Collabs 101: How to Price Yourself & Your Work

Money is one of the most uncomfortable subjects for a lot of people, but especially new businesses, bloggers, and entrepreneurs. Some hit the ground running and price themselves too high and go out of business. Others price themselves too low and go out of business because people assume the quality is reflected in the price. Then there are the people that hit the sweet spot and price themselves juuuuuuust right.

how long have you been blogging & how many followers do you have?

Depending on the type of blogging you’re doing, (if you’re trying to turn your blog into a business or if you’re just blogging for fun in a photo diary format), the longer you’ve been blogging, the more experienced you will be, the more followers you’ll have, and the more money you can make from collaborations.

If you’ve been blogging as a business for a year or longer, you’re going to know the tricks of the trade that not many other newbie bloggers know, which increases your value. You know about SEO, what’s trending, and how to market products.

When you first started, you may not have gotten paid at all, you were “gifted” a product, you were “paid” in exposure, or you got paid very little. So, when you have some experience under your belt, feel confident in your blogging and abilities, and you have more 1,000 or more followers, you can definitely charge for collaborations.

The reason followers are so important is because they’re a reflection of your reach. Essentially most bloggers have an engagement rate of 10-20%, anything higher than 10% is being generous. This means if you have 1,000 followers and a brand pays you, they’re really paying for 100 potential sales and authentic reach, which isn’t a ton so you shouldn’t expect a ton of money.

pricing yourself based on your stats

Blogger-brand collaborations are so important in today’s day and age is because it’s a new, non-invasive way of marketing a product or service. There is so much value in blogger outreach/advertising it’s unreal.

Anyway, like I said earlier, your stats are really telling when you’re going to price yourself. Try thinking about it from a brand’s perspective – they’re paying you to get a wider reach and increase brand awareness, which is something you already have/can do.

If you have little reach, the brand will have little awareness and vice versa. So, unfortunately, if you’re only reaching a few hundred people, you’ll be lucky to get a few hundred dollars, but no matter what your reach, you should absolutely 100% get paid for your services. Don’t let a brand take advantage of you. No payment is only accepted when the brand promises other things like a big exposure opportunity for you or a really nice “gift” that’s worth a few hundred dollars.

micro-bloggers (1,000-15,000 followers)

If you don’t quite have 1,000 followers, don’t panic! A. You’re still a micro-blogger. I know micro-bloggers with 700 followers that get a decent amount of collaborations. B. You’ll hit 1,000 before you know it.

The rule of thumb is this: influencer-brand collaborations are priced at $100 for every 10K followers you have depending on the scope of work, meaning if there is a lot involved, you can charge a little more, but don’t be greedy.

If you have around 1,000 followers you could charge around $10-15 per sponsored post. Bloggers with a 10,000-15,000 following can charge anywhere from $100-300 per post, which is a nice chunk of change for your wallet and a much smaller expense for brands than if they were to collab with bloggers who have hundreds of thousands of followers.

Being a micro-blogger actually puts you at an advantage because you usually have a small tight-knit community, versus the bigger bloggers with a mixed bag of spammers, attention seekers, and random weirdos, (they’re out there trust me!).

One of my blogger friends has a following of 24K on Instagram and charges around $300 for one Instagram post, which over the course of a month at one post per week is $1,200! Not too bad for a micro-blogger.

mid-level bloggers (15,000-99,000 followers)

Middle-of-the-road bloggers can charge anywhere between $200-2,000 per Instagram post – the more followers you have, the higher your fee. This is a rough estimate so I recommend asking around and doing your research. And again, it depends on the scope of your work. Will you need to hire a photographer for the campaign? How much time are you allocating for creating the content? Are you buying the products yourself? These are all questions to take into consideration when pricing yourself.

I will say, you really can’t go wrong if you’re reasonable in your pricing (second reminder: don’t be greedy) and go above and beyond what is expected so the brand knows their money is being well spent.

macro-bloggers (100,000-1M+ followers)

So you’ve done your research and you continue to stay sharp in the digital world. You know what sells, you know how to implement SEO, and you know how to market the crap out of your brand and anyone else’s.

Now you can charge $5,000-15,000 per sponsored post plus any additional fees for specific hashtags and shout outs. Yes, that’s right, you could charge $15,000 per post if you have 1M or more followers.

Instagram insights may bump up that price even more because macro-bloggers’ “reach” is usually substantially higher than their actual following. You can show this data to brands when negotiating a higher rate for collaborations, (we’ll talk more about that next week).

So for right now, no matter what your following is or how long you’ve been blogging, know that you have every right to put the right price on any collaboration.

What’s your brand collab experience been like? Share in the comments!

xx

my latest obsessions

want more?

Week 1: How to Prepare for Your First Collaboration

Week 2: How to Get Brands to Notice Your Blog

Week 3 (this week): How to Price Yourself & Your Work

Week 4: Secret Negotiating Tricks No One Talks About

Week 5: How to Get More Collaborations