Complete practical guide
The sponsored-content book about the three hundred and forty people who left
37 chapters and 68 printable worksheets on taking money from brands - why the fee is not the price, why nobody tells you what a campaign cost you, and why the ordinary unpaid pieces are the actual business.
Look inside — read the first chapter freeOne payment, USD. Yours permanently — no subscription.
What this guide is
Tam wrote a piece for a software brand. Fourteen hundred dollars, disclosed properly at the top, two revision rounds, delivered on time, and by any reasonable standard a good piece about a product that genuinely worked. It was not misleading. Nothing in it was false. The brand was pleased and paid on time. Then three hundred and forty people unsubscribed in the week that followed, against a normal week of about forty. Nobody wrote in to complain. Nobody accused Tam of selling out. They simply left, quietly, the way people do - and it took eleven months of ordinary publishing to get back to the number the list had been on the Monday before. Here is what had actually gone wrong. The product was good. The piece was good. The disclosure was clear. The audience had just not come for it. They had come for something else entirely, and had received, in the middle of the thing they came for, a competent article about a product they did not want, from somebody they had trusted to know the difference. That is the whole event. It is small, it is entirely legal, it breaks no advertising standard, and it does not appear anywhere in the accounts. The invoice said fourteen hundred dollars. The campaign cost three hundred and forty subscribers, at an acquisition cost Tam had never calculated - and would not calculate for another year. Most content businesses fail slowly, in public, for reasons everybody can see. This one fails quietly, in a column nobody keeps, while the revenue line goes up.
What you get out of it
Specifics, not promises.
- Why the fee on the invoice is not the price of the campaign
- The four-week measurement to take before your first paid piece - which cannot be made afterwards
- Why your subscribers cost six times more than you think
- Where to put the disclosure, and what the wrong place costs in real numbers
- The one paragraph brands never ask for that makes the whole piece work
- How four individually reasonable edits produce a piece that is not true
- The fifteen-minute call that produced thirteen of seventeen repeat campaigns
- The clause in a standard agreement that quietly takes the most valuable thing you have
- Why revenue can rise for a full year while the business deteriorates every quarter
- 148 AI prompts - and the one category of question where a confident answer is a genuine hazard
Ideal for
People with an audience - a newsletter, a blog, a channel, a podcast - who are being approached by brands or are about to be. Particularly three groups. Somebody about to accept their first campaign with no brief, no baseline and no written boundaries. Somebody already running campaigns who has never calculated what one costs them in subscribers. And anybody whose revenue is rising while their engagement is not, who needs Chapters 31 and 35 before they take another booking.
- Anybody with an audience who is being approached by brands, or is about to be.
- Somebody about to accept a first campaign with no brief and no baseline.
- Somebody already running campaigns who has never calculated what one costs in subscribers.
- Anybody whose revenue is rising while their engagement is not.
What's inside
Format
- Digital download, delivered instantly after payment
- Formatted for letter paper — read on screen or print it
- Yours permanently, re-downloadable from your library any time
- Licensed for use in your own business
By the end you can
A reader finishes with a baseline unsubscribe rate established before their first campaign; an engaged-audience definition fixed in writing with its measurement date; a disclosure grid built per format per platform from their own national standards body and each platform's published policy; a written list of excluded categories completed before anybody offered them money; a floor hourly rate calculated from realistic billable hours rather than chosen; a twelve-field brief template with a named approval chain, two counted revision rounds and a priced third; a trust ledger recording excess unsubscribes against baseline and converting them to dollars; a funded reserve sufficient to refuse a campaign without arithmetic; a monthly media-kit update including figures that have fallen; a debrief booked ten days after every publication with one specific proposal in it; and stop conditions written while nothing was at stake.
A complete working system for running a sponsored-content business - built on four rules covering the structural conflict of being paid by one party to speak to another, the asymmetry by which the audience asset is consumed by the same act that monetises it, the margin lost in revision rounds and approval chains nobody wrote down, and the fact that rebooking is decided by whether the campaign was easy rather than by what it achieved - with audience cost per sponsored piece as the central metric, revision rounds per campaign and rebooking rate as the two operational ones, and a funded reserve treated as the mechanism that makes every editorial position in the book enforceable rather than aspirational.
Instant download · One payment · Keep it forever
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