●A guide for trading creators
Two ways a prop firm pays you. You only know one.
The one you know: you post your link, someone buys, you earn a commission — and you are paid only if their checkout converts. The other one pays you a fixed fee to make content, whether it converts or not, and the affiliate link keeps running on top. It comes out of a different budget, a different person signs it, and almost nobody asks for it.
I am on the other side of that decision. I receive the requests, I write the contracts, I decide the renewals. This is 90 pages of how it actually works, with the market measured across 10,129 creators.
9 modules · 30 lessons · about 120 minutes of reading · PDF, yours permanently
10 of the first 10 left at $37. After that it is $137.
Four of the findings
Given away, because they are the proof.
Measured on 20 August 2026 against our own catalogue of trading creators, not collected from other people's blog posts. Where a number is fragile — a small sample, a selection effect, a field we know is imperfect — the guide says so on the same page as the number.
The threshold is five thousand, not a hundred thousand
Below five thousand followers 21% of the creators we track hold a firm deal. In the 5,000 – 25,000 band it is 31%. Above that it stops improving — so growth opens the first door and then stops being the lever.
The cliff is at the second post, not the first
Three hundred and forty-two creator-firm relationships in our data stop after a single post. Fifty-seven run past six months. The gap is not between small creators and large ones.
Almost nobody says the post is paid
Across 33,965 posts by creators who hold deals, 107 carry an explicit disclosure in the words. It is the cheapest way to become the creator a compliance team will approve.
What a customer costs them is your anchor
That is what a prop firm pays to acquire one, from the person who signs those invoices. It is what they already pay, through other channels, for the outcome you would be producing — and knowing it stops you pricing yourself at a tenth of it.
What is in it
What you will be able to do.
- Ask for perks in the right order
Your own discount code costs a firm essentially nothing, and almost nobody asks for one. The free challenge — the thing everyone asks for first — is the third thing to ask for, not the first. - Ask the right question about a funded account
One given to you almost always carries a ceiling on what you can withdraw each month. The question is not what the ceiling is. It is whether it is a fixed figure or a percentage, and a percentage of what. - Say no to two things without losing the deal
Promising to work with nobody else, and handing over ownership of what you publish, are not compulsory. That is from the person who writes those contracts. - Move a target off their revenue
Their pricing, their checkout and their onboarding all sit between your content and that number, and you control none of them. The exact wording that moves it onto what you do control is in the guide. - Know why most deals die after one post
In the relationships we can see, 342 stop at the first post and 57 run past six months. It is not about follower count, and the module says what it is about instead. - Send 25 messages you did not have to write
First contact, the follow-up, what to answer when they ask for your rates, the monthly report, the ask for a raise — written from what the person receiving them says works.
Two kinds of statement, kept apart on purpose. Some of it we measured against 4,660 creators whose content we have read. The rest comes from a Head of Affiliates, and the guide says which is which on the page where it says it.
What it will not do
There is not a single income figure in ninety pages.
Not ours, not a student's, not a screenshot. Partly because nobody can promise you one honestly, and partly because promising earnings is, from the buying side, one of the six things that end a partnership — which the guide devotes a module to.
No prop firm is named anywhere in it, in any context. And the odds are printed rather than hidden: even in the band where deals concentrate, 31% of creators hold one. This moves your chances and reduces the mistakes you cannot see. It does not guarantee anything.
Written by the person on the other side.
One payment · the PDF is yours · figures dated 20 August 2026 on every page that carries one · 10 left at $37