Once you start receiving money directly from brands, you will need to start sending out invoices. It’s a good idea to always clarify all the terms of the campaign within the invoice so that nothing is left unclear.

If you can, try asking for the brand to pay you in advance or at least go 50:50 with you.

There is nothing more frustrating than chasing down payments from months and months ago. I once collaborated with a brand that was based in Italy and seriously considered suing them because their payment was late by months. My best friend is a lawyer and confirmed that the law was on my side.

However, it’s still such an unnecessary hassle to go through to get a pretty negligible amount of money and who knows, laws might be different in other countries with regards to these kinds of issues.

It’s not worth taking the risk. Luckily in my case, the company did eventually pay, but I learnt my lesson.

4. Don’t Be a Sell-Out

Once you build a reputation and start getting offers from various brands it can be tempting to say yes to everything. Let’s face it, it’s pretty appealing to get the same amount of money from promoting a product as you do working a few days in the office.

However, your career as an “influencer” will be very short lived if you take this path. To ensure that you won’t lose credibility with your audience, I would suggest that you do these two things:

1. Never ever promote something that you don’t believe in

2. Stick to the Pareto principle (the 80/20 rule)

The Pareto principle says that 80% of your results come from 20% of the work you put in.

It’s a general law that can be applied to anything in life e.g. You wear 20% of the clothes that you own 80% of the time; The richest 20% of the world hold 80% of the world’s income, and so on.

Therefore, in my opinion, it would be a good idea to stick to having a maximum of 20% of your content sponsored on Instagram to protect your reputation, and leave the remaining 80% of content non-sponsored.