The Only 3 Ways to Get Brand Collaborations

Watch: Fossil | Lace: Forever 21 | Rings: Forever 21

Every blogger wants to know how to get brand collaborations. Even just seeing the word “collab”, bloggers freak out and can’t contain themselves. I get it. It’s exciting. It’s cool. It makes you feel important. But I want to stress that if you’re blogging just to get free stuff, you’re blogging for the wrong reason.

I’ve written posts about collabs before (click HERE, HERE, and HERE), but the game has changed and now there’s more than one way to getting noticed by brands and sealing the deal for a successful collab.

make the first move

As a blogger, you’re an independent contractor (like a realtor or entrepreneur) and you have to go out and make sh*t happen which is why I strongly recommend making the first move to brands you want to work with.

You can do so by literally Googling the brand name + contact info. or searching on Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn. I recommend either Googling or searching on Instagram because I just think it’s the easiest. However, if you really want to get noticed you can connect with the brand/people at the company on all of your social media accounts. This is like a flirtatious wink, like, “I see you Revolve and I want you”.

So after you find the brand’s contact info. you’re going to make yourself a nice little excel spreadsheet so you can stay organized. In fact, you can DOWNLOAD THIS ONE which is what I use.

You want to keep track of every email address (sometimes you’ll get a response from a different email of an actual person versus a general email), if you’ve reached out and how (Did you send 1 email or 2?), and what your plans are for the particular brand (Will you do a giveaway? How will you spread brand awareness? Instagram post? Blog post? YouTube video? All of the above?).

play hard to get

If you want to be a little more subtle about a collaboration you can “play hard to get”. Though this will definitely be more challenging and you’re putting the ball in the brand’s court but this may work for some bloggers who don’t have time to reach out to all these brands or bloggers who aren’t concerned with landing collabs fresh out the gate.

You can do things like tagging them in your pictures on Instagram: in the picture itself and in the caption. However, you only want to do this if it’s relevant otherwise you’ll be marked as spam. For example, if you have a flatlay of your laptop, calendar, and a water bottle you don’t want to tag Anthropologie unless one of those items is from the store. Make sense?

Then you can “subtly” mention them in Instastories. You’ll want to physically type their name and make sure it comes up as a clickable account before you post so the brand is notified that you tagged them. This lets the brand know you’re authentically using their products and if they’re smart they’ll see it as an amazing opportunity to collab with you.

An authentic collaboration is the best collaboration.

do nothing

Finally the last way to land a collab is by literally doing nothing. For a while, I was doing this not because I didn’t want collabs, but because I was investing my time in other things.

The key here is patience.

Some of you may be thinking ‘Yeah ok I’ll just kick my feet up and chill Britt, great idea!’ That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying getting collabs is all about patience.

You can’t expect to blog for 4 months and have brands approaching you left and right. In fact, I don’t even think you’d want any collabs within the first 4 months of blogging because odds are your content is probably not that great and/or you don’t know how to optimize to get more sales.

I recommend your first year be dedicated to creating high-quality content and building a community because people buy from people they trust and that’s when you’ll get sales which is the end goal of any brand. Brands want to work with bloggers who will spread brand awareness and increase their sales, simple as that.

Do you use any of these tactics? If so, which one? If not, what do you struggle with? Tell me in the comments below and we can work together to get you to that next step. 

xx

Blogger BTS: To create the flatlay above, I used the items below. I used the dress for some texture, the watch as the main focal point (it was a gift from Fossil), the rings to keep it interesting, the candle to pull the black out from the watch, and the coaster to tie in the pink. 

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