Brands don't pay for followers. They pay for a person they already understand. This workbook is how you decide who that person is before someone else decides for you.
Fill it out honestly — there are no wrong answers, only vague ones. When you're done, send it to your brand lead and we'll build the calendar from it.
A pillar is a lane you can drive for a full year without running out of gas. Not a hobby you tried once. You get three or four — no more, or your page turns into noise.
Basketball is Pillar 1. That's locked. It's the reason anyone finds you. The other two or three are the reason they stay.
Highlights alone don't build a brand — every player has highlights. The pull is in the parts people don't get to see: 6am lifts, the film room, the bus, the rehab, the loss you had to sit with. Show the work, not just the result.
Every good creator started by studying somebody. List the people you actually watch to the end — not the biggest accounts, the ones you can't scroll past. Two or three per pillar. Paste real links so your brand lead can go watch what you're seeing.
Your first deal is almost never a brand that discovers you out of nowhere. It's a brand you've already been wearing, eating, or driving for free — and now there are receipts.
So be honest here, not aspirational. "He's had those on his feet for two years and never asked anybody for a dollar" is a real pitch. "He'd love to work with Nike" is not.
Eight brands you'd still be using if nobody paid you. If you've already posted it once without being asked, say so — that's the strongest card we can play in a pitch.
Local deals close fastest and pay in real money. The wing spot, the barber, the car wash, the gym, the sneaker store, the family restaurant that already knows your name. List five — we'll walk in.
Now you can be aspirational. But tie each one to a pillar and tell us what you'd actually make for them — a brand wants to see the idea, not the fandom.
Tell us now, not after we've spent six weeks on a deal. This can be a category, a competitor of someone you're loyal to, or something that just isn't you.
Now get specific. Find eight posts you love — any creator, any topic — and pull them apart. The goal isn't to copy them. It's to figure out why they worked so you can run the same play with your own footage.
Pay attention to the first two seconds. That's the whole game. If you can name why you didn't scroll, you can rebuild it.
Two people can post the same clip and it lands completely differently. That difference is voice. Lock yours down so your page feels like one person made it.
Pick two or three that fit. If you pick six, you don't have a voice yet.
Consistency beats production value. A grainy phone video posted the same way every time reads as a brand. Four different editing styles read as random.
The stuff that takes twenty minutes and gets skipped for two years. Same handle everywhere, a bio that says something, one working link.
Same name on every platform if you can get it. If a handle is taken, tell us now — we'll work around it before it's printed on something.
Bio formula: who you are · what you're chasing · where you're from · one human detail. Four beats, no fluff, no quote from a movie.
Pick a number you can hit during your worst week of the season, not your best week of summer. Three real posts a week beats fourteen posts in June and nothing until March.
Read this once and it'll save you a very bad phone call. These aren't suggestions — a few of them are the difference between keeping your eligibility and losing it.
Send this back when it's filled in. Your brand lead turns it into a 30-day content calendar and a target list of brands that live inside your pillars. Then we check in monthly and adjust — pillars are allowed to change, they're just not allowed to be vague.