Sponsors for Small Streamers: How to Find Sponsors for Your Streams

Trying to make it in the world of streaming can be a big challenge. Many of us know the unrelenting grind of streaming day after day, week after week, pushing for followers and subs. Between day jobs and your personal life, finding the time to do everything a streamer needs to do can be challenging.

But all that can start to change once you start to find sponsors. The more income you make as a streamer, the more time you’ll be able to put into your platform and your craft. And getting sponsors is a great way to get that extra cash so you can devote more time to your passion.

We want to see you succeed as a streamer and make some money, so we’ve compiled a quick guide on how to lock down some sponsors, even if you’re a smaller streamer. If you play this right, your life as a streamer could change forever.

What Do Sponsorships Look Like?

You might be thinking to yourself, “I’m just a small streamer. Why would any brand want to use me to advertise?” Well, you might be surprised to hear this, but many brands out there see a ton of value in small streamers and the loyal audiences they tend to have on big-name platforms.

In the eyes of many companies, a few impressions on devoted fans can translate into sales far better than a medium audience of haphazard fans. Of course, this isn’t always the case, but there are absolutely companies out there that take this approach.

For smaller streamers, there are a wide variety of opportunities out there, ranging from simple product placement to even affiliate marketing. So let’s take a look at what kinds of sponsorships you could get your hands on.

Ad Placements

Advertisements are the bread and butter of streamers of all different sizes. Ad revenue on all of your content is one of the biggest ways you can make money. It’s valuable for the company that needs exposure, it’s valuable for the streamer, and it’s even valuable for the customer who gets to learn about a new product they might be interested in or need.

Of course, ads on your stream are a big piece of this puzzle, so let’s talk about that first. On Twitch, once you make Affiliate or Partner, you can control how many ads your viewers see while watching your stream.

The best thing for small streamers is quality over quantity with ads. According to Twitch, you want to give your viewers a great viewing experience. To that end, it’s best not to front-load or back-load ads on your stream. The best move is to start with one minute of ads per hour at intentional places in the stream. That will be best for your fans and for you.

You can always air ads outside of the Twitch-curated ones. If you’re lucky enough to develop a relationship with an ad agency or even directly with a brand, you can air your own ads and collect way more of the ad revenue. But this will likely come later down the line.

Product Placements

Product placements are one of the best ways to get started with sponsorships — anybody can do this! Simply put, you’ll strike a deal with a brand where you will strategically place their products somewhere in your stream. Sometimes that’s a coffee mug with their logo, sometimes, it’s one of their signature pieces of merch, and sometimes it goes as far as an outright mention of their product.

Product placements are a great way to start developing relationships with brands. If you’re a smaller streamer just starting to get into sponsorships, they’re a great way to start building relationships with a brand you can build on in the future.

Start out by just asking for some free products to place in your stream. It might not be super lucrative at first, but if it goes well and your stream starts to grow, you can negotiate better deals that offer more compensation for you.

Gear and Clothing Sponsors

Depending on what kind of streamer you are, you might want to develop a gear sponsorship with some brands related to what you do on stream. If you’re a gamer, you might want to get sponsored by a company that makes equipment: headsets, mics, keyboards, or PCs. If you’re a fitness channel, you might want to get sponsored by a weight company or athleisure brand.

These relationships tend to be mutually beneficial in a real way. They give you products that you need to do your thing on stream while you give their brand exposure and more customers. It’s a big win-win that brands love and that you’ll love too.

Affiliate Marketing

And now, we come to one of the most important ways you can get started that make a big difference in your ad revenue: Affiliate marketing. Not only is this a lucrative form of sponsorship, but it’s super accessible to small streamers and creators.

In affiliate marketing, you’ll get a unique link to a company’s products on their website. You plug the link and the product to your audience, and you get your fans to buy the product through your specific link. The company keeps track of how many sales your link generates, and you get a commission on the sales you make.

Companies are incentivized to go with streamers of all sizes for affiliate marketing deals because it’s commission-based. They only have to pay you for the sales you make, so nobody gets screwed over!

You can even start affiliate marketing through Amazon. With Amazon, you can generate affiliate links and rake in 10 percent of the sales. It’s a great place to start, no matter what size you are.

How Can You Get a Sponsorship?

Now that you know the types of deals you can get your hands on, let’s talk about what you can do to get them. With some hard work, carefully crafted emails, and luck, you can start to make a meaningful impact on your wallet through your streaming and grow your gaming career.

1. Make a Media Kit

Your media kit will become your most important asset when it comes to landing sponsorships, so you need to make an absolutely killer one. Hit is one of those non-negotiable essentials if you want to land some sponsors.

A media kit is a document you’ll send when first reaching out to brands. It contains important information about you and your stream. It needs to have a few things to be effective:

• Your logo and branding
• A summary of what your channel is about
• Info about your target audience
• Your channel’s metrics
• Details about other sponsorships
• Your contact information

So you’ll need a lot of data, and you’ll need to make it look clean and appealing. Take your time with this. Get a graphic designer friend to help you out if you need to. A good media kit can be the difference maker in a company saying yes or no to your proposal.

2. Craft a Meaningful Pitch

Once you’ve got your media kit, it’s time to reach out to brands. Use all your channel data to pitch to the company or brand. It’s important that you present the value that you stand to bring to their company. Remember, the relationship must be mutually beneficial for them to agree.

Let them know you believe in their product, use your data to show them that your channel can help them, and be professional in your communication.

3. Start With Products You Care About

You want to do a good job of selling products, so make sure (especially when you’re starting out) that you actually believe in the products you’re pitching to your followers.

It’s also important to start with products that relate to you, your life, and/or your stream. You know that people who care about what you do will also care about the products that help you do it. So focusing on products related to the stream will make your sponsorships more likely to succeed.

Do some research, scour the internet, and find brands that you believe in and that you could realistically partner with. Once you find a good brand, learn everything you can about them so you can know what you’re talking about when you reach out to them. Information is your friend, and you can use it to let them know that you know what you’re talking about.

4. Know What You’re Worth

You don’t want to overvalue or undervalue your channel. It’s incredibly important that you know exactly how valuable your audience is when you’re negotiating with brands for sponsorships. Overvaluing yourself makes you look bad to the brand, and undervaluing yourself could end you with a bad deal. Find the balance that makes sense.

This is partly why affiliate marketing is a great method for beginners. It requires low investment from the brand but still gives you a meaningful and potentially very profitable opportunity.

Lock Down Sponsors and Grow Your Platform

Sponsorships are an important part of any streamer’s career. It’s important to diversify your income to build a channel you can rely on. The more sponsorships you get, the more money you make, and the more time you can invest into growing your channel, streaming more often, and chasing your dreams.

For more information about growing as a streamer and tools that can help you along the way, check out Powder.

Powder builds AI software for streamers to create shareable, short-form content from their long stream videos. Automatically clip your best moments in a few clicks.

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For more helpful information about streaming and tools that can help you along the way, check out our blog and see all that AI can do for your streaming career.

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