Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 62: What I’ve Learned From Making $53k in Brand Partnerships in 2026

Released: 10/16/2026

Show Notes:

Amanda’s first brand partner reached out when she had fewer than 750 Instagram followers. She walks through how brand partnerships grew into one of the strongest income streams in her business, with $53,000 secured so far in 2026. She explains how she set her first rates using her therapy hourly rate and why she prefers long-term partners over one-off reels. She also shares the six-month deal that fell apart in a finance department after everything felt certain, plus why lifestyle content is hard for her as a private person. Her closing advice: start by showing up as yourself wherever you already market, and keep an eye out for real opportunities.

3 Key Takeaways:

1. Brand partnerships do not require a massive following to get started; Amanda landed her first one with fewer than 750 followers because depth of connection and authentic content matter more to brands than raw reach.
2. The emotional side of brand partnerships is real and undertalked: deals can fall through late in the process for budget reasons that have nothing to do with fit, and having an organized system for follow-up is what separates a dead lead from a warm one you can revisit later.
3. Brand deals are one of the highest-margin income streams available to a therapist-entrepreneur because they require no additional calls, no ads spend on your end, and can be worked on from a plane or a balcony, which makes them worth building toward even if the organizational side takes time to figure out.

Connect with Amanda:

• Follow on Instagram: @amandakbcoaching
• Check out the Amanda KB Coaching website

This episode is sponsored by:

• Alma – learn more here
• Jane – use code: AMANDA2MO for a 2-month grace period

Resources & Links:

• Join the next cohort of the Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Mastermind – we kick off November 3rd!
• The Wealthy & Worthy Retreat – Vancouver, CA, June 2027
• Click here for more resources & links

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Transcript:

Amanda Buduris (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Happy, Healthy, and Wealthy Therapist Podcast. I talk a lot about making money as a therapist, as someone who diversifies their income streams. And I’ve talked a lot about, you know, what it looks like for me to have my Therapy Intensives Academy program or my mastermind. But what I realized is I don’t talk too, too much about what it’s like to do.

whatever you call it, brand deals, sponsored posts, partnerships, ambassadorships, whatever word you want to use. But I realize I don’t talk about that a lot. And so I wanted to spend today’s episode just talking more about that because I think it’s something that a lot of people have questions about, whether they are also wanting to do business coaching with other therapists or whether they’re someone who works with moms or couples or anything where there is a brand.

You could promote and you could be paid to do that. The first question that I usually get asked when it comes to brand partnerships is how long did it take you to get your first one? And you know, in some ways I actually kind of consider myself lucky that it came fairly quickly. I wish I had the exact data on this. What I do remember is that my very first brand partner, which was Jane App, EMR,

reached out to me on Instagram when I had less than 750 followers. So I definitely was not going viral in any way. I didn’t have this huge audience, which I think a lot of people encourage you to have of like once you have 5,000, once you have 10,000, or you know, some kind of non-specific marker of when you’re ready for brand partnerships, but that’s not necessarily the case. And that might change depending on your market.

That might change depending on your niche, whatever that is. But I wanted to just say that piece first because it’s not necessarily something that has to take forever. I think if you know what you’re doing and you’re good at what you’re doing, the right brands will find you and reach out to you. So at the point of this recording, I’m recording this on Monday, October 12th. To date, I have secured

$53,000 in brand partnerships in 2026. Now I say secured because some of that has been earned to date so far. It’s been things that have actually hit my bank account. From, you know, I send a sponsored email or I post a sponsored Instagram post or s I have podcast sponsors. So some of it is they pay per month, but there are also a couple of sponsors I have that are

I’m in longer-term contracts with them. So I can already guarantee what I know is coming through through the end of the year. So that’s why I’m saying it’s 53,000 secured. I’d probably estimate I’ve collected maybe about 45,000 of that so far at this point. And some of that is also, you know, I have long-term partnerships with a couple of brands. And then some brands I don’t have.

