I get emails from brands daily but I ignore 90% of them for a few reasons:

TOP: Target (Men’s section) SHORTS: Romwer SHOES: JustFab

👎🏻 They only offer a discount code for YOU to PURCHASE the product they want you to PROMOTE. That doesn’t make sense! The least they can do is provide you the product. These messages get deleted right away, oops.

👎🏻 When they come at you with the terms “ambassador” or “affiliate”. Unless they’re from a brand I already love, or really want to try out, I don’t give these emails the time of day. I learned from past mistakes. I accepted waaay too many “affiliate” gigs where I found myself creating free content for the brands and not really seeing fruit from it. And often times, as soon as you post once, you don’t hear from them again. 😂 My favorite affiliation so far is with Versed. I can elaborate on this more if you want.

👎🏻 When the budget doesn’t make sense with the deliverables. For example: “1 IG Video for $50”. Yes, brands have the audacity to pitch these to influencers, to this day! It’s not even worth negotiating.

👎🏻 When it’s a “gifting” campaign but they require you to post on your socials. I still do exceptions for this sometimes, but if this email is from a brand I am not familiar with, or if their product doesn’t interest me, and if it feels like I’m doing them a favor, then I don’t even respond. If I want to try their product, I counter them with my negotiation tactics. Read last week’s post where I gave a few examples.

👎🏻 When the email is from Chic NYC Runway 😂, when they greet you with “hi babe” or hi “@username”.

To my fellow influencers, what are your usual red flags when reading emails from brands? Do you give them a chance or do you just straight up ignore them like I do?

Saying no or ignoring these "random" job opportunities opens up a space for you to say yes to more quality gigs. You not spending your precious time and energy on these "favor" jobs gives you time to work on more important stuff and will most definitely save you from burnout. Learned all of this the hard way. 😂 I fell into the trap of "the more "brand deals" I get, the more legit I look".