Last week, I wrote a post about pitching and the different variations of pitches I like to see. I’ve been mentoring a mentee named Jenny through a program I’m a part of in Austin at Soho House (launched by Jai, past The New Unfiltered guest) and she’s been reminding me of so many lessons I’ve trained myself to remember over the years. Specifically, about money and pitching.

I released a bonus episode today going into detail on many of my secret tips and tricks to pitching, WHO to contact (stop contacting a contact us form on any website, please please please)  and how to reply when you want money. The first step to overcoming many of these hurdles is to get comfortable asking for what you want. This is so important in every element of your life, personal and business, because until you’re confident enough in your identity to ask for what you want, getting someone to trust you doing a form of work is going to be hard.

In the episode, I forgot to mention that you shouldn’t contact a company and then post about them, then expect to go back and get paid to post. Here’s what I’ve realized, and this isn’t for every single company but for many of them: if you’re in talks to feature whatever product they have, and then you get free samples and post because free stuff is so fun! they’ve already gotten you for “free”.

If your goal was to post the free items and then get paid to post, the possibility of that happening now is very slim because you’ve already shown them you’ll post for free. I’d analyze what companies you want to be paid by and what companies you want free product to post about and from there, you can determine whether you should flesh out a partnership further or just go ahead and post, feature, etc.

Start small. Ask for $100. Make a media kit. Round up a few different clients after the first who will pay you $100 and then up your rate to $200. If you don’t view yourself as the brand that you are, how can you expect someone else to take you seriously?