How to Land Your First NIL Deal (Even With a Small Following)

You don't need 100,000 followers to land NIL deals.

I know that sounds like something a guru on TikTok would say to get you to buy their course. But I've been running brand campaigns for college athletes long enough to tell you the data is real. Some of the best performing campaigns we've run came from athletes with under 5,000 followers. Some of the worst came from athletes with 80,000.

Brands don't pay for numbers. They pay for results. Here's how to get your first deal even if you're starting with a small audience.

The Myth That's Costing You Deals

Most college athletes think NIL works like this: build up followers, wait for brands to slide in your DMs, sign the first thing that looks real. That's the Power Five star path. It's a small path and most athletes aren't on it.

The path that works for the rest of us looks different. It starts with understanding what brands are actually buying.

A brand running a NIL campaign has a specific goal. Move product. Grow an audience. Test a new market. Build social proof. They don't care about your follower count in isolation. They care whether you can help them hit that goal.

A D2 volleyball player with 3,000 engaged followers in Iowa might be worth more to a regional protein brand trying to break into the Midwest than a D1 basketball player with 50,000 followers whose audience is nationwide and unengaged. That's not me being nice. That's a real pitch I've used to close a real deal.

What Brands Actually Look For

Three things, in this order.

1. Audience Fit

Who follows you? If a brand sells baby products and your audience is 18-year-old college guys, you're not a fit no matter how big your platform is. If a brand sells affordable workout gear and your audience is college athletes, teammates, and families from your hometown, you are perfect.

This is why niche athletes often outearn famous ones. A swimmer with 4,000 followers in the swim community has a tighter audience than a football player with 40,000 mixed followers. Brands know this.

2. Content Quality

When a brand sponsor scrolls your feed, what do they see? Bad lighting, shaky video, and no consistency? They'll pass. Clean photos, decent edits, a consistent voice, and a brand they can actually trust to represent them well? They'll pay.

You don't need a ring light and a $3,000 camera. You need good natural light, a clean background, and enough reps that your content doesn't look like it was made on the way to class.

3. Professionalism

This is the one that decides whether you get a second deal after your first. When a brand emails you, how fast do you respond? When they send you a brief, do you actually read it? When the content is due, does it go up on the day it was supposed to?

Most athletes lose deals here. Not because their content is bad. Because they ghost, they miss deadlines, or they argue about things the contract already answered. Brands talk to each other. Being the athlete who handles business well is the single fastest way to get recommended to the next brand.

The Three-Step Playbook

Step 1: Clean Up Your Page Before You Pitch

Before you reach out to a single brand, go look at your own page. Pretend you're a brand manager deciding whether to pay you $500 to post.

Here's what they want to see:

• A clear bio. Sport, school, what you're about. No more than two lines. Something like: "Volleyball @ Eastern Michigan. Training, recruiting, real college athlete life."
• Recent content. If your last post was six weeks ago, brands assume you're inactive. Post something in the last 10 days before you pitch anyone.
• A pinned or highlighted post. Something that makes it obvious what you do and who follows you. Training clips, game highlights, team content, whatever represents you.
• Contact info. Either an email in your bio or open DMs. If a brand has to hunt for you, they won't.

Step 2: Make a List of Brands That Actually Fit You

Don't pitch Nike. Don't pitch Gatorade. They have agencies and rosters and you're starting over.

Instead, pitch brands where your audience is their customer. Think about:

• Regional or local businesses near your campus
• Mid-sized DTC brands that are clearly running influencer campaigns (you can tell because other athletes are posting them)
• Product categories your audience already buys (supplements, recovery tools, apparel, tech, skincare)
• Brands whose team feels like your team (if you follow the founder on Instagram and they post like a real person, that's a good sign)

Make a list of 20. Not 3. The numbers game matters here.

Step 3: Pitch Like a Business, Not a Fan

This is where most athletes blow it. They DM "love your product, would you be interested in working together" and wait. The brand either ignores it or offers them free product in exchange for three posts. Not a deal.

A real pitch has three parts:

1. A specific reason you reached out. "I've been using your electrolytes through pre-season and my teammates keep asking where I got them." That's a specific hook. That tells the brand you're actually a user.
2. A concrete proposal. "I'd love to do a one-week partnership: three Stories showing how I use it in training and one feed post with a discount code for my followers." Specific deliverables. No "let's collab."
3. A rate. "My rate for that package is $400 plus product." If you don't name a number, the brand will. And their number will be lower than yours.

Send that pitch to 20 brands. Follow up once after a week. Expect most of them to ignore you. Expect two or three to say yes. That's how this works.

What to Do When You Get the First Yes

Get the deal in writing. Every single time. Even if it's a small deal. Email counts as writing. Verbal doesn't.

Make sure the agreement covers:

• What you're getting paid and when
• What you're posting (exact number and type of content)
• What the brand can do with your content (usage rights)
• How long the deal lasts
• Who owns the content after

Deliver on time. Overdeliver slightly. Ask for a quote or testimonial you can share with the next brand. Now you have proof, and the next pitch is easier.

The Truth About Timing

Most athletes quit before their first deal because they give it two weeks and feel defeated. Two weeks is nothing. The athletes who land real NIL deals consistently have been pitching and building for months. Some for a full year before their first paid deal hits.

What changes everything is the first one. Once you have one deal, you have social proof. Once you have three, you have a portfolio. Once you have a portfolio, brands start reaching out to you instead of the other way around.

The athletes I've watched go from zero to $20,000 a year in NIL deals all have the same story: they treated it like a business from day one, they didn't wait for brands to come to them, and they kept showing up long after everyone else quit.

If that's you, you're in the right place.