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August 27, 2026

How I Find, Reach out, and Negotiate with Social Media Influencers

Finding the Right Creators

There is simply no substitute for finding the creators: SCROLLING. Scrolling will give you the hot, fresh-off-the-press, creators that are going viral in your niche right now.

I scroll on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube under a fresh account if I'm marketing a new product. I try to put myself in my ideal customers' shoes and linger, save, like, and comment as if I were my ideal customer.

Once my algorithm is "trained" I do the following:

Whenever I see a relevant video that has tons of likes and comments, I check out the creator's profile and scroll down to see the amount of views they roughly have on their videos. Ideally you want to shoot for over 50k average.

The reason you want at least 50k views is because the economics won't work otherwise. Creators with less than that expect far too much money ("$700 per post where the posts get 1k views). That's a money sink.

Randomly click around on their videos to see their comments. People making inside jokes are a very good sign. Emojis are a bad sign.

Reaching Out to the Creators

Then, if the creator has an email in their bio, I will email them. This is preferable to DM'ing because you don't get marked as spam by the social media platforms. The benefit of DM'ing is that, oftentimes, the creators that have emails have a "manager" that monitors their email. Whereas DMs usually go straight to the creator. But still, I prefer emailing.

I send a message like this, whether in email or DM:

Say in subject line: Paid Promo? [Product / Company name] x [Creator name]

Then body:

Hey [first name, or handle if first name isn't deducible],

I love your [niche] content, especially your [adjective(s)] videos.

I'm [my name] from the [Product / Company name] team. We help [type of person] [solve type of problem]. Interested in a paid promotion to share our product with your audience?

Happy to talk over the details if you just send over your phone number. My number is [phone number]. You can call me anytime :)

[my name] from the [Product / Company name] team

P.S. You can find our website here: [website url]

The "Paid Promo?" at the beginning is vital, it makes sure the important info is clearly visible by the receiver. I send over my personal phone number to make it clear that I'm serious and I want to talk NOW.

When the person replies, they'll often ask for a little more information, so just give it over like a normal human being. But most of the time they'll want to start talking about deal structure over email. DO NOT TALK ABOUT DEAL OVER EMAIL.

Many many times I have read something unprofitable like "$700 a post" from a creator that gets 50k views per post. But when I hop on a phone call with them I am able to explain why that isn't reasonable, is unlikely to produce a long term income for them and here's why this other deal structure is much better.

So just ask them again for their phone number and if they don't provide it then move on to the next creator, this one was unlikely to work well for you anyways. And if you do this right, ie at scale, you'll have many other creators to choose from.

Once you have their phone number, just call them immediately. If it's not a good time, they will tell you so and you can schedule a better time right there.

Doing it at Scale

A note about volume: You really need to do this for HUNDREDS OF CREATORS PER DAY. Why? because the market is NOT efficient. The new creators that are going viral have absolutely no idea how to price their posts and companies just starting out on this type of influencer campaign have no idea how much to pay.

So many creators are getting hundreds of thousands of views and they're not getting paid for it. And some creators are getting hundreds of views and some dumb startup is paying them thousands of dollars. The market is not efficient.

If you want proper CAC (this strategy, done well, can give you $1-$7 CPM) you need to find so many creators that you have ALL THE LEVERAGE in negotiations: if one creator doesn't budge, then you are happy to move on to the next one.

To do this at scale you can either do it manually, which is kind of soul-crushing, hire a VA to do it, or use tools that can scroll social media and do outreach automatically.

If you want to know the tools and strategies to automate the above process at scale, I can point you to some of them if I'm asked in the comments.

On the Phone Call

Just be enthusiastic, genuine, and interested in the creator. Make jokes. Ask them questions, just make it a conversation. They're a tiny little human being like you. Ask them how they got started making content, etc. The negotiations will come when they come.

They will ask you about your product. Be honest, tell your story. This is where soft, human skills come in and become insanely valuable.