Ongoing partnerships with, but they might reach out to me when they’re interested in partnering together. Like, hey, we have this campaign coming up. We would love to you, we’d love for you to send an email to your list. What are your rates for that? Or I count, I’m not good at tracking like my affiliate sales of, you know, sign up for this program and you know, you get a kickback and I get a kickback. Like I’m not good at tracking that, but it’s a little bit easier to track.

bigger things that come through, like if I refer someone to this company and I get a $200 bonus, I lump that in with, you know, what I call brand deals, because it’s still me promoting the product, even if I’m not getting specifically paid in the moment to do it or I didn’t get paid before to promote it. So I just want to share some of that early contacts with you of how how I got started and what it actually looks like nowadays. So again.

With starting with Jane App EMR. Again, I was not, I wasn’t viral. I honestly don’t think I was very good at playing the Instagram game at that point. Like, yeah, 750 followers is not nothing. And I was very grateful for it at the time. But I remember that back then feeling like I was an imposter or, you know, there’s no way I would ever get a brand deal so quickly. And yet.

They did connect with my style of how I was talking about things, they connected with my content. So it wasn’t necessarily that they cared about my reach, right? They weren’t like, well, we’d love to partner with you when you get to that $5,000 follower count or something like that. And I think that’s what’s really important is that when it comes to what you’re posting and how you’re posting, you have to post in the most authentic way possible.

In general, right? If you want to grow your following, if you want to get clients, get customers, whatever your goal is on social media, wherever you might be marketing, I primarily do it on Instagram. And that will serve you, right? If I had a, you know, 750 followers, but I was saying things that a brand hated, obviously they’re not gonna reach out to me. If I said things that were like a little too vague and didn’t resonate with people, well, they might reach out to me. But, you know, part of what brands do.

want more of is they want to see that you have engagement. They want to see that people are responding to the things that you’re posting to. They want to see that you have some kind of influence, right? You don’t have to be an influencer to have influence. So truly authenticity is the marketing lesson here. The more that you can emphasize depth, right? That is always going to be more important than reach. No matter how many Instagram coaches will teach you.

How to go viral, how to have a increase your story views and increase your clicks and all of that. Like, yes, all of that is important, all of it is helpful, but it’s not the only goal here. If you care about what you’re saying, if you know what you’re talking about, if you know how to reach your ideal clients, brands will see that and they will value that. Now, the second thing I wanna cover is that when it comes to brand partnerships, I truly consider myself lucky when it is people

When it is a brand that reaches out to me because me pitching to a brand can feel like a full second job. And I already have two jobs because I am a therapist first, I am a coach second. And it was really hard for me, honestly, to try to build some organizational systems around how I pitch to brands, which brands I pitch to, how do I organize all of my thoughts within that, you know, stream of trying to collect some income. So

Organization and follow-through is something my team and I are continuously trying to get better at because that’s the thing is think about how many cold DMs you get. And if that’s the way that you are reaching out to brands to partner with them as well, you know how easy it is to see it, open it, close it, whether you mark it as on-red so you can come back to it later or not, or it’s just a bad time, or it’s not the right time. So it is helpful to think about.

If this is something that I want to do, if I’m going to start pitching more brands because I want brand deals, then what is my goal for how am I going to organize who I’m reaching out to, when I’m reaching out to them, and how am I reaching out to them? Right? Why are you proposing partnering together? How do you have the same audience? Have you even thought through things like your rates and what you would offer people? So super important.

In thinking about setting your rate, this is something again, I was not even prepared for my first brand partnership. So this is something I had to figure out with a different coach I was working with at the time. And we just kind of looked at, you know, when you think about someone asking you your rate when it comes to therapy, makes sense, right? What is your hour worth? So we looked at, okay, I have to at least propose a rate that is consistent with my therapy hourly rate because.

