YouTube Sponsorship: How to Get Sponsored on YouTube

Being a YouTuber is an incredibly fun and rewarding career. You get to make content of you doing what you love and invite thousands, if not millions, of people across the internet to join you in your passion and create a community around it.

But if you’ve been in the YouTube game for a long time, you know it requires much more than just making videos. Aside from content creation, a ton of work is important for giving your career financial sustainability and longevity.

One of those important aspects is sponsorships. These sponsorships help to fund your channel so you can afford to pour more time into your craft, so they’re absolutely essential if you want to make your living as a YouTuber.

With that in mind, we’ve come up with a quick guide on how you can get sponsored on YouTube so your career as a content creator can flourish. Follow these steps, and your life as a creator could change for the better.

What Are YouTube Sponsorships?

Sponsorships on YouTube are ways that brands utilize your channel to get the word out about their products. Of course, they compensate you for the advertisements. Typically, sponsorships last a long time. Brands will create contracts with you and ask you to fulfill either a certain amount of time or a certain number of advertisements or product placements.

YouTube sponsorships are referred to as sponsored videos or branded content. You use your videos and your channel to represent their brand.

YouTube sponsorships come in a variety of different forms, and every brand will want different things from you. Here are a couple of the different types of YouTube sponsorships brands might give your channel.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a fantastic way to get sponsored by a brand, especially for smaller channels or content creators who are just starting out. With affiliate marketing, a brand will give you a unique link to their website and then a commission on all the sales made through that link.

These links sometimes come with some sort of discount or promo code to benefit your fanbase and their customers even more. This really leaves the ball in your court as far as how much you want to push their products.

You might want to dedicate a whole portion of your video to advertising their brand and giving your viewers your link. However, some brands might let you be a bit more passive and just place the link in your bio or in the description of your videos.

Ultimately, you only make money on the sales you generate, so you get what you put into it, making it a great option for creators willing to put in the work.

Product Placements

Some sponsorships involve more specific products from a brand. Brands will typically do this when launching a new product to drive traffic and buzz around their name. There are tons of different ways that brands might do this, and all of them are worth different amounts to the brand.

Sometimes, a brand might just want you to put their product in the frame of your video. An energy drink company might want you to be drinking one of their drinks during the stream, or a fashion brand might want you to wear their clothes. Placements like this typically benefit you in a pretty modest way.

Some brands will want you to dedicate a whole portion of your video to reviewing or advertising a specific product of theirs. This all depends on the value of the product. Most of the time, brands aren’t going to pay you much for product placements like these, if at all. You’ll likely get the products for free, and that will be your compensation.

Paid YouTube Sponsorships

Paid YouTube sponsorships are typically reserved for the bigger creators with large audiences. These sponsorships are when brands will pay you to create specific content related to their products. They might ask you to do a whole YouTube video that relates to their product.

The brands you partner with for these sponsorships will almost certainly relate to the content you typically make on your channel. It’s a way for them to get their product in front of your audience and compensate you well for the exposure.

You might have to change up your typical content schedule, but most of these sponsorships are well worth it. It’s a great way to develop a relationship with a brand that can last for a long time. And because these brands likely relate to your channel very specifically, they’ll mostly be products that you really enjoy and benefit from.

So How Do You Get Sponsorships?

Getting sponsored will take a lot of work — they don’t just come to you out of pure luck. But if you follow these steps, you’ll be in a good spot to potentially land yourself some sponsorship deals with brands you enjoy.

1. Revamp Your Channel

When you ask a company to sponsor you, you ask their brand to align with yours. And companies are not going to want to align with a brand that isn’t professional and well-thought-out. So if you want some sponsorships, it’s time to audit your channel and see where you can ramp up your branding.

You might want to work with a graphic designer to come up with a brand logo, color palette, YouTube banner, thumbnail templates, and more. All of these things tie together to create a brand for your online presence. So partner with an artist or hop on a design platform like Canva and create some basics of branding to apply to your whole channel.

On top of that, you’re going to want to utilize all of YouTube’s features to give your viewers a put-together, professional experience. If you don’t have one yet, it’s time to make a channel trailer.

It’s also important to utilize playlists. Playlists are especially valuable to potential sponsors because they let sponsors know what kind of content you make right away.

And finally, make sure your channel and content are following the YouTube Community Guidelines. You won’t be eligible for sponsored content or ad revenue if you’re not in line and brands might not be willing to associate with you. So, make sure you follow YouTube’s rules.

2. Grow Your Channel

Your channel will only be valuable to a brand if you have a significant audience from which they stand to benefit. So if you want to get sponsors, the best thing to do to increase your chances is to grow your channel.

It’s time to start posting regularly. It’s time to look deeply at your analytics and post more of the types of content that do well. It’s time to get into YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Reels to try and go viral. A bigger platform means more value. More value means bigger sponsors.

3. Create a Media Kit

A media kit is the most important tool in your arsenal when it comes to getting sponsors. It’s the document that makes you and your channel look appealing to potential sponsors. You need to take some time to craft your media kit carefully if you want to land some YouTube sponsorships.

Make sure to include your branding, describe who you are and what your channel is about, and provide tons of details about your audience. Demographics, viewing time, subscriber count. Find all of that data and more in your YouTube Studio so you can show these brands that they stand to benefit from sponsoring you. And of course, include all your contact information.

If you’re not good at making documents like this look good, hiring a graphic designer to make it look professional might be good. This document is what sells your channel, so it has to be perfect.

4. Find Good Brands and Reach Out

Once that’s all ready, it’s time to reach out to brands. But not just any brand will work. You should reach out to brands that align with your channel and the content you make so the relationship can be mutually beneficial.

You also want to ensure that the brands you reach out to have a marketing budget they can tap into. You don’t want your efforts to be in vain, so do some Googling to find out. You might be able to find brands that recently went through a round of funding. But also, if the brand is big enough, they’ll likely have a marketing budget anyway.

After you do that, find the email address of the brand’s PR rep or marketing department, and send a well-crafted email with your media kit asking if they need any creators. It’s a good idea to ask to be added to the brand’s PR list of content creators.

Land Sponsors, Keep Creating

If you’re not successful at first, keep trying! You might be more valuable to the brand later down the line or find other brands willing to partner with you. Either way, don’t lose hope, keep grinding, and eventually you’ll get those sponsors and start making more money as a creator.

If you’re interested in learning more about tools and ideas that can help you become a better content creator, head to our blog and see how we can help you!

—

💡If you're a streamer looking to save time and money getting short, shareable highlight clips from your latest streams, try Powder for PC (Windows) now. Powered by AI 🎮.

💡Learn more about Powder at our website or join our Discord, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn communities!