Your audience isn't the product
A sponsorship rents your audience.
The brand pays because your people are watching, and how many of them there are is the price.
UGC is the other deal.
The brand pays for footage, posts it on their own account, and puts their own ad money behind it.
Your followers never come into it.
That is why people move into this work with nothing on their own channels.
It is also worth keeping in mind on every screen of your page.
A portfolio built around subscriber counts is answering a question nobody asked.
Put the work at the top, and name every piece
Somebody scanning your page is looking for one thing: does this person's work look like something we could post.
So the videos go above the introduction, the bio and everything else.
Nobody scrolls past a paragraph about you to find out if you can film.
There is a catch here that catches everybody.
Your videos live on the brand's TikTok and the brand's Instagram, not on your own channel.
So a feed pulled from your own uploads shows an empty box.
Still frames that link out to the real post do the job instead.
Name each one.
The brand, the product, the format, and what the video had to do.
"Skincare, 30-second unboxing, TikTok" tells a stranger more than a wall of unlabelled clips ever will.
Three or four strong pieces beat twenty average ones.
Anybody hiring is looking for a reason to stop looking, and a weak fifth video is a reason to keep going.
The logo row
Brands hire people other brands have already hired.
A short row of logos does more work on this page than anything you could write about yourself.
If you haven't got any yet, don't fake it and don't leave a hole where they would be.
Make two or three pieces for products you actually use, and label them as practice work.
Everybody in this business knows what a spec piece is and nobody minds one.
Being caught implying a client you never had is a different story.
The page that gets you booked is the boring one
Somewhere on your site there has to be a page saying what you deliver and what it costs to use it.
It is the least fun thing to write.
It is also the reason a brand emails you instead of scrolling on.
Deliverables first, in plain numbers:
- How many videos, and how long each one runs.
- How many rounds of changes are included.
- Whether they get the edited cut, the raw files, or both.
- How long you take, from brief to delivery.
Usage rights are the part nobody explains
This is where new creators lose money, and they lose it by saying nothing.
If your page is silent about usage, a brand will quite reasonably assume it can run your video anywhere it likes, for as long as it likes.
That assumption is worth several times what you charged.
The trade splits it into a few plain cases, and they are priced as a percentage on top of your base rate rather than as separate jobs:
- Organic. They post it on their own feed. The cheapest, and usually assumed to be included.
- Paid. They run it as an advert, and this one is sold by the window - thirty, sixty or ninety days are the usual choices.
- Whitelisting. The advert runs from your handle rather than theirs, so it borrows your name as well as your work. Its own line, always.
- Perpetual. They keep it for good, and it is charged as a multiple of everything above, because that is what it is.
The percentages move around, and they move by country, so read a current rate guide before you print a number.
What doesn't move is the shape: a base rate, then a line for each way they intend to use it.
Put that shape on your page and you will never have the awkward conversation six months later.
Make it easy to say yes
A contact form on the page beats "DM me".
Somebody at an agency with fifteen creators to brief is not opening Instagram to reach you.
Ask for the product, the deadline and the usage they want, and half the email is answered before it arrives.
Say what you need from them, too.
Who sends the product.
Who approves the cut.
That is the friction a brand is quietly checking for, and being clear about it reads as experience.