What Is Whitelisting? And How To Charge For It
We’re seeing a new trend in blog and social partnerships and what’s being included in these contracts. And that’s granting rights to Whitelisting. Whitelisting means you the influencer, give access to a brand partner to access your social media accounts to run ads on your behalf. A whitelisted post will look like it’s coming from your blog social media account, but the copy, the image, the link, will be written by the brand who was given access.
What Is Whitelisting?
In a nutshell, whitelisting is a great opportunity for brands to gain traction with ads, utilize your look-alike audience and really maximize their influencer marketing strategy. Which may be beneficial to you. The brand will use the access you grant them to your social platform (this is safe to do through the Facebook Business backend). Then the brand will run ads as if they are posting as you. This feels more authentic than them, the brand, making more ads on Facebook or Instagram. Proof that influencers are trusted and should be charging for their work! There are some caveats with Whitelisting and risks. So it’s important to understand what whitelisting really means and to be mindful of who you’re giving this access to.
Benefits of Whitelisting
One of the main benefits of whitelisting, especially if the brand is utilizing your blog URL in the post, is that it can drive incredible traffic to your site. Brands are able to put quite a bit of money behind the ads and also usually know how to run more successful campaigns than we can. This can improve your page views, drive new readers to your site and build a larger fanbase. It may also mean more engagement on your Facebook post or Instagram post.
Risks of Whitelisting
When you allow a brand to run ads on your behalf as a content creator and influencer, you do not have full creative control. You also can not see what they’re creating. The visibility on the influencer’s end is minimal. This is why offering whitelisting to brands you trust and support is important. Don’t just offer it to anyone who may create harmful ads, inappropriate ads, and so on. Plus, brands may just utilize your likeness and pretty images to drive clicks to their own site and not yours.
How to Price Whitelisting
Since whitelisting seems to be similar to granting usage rights to images, considering they’ll be running ads, we find that pricing this like you would image licensing is best. This can range anywhere from $250 to $5,000. It really just depends on the situation, the brand, the number of images, the length of offering to whitelist, etc.
Don’t be afraid to speak up! If you’re not okay with whitelisting, just ask if it’s something that can be removed from the contract. Or come up with the ads together if that’s something you’d prefer to have control over. Brands are sneaking this in and it’s important to be reviewing your contracts and speaking up when you have questions!
P.S. If you don’t have a contract with a brand, check out our sample sponsored post contract in the member dashboard!