Regardless of what you’re being asked to produce, if that is an email to your list, if that’s a blog post to your website, if that’s an Instagram reel, an Instagram story set, it’s going to take you time to be intentional, to catch yourself up on, you know, what are people what’s the campaign about? What’s the goal of the campaign? How does that fit in with my audience? How do I promote it without

Promoting it to sales-y, right? Like there’s a lot of thinking that goes into it. And then there’s the actual creation around it. So it does take time to do something meaningfully. And there’s different ways that I have my team support me where I can share: like, here’s my vision for it, here’s what I want the graphic to look like. Here’s how we want to make sure the many chat automation is working for us. So it saves me hours, but I am having to pay team time to do that work for me too, right? I need their help with.

loading the email into our email marketing system and they make sure it gets scheduled to the right list on our email list. So you have to think about the amount of time you are putting into it as well as are you hiring any support within that? So again, it’s very, very easy to almost like trip and fall into brand partnerships, but you do have to be strategic and kind of ready for it if someone does reach out to you to think about

What do want to charge for this? Right. I once worked with a brand who referred to sponsorship sponsorship money. They’re like, it kind of feels like it’s almost monopoly money. And I’m like, it kind of does. Like it’s it is work, right? Like, I’m not gonna deny that because, you know, ideally, probably what you want, what I definitely want, is ongoing long term.

partnerships with someone. To me, that helps me promote the brand better because I get to know them better. I get to know more of their services. I get to know them as humans. That helps me promote something longer term compared to something that I promote once. Right. But a lot of people want you to promote something once like, hey, how much would it cost to just do this one reel? Well, are you going to see a huge bang for your buck with that reel? I don’t know because I don’t know your content.

Your my audience hasn’t seen me talk about you before. So it’s very, very different to have these like one-time, one-off partnerships. Don’t even get me started on especially gifted affiliates. I have very negative feelings about people essentially expecting me to work for free or for something that I didn’t even want to begin with. But I will promote something that, you know, I did want or

you know, benefits me in some way, even if that’s for exchange for a product, for example. So there are a lot of ways where thinking about what you want to charge, what your deliverables are, who you want to work with, again, it’s just helpful to try and be organized as much as possible and also try to think about what is your goal here for brand partnerships.

What I would not do is just copy someone else’s numbers. Like I could tell you what I charge for each deliverable, but those numbers may or may not make sense to you. So really think about what works for you. And then, you know, you also have to kind of believe in yourself and believe that your time is worth it because it does take time. This is work, although it feels like fun money. There is a lot of time and effort and energy that goes into.

Creating content that a brand likes and then, you know, makes them want to work with you again, whether that’s a, okay, that was great. Let’s turn into a long-term partnership, or whether that’s that’s great, we’ll contact you the next time that we do have a campaign that we want you to be a part of. The one, I don’t know if I want to call it like a downside, but the one thing that I kind of wish I felt a little bit more prepared for and something that

I think is genuinely hard to deal with as someone who’s trying to get more brand partnerships. Is there’s a huge emotional side to it outside of, you know, pitching yourself and promoting yourself and managing the organization of it. There’s quite a few times where the process might go pretty far. Like you get into DMs, you get from DMs into emails, you get from emails to maybe a quick Zoom call. Like things can go pretty far, and you’re like, okay, like.

This is this is pretty secure. Like the fit was right. I like the product. I like the people. And everything seems good. And they’re like, great, let’s move forward. And then, right, like the people you are generally probably meeting with are people in a marketing department that they then have to get things authorized by the financial department. So I had a company pitched to me initially.

And we talked through, you know, how great of a fit it would be for my audience, how it’s very much in alignment for the type of product I would use and would feel good supporting. I felt really good about it. They wanted a long-term partnership. I gave them my rates. We already kind of negotiated rates even on via email before we got on a call. And everything seemed like it was going to be perfect. So it was going to be a six month, $18,000 agreement. And I thought it was.

