A travel YouTuber built a journaling company with her creator income. She uses this 2-page media kit to negotiate paid partnerships with brands like American Express and Priceline.
- Joanna Franco started a YouTube channel after realizing a corporate job didn’t fit her needs.
- She focused her content on travel and used the income from brand deals to build a journaling company.
- Here’s the exact two-page media kit she uses to negotiate deals with brands like Priceline.
Joanna Franco, 31, quickly realized after graduating from business school that no single job would fulfill all of her requirements. That’s why she decided to put everything she had into YouTube.
“I saw myself in a career where I could travel, speak different languages, and build things that didn’t exist yet,” she said in an interview with Insider. “No organization in corporate America could give me that, so I decided to create my own way of working.”
The creator, who was born in Brazil, decided to document her travels to other countries with a focus on low-cost travel. She was 20 at the time and didn’t have much money to spend on things like lodging, flights, and activities.
She began pitching paid partnerships to travel companies and brands as her YouTube channel grew. She landed her first brand deal with Skyscanner in 2013 after messaging the CEO on LinkedIn and proposing the idea of turning all of their online blogs into videos.
“Back then, you had to convince people that influencers weren’t scammers because there was no credibility to what we did,” she told me. “The last thing that companies expected were professionals who had pitch decks and formatted emails, most of which I learned through interning at top firms in New York.”
Franco, who speaks six languages and has visited 50 countries, now has 233,000 Instagram followers, 133,000 YouTube subscribers, and 46,400 TikTok followers.
She is also the founder of JoClub, a company dedicated to self-awareness, growth, and the cultivation of a positive community through the art of journaling, with tools such as themed journaling prompts, live journaling calls, workshops, and custom retreats.
“Journaling on my travels really helped me become the woman I am today, and I wanted to help other people tap into that space too,” she went on to say.
Franco stated that she built the company with the money she earned from brand deals in her early YouTube days.
She credits her more than ten years in the industry with helping Franco establish a reputation as a “go-to” creator for brands. She rarely cold pitches companies she wants to work with these days. Instead, they approach her.
She began working with brands who license her content earlier this year. They pay her a set fee each month to create a specific video or post, and they preorder content for timelines as long as six months.
Franco, on the other hand, recognized the need for an updated document to demonstrate her value to brands. She created a media kit in early 2022 to help her negotiate higher rates with brands. She has previously worked with Priceline, Adobe Max, American Express, Samsung, Amazon, and Google.
“The value I bring to a potential partnership has increased a lot compared to when I first started out, so I walk them through a very detailed biography to showcase the depth of my experience,” she went on to say.
Even though Franco believes in fair and equitable pay for every opportunity given to a creator, she cautioned against dismissing the value of a free collaboration with a brand.
According to her, one company she worked with for free the first time turned into a six-figure deal. A free speaking engagement at a conference turned into a $15,000 paid opportunity a year later, and a language company she promoted for free on social media has now turned into a consistent licensing deal that pays thousands of dollars per month.
“The better deals in my life have come from me doing things for free,” she went on to say. “If they aren’t able to pay you but you see the long-term partnership potential, go with it because you never know what could come out of it in the future.”
Here’s the exact two-page media kit Franco uses to negotiate with companies.
Franco describes herself on the first page as a “refreshing face in media, representing the future of our global world.” She emphasizes her YouTube and Netflix content, as well as her status as a “woman of color, an immigrant, and a multilingual self-made entrepreneur.”
The second page of the media kit includes a detailed biography, as well as her email address, websites, social-media following, and other credentials.
It says:
email: jo@joannafranco.com
personal website: www.jofranco.world
company website: www.joclub.world
YouTube: 133k subs
Instagram: 233k followers
Threads: 25k followers
Twitter: 22k followers
TikTok: 46k followers
Jo is a multilingual writer, entrepreneur, content creator, and Netflix travel host for The World’s Most Amazing Vacation Rentals. Over the last decade, she has published over 600 videos on the internet, amassing 1.3 million subscribers on two YouTube channels (DamonAndJo + JoFranco). She has produced and hosted shows in a variety of languages, including English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. Jo speaks to the multicultural generation in multiple languages to both the industry and her audience, having grown up as a Brazilian immigrant in a small town in Connecticut and later earning an international business degree in NYC.
Her curiosity fuels her documentary-style videos during her adventures, whether she’s buying a house or learning a new language from the ground up. Her audience has grown into a global community of people who are inspired to live their lives as Jo does.
She is the CEO and founder of JoClub, a diverse and global journaling club in which she uses journaling and community as a catalyst for members’ self-development and community. The club has over 28K Instagram followers, and hundreds of global members meet 12 times per month to share their introspection with the world via live journaling events hosted by Jo and trained facilitators. She has also organized and successfully run three retreats in Croatia and Mexico, with six more trips planned for 2024.
Jo is also the author of the best-selling language learning book and journal Fluentish, as well as the founder of JoClub Fluent, a company that teaches language.
Her knowledge landed her on Forbes’ top travel influencer list in 2017, and she’s spoken at prestigious events like SXSW, keynoted at the Women’s Travel Fest, and led workshops at Google and Amazon, to name a few.