Then the topic will eventually drift to MONEY.

The Deal

There are so many deal structures, but the one that works for most everybody is the Minimum View Guarantee.

For example, "We'll pay you $2000 for 4 posts with a minimum view guarantee of 1 million views". You can add "per month" if you want it to be recurring.

If they post 4 videos and they don't reach 1 million views, then they simply keep posting. You want to balance the 3 numbers: dollar amount, post count, and minimum view guarantee such that you hit your CPM target.

So if your CPM is $2, and you have $1000 to spend on a creator, then you would say "We'll pay you $1000 for [x number of posts] with a minimum view guarantee of 500k views"

How to calculate "x number of posts"? This number is really for the creator's benefit. It's to let them have an idea of how much work it's going to be. Just look at their average views and calculate it like such: If their views are 100k average, then it will be about 5 posts to reach 500k.

So the offer becomes: "We'll pay you $500 for 5 posts with a minimum view guarantee of 500k views. If you don't hit the guarantee, you just keep posting until you do. Your average views per post are 50k so you really don't have to worry about it."

If they think your offer is too low, you need to either increase your CPM, move on to the next influencer, or KEEP the same CPM and just UP the numbers, so instead of saying $1000 for 500k views, you say $2k for 1 million views. The higher number makes it more psychologically worth it, even though from your perspective it's still the same CPM. This psychological reason is why it doesn't make sense to sign people with less than 50k views per video.

Increasing your CPM should almost never be an option. Especially if it will make your product unprofitable. Between increasing CPM and moving onto the next influencer, you should almost always just move on. Don't burn any bridges, either say "I'll get back to you" or "Maybe this won't work now, but it'd be great working with you in the future" and move on.

If you're doing this correctly, which means at scale, you'll have many many other creators to choose from.

The Contract

Once a verbal deal is made, send over a contract IMMEDIATELY. While the topic is still fresh in their mind and they remember the details of the deal. Keep the contract simple, easy to read.

It should contain the deal structure we discussed above, as well as some other minor details, like how long they have to hit the guarantee (usually 1 month), how it should be measured (publicly available view counts, or in the case of Stories, a screenshot of analytics dashboard), how much money upfront vs after the view guarantee is hit, if the brand can use the content in ads, etc.

Once you write your first one, the subsequent other ones should be easier to make. Again, there are tools you can use to automatically look at the creator's info and draft up a contract instantly. Ideally you can send over the contract and walk through it right on the same phone call.

The important thing is that it be done FAST, and it must be easy to read, as well as accurate to the terms of the deal.

Content

I like to trust the creator with their content. After all, they're getting views for a reason. However, they often need a little guidance for giving the user some sort of Call to Action. If a person sees the product but doesn't know where to get it, then the view is wasted.

The CTA can come in the form of a literal link (works on Stories, YouTube), a "DM [Product Name] for promo code" and the creator can send a promo code to whoever DMs them, a simple "search Google for [Product Name], a "collab" that links to the product's social media, or something more clever where the creator shows the product as something fixing a vital problem for themselves and someone asks in the comments "What is that?" and the creator responds with a link.

Management

Attribution is famously difficult for influencer marketing, which is why using Promo Codes specific to influencers is a good idea. That way, you can track who is doing well and who to cut. If you don't use Promo Codes, you can try to get your creators to post at different times and days and you can correlate the post date with the purchases you received on your product.

Be available, and expect the same from your creators. You want a relationship where you can really call each other up at any time. If you see something you don't like, just call them up and be honest, but gentle and malleable. People appreciate that.

Never at any point do you lose your temper. You are a professional.

If something doesn't work out, that's OK. Maybe it will work out in the future. Again, you should have many creators to choose from if you're doing this right.

Related

The longer version of this system lives in JumpTrend learn:

This is the process JumpTrend automates. Describe your customer and we scroll their algorithm on a real phone.

Start at $1,500/mo