Secured. I felt so excited about it. That little tiny anxious part of me said, Don’t celebrate though, until like everything is signed and confirmed. And sure enough, even though they thought it was a great fit, they went to their financial department and their financial department did not approve of moving forward with the contract. And that was really disappointing because at the time when I was

Kind of in the works of figuring out that agreement, things were not like specifically slow in business, but I was starting to wonder, you know, what did I want to focus on? Did I want to focus more on my mastermind? Did I want to focus more on scaling my therapy intensives academy? I am forever, I feel like I’m always saying I need to pay more attention to my profit margins and with everything that I do.

with those, especially those programs that I just mentioned, there’s a lot of team time involved. Whereas with brand partnerships, there’s less team time involved. So it makes it one of those things where I have a pretty big profit margin for them. And so yeah, it was disappointing to see I could have made a really good amount of money that I mostly kept. And I think also at that time, yeah, I was just getting I was just maybe a month or two out from my divorce finalizing. So I felt like

Okay, great. This is a great way to save for what I’m gonna need to pay for health insurance and to get everything financially solidified and a little bit more stable. So yeah, very disappointing. But the great thing was, you know, it was not a no on their end in the sense of this is generally a bad fit for us. It was more a no on not yet. So that’s helpful for me, right? To know that.

There’s still a very warm lead that I can follow up in the future with, you know, budgets as they change. And that’s again where it comes back to the organization part of it would be very easy for my me and my team to just forget about it, right? Forget to follow up. So that’s why we are trying to get better with organizing everything in my project management system, Asana. The other thing that I’ve really learned is there is a whole different style of.

Content that I need to create if I want to get more brand partnerships. Right now I do a lot of nurture content. So how do I warm people up to me, my offers, get them aware of what it is I do and how I can help, and then that conversion content of now, now that they’re aware, how do I sell people on it? But what I am not great at doing is lifestyle content. I’m not great at doing get ready with me or behind the scenes or

Hear something about my personal life. And in some ways, that has been intentional, like back in most of 2025, a lot of 2024, and even beyond then, I started this coaching business in 2023. Like, in addition to just being a very private person, like I don’t even post on my personal social media. In addition to being very private and generally keeping a lot of things closer to my chest, I just

I’ve really struggled with I’m a person who likes to be so present when I’m out and about, when I’m with friends, when I’m with family, when I’m doing something that brings me joy, that always after the fact I’m like, damn it, I should have recorded that. I could have gotten some b-roll out of that. I should have done this, that, and the other thing. Like, I’m so busy being present that it’s hard for me to organically kind of film some lifestyle content.

So it does take a lot more time and attention and almost like a different section of my brain to think about what are the things that brands want to see more of. They want to see me talk more about, you know, they want to see me promoting brands. They want to see how does a brand fit into my life pretty naturally and organically. So it is hard to balance that intention on an account that is primarily about.

Teaching people about my business services and how we can work together. So it’s something that I’m going to continue to focus on and try to get better at. But yeah, work in progress for sure. All of that said, right, there’s a lot of work in pitching and organizing and actually doing the work and managing the emotions, right? And it still is for me a very fun income stream. So

I really do only promote either something I currently use, something I’ve used in the past, or and or something I believe in. So it makes it very easy for me to say, like, yeah, when I had this experience with this company, here’s what it looked like, right? Everything is obviously always a choice. And that feels really good for me. Of I’m not forcing anyone to sign up for anything when I have a brand partnership. So this kind of this might get a little bit

more into the weeds. But when I have a brand partnership, I am paid for pushing content out. That is very different than I get paid when you sign up. Obviously brands want to continue working with you if the content they pay you to do does convert people. But I know a lot of people worry when they see therapists sharing things because it’s like, well if you sign up, I get a $500 bonus. So I’m going to pitch it and pitch it and pitch it until you sign up.

