Tips & Tricks: How To Deal With Business Proposals

It’s Tuesday, which means I’m going to reveal what my response was to the business proposal I talked about in last Tuesday’s Discussion: Businessess That Take Advantage Of Bloggers. If you read the article you might thought of what you would do if you were me. I’m just gonna cut to the chase: I declined his offer politely. Why? Because writing that article, researching the clothing line and not having the clothes itself to show you, just wasn’t making up for what he could give me in return. Let’s be honest, if I would’ve made the article without showing the clothes to you in an accompanied outfitpost, the post would have been nothing more than a gaudy advert for the clothing line. If you ever dealt with sort of the same or in the future will, I made some tips & tricks to guide you thru it.

Tip 1: Think of how much time you have to spend on making and producing that article and what you get in return. If, in my case, you spend a few hours on it but the reward for it doesn’t add up to those hours, it isn’t a fair deal.

Tip 2: Try to negotiate your way into a business deal. What I could’ve done better was trying to prise out more benefits on his side. Maybe he was willing to send me some pieces of clothing for a photoshoot, or some garments for a giveaway? I have to say I did mention these things in my response to the guy. Maybe waiting it out before turning down the offer would’ve been better. So a good lesson for you guys: try to find the golden mean.

Tip 3: Even though ‘he’ offered to publicize my article on his IG and Facebook, I didn’t thought it was a fair deal. His IG account had like 10k followers, way more than mine. You could say I would get lots of awareness thru his accounts. But think about it, what is the chance every 10.000 of them sees the post in his/her timeline? Does only one single mention add up to what you give in return?

Tip 4: Of course it’s an honour a brand reaches out to you. It means you get recognized and appreciated. For example: A brand wants you to tweet/post/gram about something and they will in return mention you and your blog on their website/Facebook/Twitter/IG. Make sure you gain the same or more awareness for your blog than they do. If you have 10k followers on IG and they got 1k, it means the brand takes advantage of your large follower base.

Tip 5: A good way to find out if a brand or company could be of help to you regarding creating awareness for your blog, is by checking its pagerank. Pagerank is what search engines use to determine the importance of a webpage. The higher the pagerank of your site is, the better it shows up in search results. A higher pagerank means you are going to land on top of search engine results. So if a pagerank 5 website links to your website, it weighs more than a pagerank 4 website redirecting to your blog. Check yours by clicking on the link. Mine tells me I have homework to do!

Tip 6: If a brand offers you a fee in return for your work and effort, make sure it has the same standard as what you make for a living on a regular job. Some brands don’t take bloggers seriously. But I think bloggers raise a lot of awareness and have dedicated followers that will get products/clothes if you recommend them. Please take us seriously?! We put real effort and manwork into our websites and posts. Thank you.

Tip 7: Make a timetable of the average amount of time you spend on a post. Will help you find out how long you take making an outfitpost, how long you work on photographing attributes or outfits, how long you take for editing them, if you make food recipes how long you are busy preparing and cooking it, how long researching for an in depth article takes, et cetera.

Next week Tuesday I’m going to tell you how I made my own timetable, fee scheme and production costs overview.