Gone are the days of emailing your media kit and expecting a check.

👋 Welcome back to Content to Commas, the weekly playbook for making your content work harder for your brand and your bank account.

I'm writing this from LA at Press Publish in a room with 500 creators with various content businesses. Fashion, sports, food and beverage, talk shows, you name it.

In the past few days, I've had a lot of random convos and 'brand partnerships' keep coming up.

I see how brands actually evaluate creator partnerships. What makes them say yes, archive your email without a reply, or come back for deal number two.

This week we're talking sponsorships … specifically, what changed, what brands actually want right now, and how you stop leaving money on the table.

📌 In this issue:

Let’s get to work.

— Brandon

^{a message from our friends at Typeform}

People treat Typeform like a clipboard. Build the form. Share the link. Responses come in. You glance. You move on. Cool. Cool. Cool … but that's the warm-up, not the workout.

Typeform now enriches the responses you’re already collecting into structured contact data. Those answers stop being feedback ... they start being signals.

A founder fills out your survey. They go into one bucket. A fractional consultant fills it out. They go into another. The form captures it all and your system sorts it in real time.

Then the automation layer kicks in. The warm lead gets an invite to book a call. The booked call gets a welcome email. Your team gets pinged. All without you opening a tab.

I switched my newsletter intake to this setup and it's already doing work I used to schedule into my calendar.

Why it matters for small businesses:

Stop letting your sub data sit in a tab you never open.

Let me set the scene first…

Marketing teams are shrinking.

The person you're pitching has 3 campaigns running, 4 back-to-back meetings, and an inbox they'll never be empty.

They don't have time to check your media kit, scroll your page, watch five videos, decide if you're a good fit, and then respond.

The detective work used to fall on the brand. That's shifting. Now the onus is on you to make the decision obvious.

Here's what that looks like.

A media kit is a table of contents. Vision is the pitch.

Brands don't want to be handed your stats and figure out what to do with them.

They want a partner who understands the product, is a customer, and has a specific idea for how to bring that to life.

BUT … be prepared to compromise.

It's not about just having a brand sponsor your show or idea. They also have people to please, and it needs to be a collaborative process.

If your newsletter readers click affiliate links at a 6% rate, say that.

If your YouTube comment section is full of people asking where to buy the thing, screenshot it.

That's what the brand actually needs to take to their internal approval meeting to advocate for your price.

One thing that's been working: build a short "audience behavior" slide not demographics, behavior.

What do they buy? What problems are they actively trying to solve? What conversations are already happening in your comments or DMs?

If you don’t know this … survey them on Typeform.

The first email you get when you sign up to this newsletter is a Typeform so that I can also learn more information about you.

Don't just tell them you have an audience. Show them what your audience does.

TOO MUCH MONEY IS LEFT ON THE TABLE.

I need to skip the fluff here and tell you directly … stop pitching 1 by 1.

1 YouTube spot. 1 Substack mention. 1 IG Reel.

Instead, build packages. Think about every platform you consistently show up on — newsletter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn — and create bundles designed for a campaign, not a single post.

A three-part newsletter series + an Instagram Carousel + a LinkedIn breakdown. That's a campaign.

That hits an audience across multiple channels and multiple touchpoints and it fits into a brand's quarterly budget in a way that a solo $500 story placement never will.

Ask yourself…

I was at a conference recently where creator after creator got on stage and said some version of: "Brands should want to work with me because I make this type of content."

The ick was immediate.

Saying "I make content in X niche, so pay me $10,000" isn't a pitch. It's a request for charity. Brands aren't looking for creators who need a check. They're looking for creators who understand their audience well enough to move them.

The question isn't "why should a brand want to work with me?"

The real question is: "Why would my audience actually care about this brand?"

IG and TikTok sponsorships aren't going anywhere. But brands are actively looking to diversify.

Newsletters. Podcasts. In-person events. Community spaces.

These formats carry stronger trust signals and, in many cases, better conversion rates than a 30-second sponsored reel that gets scrolled past.

Your niche matters.

If you're primarily an entertainment creator (comedy, reaction content, general lifestyle) this is going to be harder. Your audience is conditioned to watch, not to act.

This means you have to intentionally condition them over time if you want brand deals to convert.

If you're in finance, wellness, productivity, career, food, fitness (anywhere your audience is actively trying to solve a problem) you have a head start. Lean into that.

Last week I announced Content to Commas: The Course and the response has been wild.

But let me be clear about what this is.

This isn't a "how to go viral" course. This isn't a "post every day" course. This isn't another course that teaches you how to make content about making content.

If you've been building in public and wondering when the "business" part kicks in … this is it.

Each week, I share simple plays on branding, monetization, and growth strategies, plus tools I actually use that you might've missed. Catch up in minutes.

These hit hard the first time. Worth the re-read.

Yes, these are affiliate links, but I really use them.

Thanks for reading!
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