twitter.

Sweet. Next one. If you had zero followers, which social media network would you choose to grow the fastest?

Yeah, that's a good one. I would say probably LinkedIn. I think the best marketing channels in general are where other people are not. And if you're starting from zero, like the Twitters, the Facebooks, IGs of the world, TikToks, there's so much competition there. Yeah, you can still make it. I would say even podcasting, too is extremely competitive. But LinkedIn still seems like there's a lot of opportunity and people think it's boring. But people like Justin Welsh have built these huge businesses and followings off of this place that people think is a place just to get jobs but I would say LinkedIn.

Awesome. And last question here is who is an upcoming creator that will be famous in the future?

He may already be famous now, but I would say Danny Miranda. He lives a couple blocks away from me in Austin. I love his interviewing style and maybe he's famous in our circles but I think you'll be actually famous very soon. Love that.

Well, Nick, we want to thank you for coming on uploading. Had a great time. Unpacked a lot of ah, content strategy and creator strategy. So thank you. And for our listeners tuning in, where can we connect with you?

You can connect with me on Twitter. My handle is Nick Ac one. That's probably the best place. LinkedIn. Nick Christensen. Yeah. Shoot me a message. Follow.

Would love to hear from you.

Sweet.

Thanks for coming on the show.

Thank you, Nick.

Cool. Thanks guys.