The nice thing with a brand partnership is that’s not the case. And so the ones that I have partnered with, again, are things I’ve used, things I do use, and things that I have found helpful at some point in my career. Right. So it is a nice way to bring in income that feels authentic for me without adding more calls to my schedule. I don’t have to promote ads for them because, you know, that’s on that business to promote their company with their own ads.

So it doesn’t cost me really anything outside of a little bit of time that I could do. I’ve worked on branded partnership content on planes or at night on my balcony. Like I don’t have to be on a call, I don’t have to be well dressed, I don’t have to have done my makeup and my hair. So it just feels really good to have flexibility in how I am making that money. Now, the thing that I wish I had when I started was, like I said.

a much more organized system on how do I know which brands to reach out to, how do I organize how I want to reach out to them, how do I organize when I’m going to follow up with them and really decide what is worth my time. Right? I learned a lot when I actually joined a mastermind that was specifically about how to get more brand partnerships. I learned a lot in that. Some of it I learned already because I’ve been doing them, but I want to get more income from brand partnerships.

But I also want to zoom out the lens just for a second to say when I left my agency agency job, I was working at a college counseling center. What I signed up for was it was a 10 month contract. So even though I made $6,000 a month, and in theory, $72,000 a year, but I didn’t work a year. I worked 10 months. What I was actually then making was about $60,000 a year in Oregon, which is just

Not enough, especially not because I have student loan debt and personal debt and credit card debt. And I had a car, I had a mortgage at that time. so to be able to go from $60,000 for a 10-month contract to I’ve made and secured $53,000 just from brand partnerships, like that’s actually wild to me because never, ever, ever did I think that that would be something that was such a strong arm of my business in terms of revenue streams. So

Very exciting that that is what that’s been able to do for me is literally replace my job in a different kind of way. And it’s something that I’ve helped a few other therapists with inside my mastermind. It’s something that I want to build more content for them to consume. I’m very good at coaching people live in the moment. My ADHD brain is like, I want to film a video on that. And then I’m like, nah, but I’ve got 50 million other things to do. So I’m working on filming video content for them.

But that’s where a lot of the hot seat coaching I do inside the mastermind is helpful because then I get to share with people, you know, here is my project that I’ve set up in my Asana. here is, you know, here are my templates that I’ve DM’d people and emailed people, and here’s lessons I’ve learned. So if that’s something that you are wanting to learn about as well, brand partnerships inside the mastermind, then I would love to support you in that way. Because

Really, when it comes to scaling outside of therapy, right, like the most important thing to do is to be intentional, right? To decide on purpose which income streams fit into your life. And if you’re someone who doesn’t want to record content or doesn’t have time to record content in terms of like a course that you’re building, if you don’t want to add on more one-to-one work, brand partnerships can be a really, really solid and great form of.

getting income into your business. So would love to support you inside the mastermind if that’s a goal of yours. Instead of thinking about, okay, listening to all this content, feeling inspired by it, now here’s my giant to-do list. Instead of thinking about that, right, start by just really embracing that if you are authentic in the ways you’re already showing up in your blog posts, on your website, on social media, wherever you are,

That already can be a really, really good starting point. You don’t have to change a ton right now. It’s just about, you know, almost like keeping an eye open for the possibility of a legit brand partnership. Do not fall for all these people who want to send you jewelry and athleisure and things like that. They’re very rarely actually real, but that’s something that I’ve had to learn as what are the real pitches versus what are the bot pitches? I don’t know. I don’t know what that is.

But yeah, again, if that’s something you want to learn more about, go ahead and check out the link in the show notes to my mastermind, where that’s something that we can cover over the course of eight months to really help you with building out that, whatever other income streams you might be interested in. And let’s just help you with feeling like your finances are more stable because we all deserve that in 2026 and beyond. And I would love to support you with that if you’re interested.

All right, everyone, that is it for today. If you liked hearing this type of content, if you want me to share more about brand partnerships generally, DM me, email me, let me know. and otherwise, I will talk with you next week. Thanks for listening today.