Borrow Someone Else's Audience

Every other module has been about building your own audience. This one is about renting someone else’s — which is faster, more expensive, and much easier to get wrong, because you are buying something you cannot inspect directly.

Two different arrangements, routinely confused

• Influencer partnership — you pay for access and endorsement. The fee is usually fixed and paid whether or not anything sells. You are buying attention and association, and you carry the risk.
• Affiliate arrangement — the partner is paid a share of what they actually sell, tracked by a link or code. You pay only for results, which moves the risk onto them.

The practical consequence is that a fixed fee is a bet on an audience you have not met, while an affiliate deal is nearly free to try and correspondingly harder to interest anyone in. The hybrid — a smaller fee plus commission — is where most real agreements land.

Micro and macro are different products

Follower count is the least useful number in the room, because engagement rate tends to fall as an audience grows. A creator with 8,000 followers who reads their replies frequently outperforms one with 800,000 who does not, for anything requiring trust rather than mere exposure.

• Nano, roughly under 10,000 — high engagement, cheap or free, and a genuine relationship with their audience. Best for niche products and honest recommendation. The overhead is that you need several of them.
• Micro, roughly 10,000 to 100,000 — the usual sweet spot: still credible, still affordable, and large enough that one partnership is worth the administration.
• Macro, roughly 100,000 to a million — reach and legitimacy. You are buying awareness, not persuasion, and paying accordingly.
• Mega, above a million — brand association at scale, priced for companies with brand budgets. Almost never the right instrument for a small business.

Commission structures

• Percentage of sale — the standard. Simple, aligns interests, and needs a floor if your margins vary by product.
• Fixed amount per sale — better when your prices vary but your margin per unit does not.
• Per lead or per sign-up — used when the sale happens later or offline. Invites low-quality volume unless you define what counts as a lead precisely.
• Tiered — the rate rises after a threshold. Motivating for serious partners, and it means your cost per sale increases exactly when volume does; check that the maths still works at the top tier.
• Recurring — a share of a subscription for its lifetime, or a fixed number of months. Expensive over time and the strongest incentive there is, so cap it deliberately rather than by accident.

Two clauses matter more than the rate: the cookie window, which decides how long after a click a sale still counts, and the attribution rule, which decides who gets paid when a customer clicked two partners’ links. Leaving either unstated is how affiliate programmes end in arguments.

Vetting, and the ways it goes wrong

1. Check reach against followers on recent posts. A large gap means either bought followers or an audience that has stopped paying attention.
2. Read the replies, not the like count. Generic praise in broken English is a bot signature; real questions from real accounts are the thing you are buying.
3. Check who else they have promoted, and how often. An account that endorses something new every week has trained its audience to ignore endorsements.
4. Check the audience is where your customers are. Enthusiastic engagement from a country you do not sell in is a cost, not a benefit.
5. Agree the disclosure. Undisclosed paid promotion is illegal in most jurisdictions, including the Netherlands and the wider EU, and the reputational damage lands on you as much as on them.

Measuring whether it worked

Give every partner a unique code or link, because without one you are guessing. Then the arithmetic is straightforward: total cost — fee plus commissions plus the product you gave away — against revenue attributed to that partner.

Two adjustments make the number honest. Subtract the sales that would have happened anyway, which for a small audience is usually near zero but is not always. And if what you sell repeats, judge against the customer’s expected value over time rather than the first order — a partnership that loses money on the first purchase can still be the best acquisition channel you have.