Learning to collaborate with brands for free products to review can be difficult to understand how to avoid scammers.
I was new to anything side hustle related until last February of 2023. I began the Amazon Influencer Program in late September of that year and it has been an awesome ride. I have earned money from my reviews of the stuff I owned and in around December of 2023 I began to get Amazon sellers reaching out to me as well as other brands.
I was very skeptical of scammers and wasn’t willing to risk my account or personal info. Brands will usually reach out to you through email. If they reach out through social media I would redirect them to an email for further investigation.
First thing I do is, carefully, evaluate the trustworthiness of the email. I don’t click links right away.
I will go to Amazon and search via product listing by name and not click links or I will enter the link they gave me into Amazon directly.
Once I see if the listing exists on Amazon , I will reach out to them and give them my general rules for creating a shoppable video. It is usually that I will do the work for a small fee and the free product and I will only upload to my Amazon Storefront and link to their product.
I make sure to say that they are not granted copyright for the video. I will place on my YouTube channel too, but it just depends on whether I feel the product is going to make sales and if the video was requested in horizontal or vertical. If horizontal is requested, then I will go ahead and put it on my YouTube channel since it is already in the format YouTube requires.
If they agree to the terms, I will make sure that I understand their expectations before a final agreement is made. Then I will provide my P.O. Box for them to send the item. I don’t give out my actual address most of the time for privacy reasons.
I still will not click the link in their email at this point most of the time. I will wait to see if they send the item which proves to me that they are legit.
At this point, I may click the link if necessary but most of the time I don’t need to. I will provide the link to my Amazon Storefront video for them to see it was made and is published. From there I will ask for payment to my PayPal.
I do have an LLC that I use, however, this is not required. I have had great luck with most collaborations. I had one of my first say they were having trouble with PayPal and I decided to ask for another free product since they had something I wanted and it wasn’t the item they sent. It was equivalent to the price we agreed on for the video.
The rest of my collaborations have been smooth transactions. This was a difficult process for me to understand so quickly. Less than a year ago, if someone had told me this was possible for normal everyday people, I would have laughed in their face.
I get free products several times a week and invited back to do more collaborative work with brands.
I do think that brands that collaborate with influencers have a way to share their connections with influencers and UGC collabs. This is a simple word of mouth thing. If you represent yourself like a business and treat the brands and agencies with respect, you will get asked to do more work for them and others by recommendations from other brands.
Now, if you are an Amazon Influencer and want to collaborate with brands. Just make sure to link your social media in your Amazon Storefront where it is allowed. Not in your banner! This is not allowed.
Then, place your email address in your social media account where it is easily discovered. The brands and agencies are aware of how to find you. It’s up to you to make that information available for them to find.
I learned how to join the Amazon Influencer Program through a stay at home mom that worked in marketing and had a six figure income prior to having her child.
She wanted to stay at home for those precious few years to raise her son and this has helped her do that. She started sharing her success on her social media and ultimately, created a course to make it easier for people to learn this process. If you would like to learn more about that then check out my blog post here.
After that point, I began getting sellers reaching out to me to collaborate with brands. It just kinda goes with the territory. One thing leads to another and so on.
So, getting deals with brands isn’t hard at all! It just takes time to build your portfolio to show that you are someone that can be trusted with the task.
Thank you for reading and if this helped you drop me a comment. I’d love to hear from you and your thoughts on the article.
Don’t forget to check out my other blog post here
or get access to the course I took by click the link to my stan store here