Get Sponsored to Travel

Every sticker was a company that agreed to pay for part of a journey they were never going on. This is how you ask them: the same three methods, the same emails, the same checklists we used, with the numbers that came back. You do not need a large following: we had about 2,000 when we started asking, and the approach that worked best went out to an email list of 1,600.

One payment. 30-day refund.

The problem was never the plan. It was the money

You know where you want to go. You have probably known for years.

What stops it is the arithmetic: the trip costs more than you have, and the gear that makes it survivable — the backpack, the tent, the recovery kit, the camera, the power station, the fridge — costs more again. So the departure date moves. One more season of saving. Then another.

Meanwhile the gear you are saving for is sitting in a warehouse owned by a company with a marketing budget, looking for exactly the kind of person you already are.

There is a method, and it is duller than you'd hope

Brands do not sponsor travellers because the trip is inspiring. They sponsor travellers because photographs of their product in a real place, taken by someone whose audience believes them, are worth more than the product costs to make.

That is a transaction, not a favour. Which means it has a process:

Build a profile a sponsor will actually check
Build a list of companies — wide, niche-first
Find the human being who decides, rather than emailing info@
Approach them, by one of three methods depending on who they are
Negotiate the deal so both sides know what was agreed
Deliver, then ask for more

Six stages, fourteen lessons, six fill-in templates.

"I don't have enough followers"

That is the reason most people never send the first email. Twelve hundred followers. Four hundred. A site nobody has heard of.

It is also the thing the market has been moving away from. A large, obviously commercial account is expensive, and its audience has learned to scroll past the ad. Brands have been shifting that money toward smaller creators whose readers still believe them, people who have not yet been monetised into the background. Being small and credible is the asset here. It is also the one advantage you lose by growing.

We can only show you our own inbox.

When we started approaching sponsors we had about 2,000 followers. That is the audience behind the emails in this course, not the one we have now. The distance between the two is years of work, and most of it came after the sponsorships rather than before them.

We would have got the same answers with fewer. That is a judgement rather than a measurement, but nothing in the replies points the other way.

The best approach we ever sent cited 1,600 email subscribers. Not followers. Sixteen hundred people on a list, and it worked because it arrived after we had already published something useful about that company's product. A second email of the same kind reached a Vice President of Sales and Marketing at a manufacturer you would recognise, and he answered personally.

When brands later started writing to us, not one of them opened with a follower count:

I am impressed by your content, and so many fun, great posts

Based on the fantastic content you've created in the past, we believe your work could shine in this campaign

Both real, both about the work rather than the numbers.

Where this stops being true. A small audience does not open every door, and the course says so rather than flattering you. It changes which brands reply and which of the three methods you should run, and one of the three is built for exactly this position because it does not lean on your numbers at all. A thousand engaged followers can get you product from a company making gear you already use. It will not get you a cash deal from a household name yet.

The one thing that ends the conversation is buying followers. Marketers check as a matter of routine. A small real audience is an asset and a large fake one is a liability.

What it cost us to work this out

In 2018 we sent 700 emails. About 10% replied. About 10% of those became sponsors.

Read those numbers properly, because they are the whole reason this course exists. Seven sponsors out of seven hundred emails is a working method and a brutal hit rate at the same time — and we only found out which parts mattered by getting 693 of them wrong.

What we learned the expensive way:

Almost nobody replies to info@
The first email is not the one that works — the second one is
One approach to a large outdoor brand got an automated shop reply and then eight months of silence. It never converted. That happens, and it is not a reason to stop
The approach that worked best cited 1,600 email subscribers, not followers — because it arrived after we had already made something about that company's product

Every template in this course is a thing that worked, and every warning in it is a thing that did not.

You don't have to write any of it

The approach emails are written. The follow-ups are written. The media kit is a page with blanks in it, the prospect tracker is a spreadsheet with the right columns already in it, and the agreement checklist is a list you read down with the brand so that nothing is "assumed" six months later.

Fill in the blanks, send, log the date. That is the daily work.

How long before anything happens

About nine weeks of real work — not nine weeks of waiting.

Say it in days: in the region of 63, if you spend them properly. That means the profile built, the list built, the emails actually sent and the follow-ups actually logged. Results follow the groundwork; they do not arrive instead of it.

What we can tell you precisely, because the dates are in our own inbox:

21 days from our first cold email to a 4x4 accessories manufacturer to their first reply
Five months from that email to a signed arrangement
Five months after that, the same company came back asking for a wider collaboration — and that relationship was still running two years later

Nobody who sends three emails in nine weeks gets a sponsor. People who build the thing and then work the list start seeing replies inside the first month.

What it looks like when it works

A departure date that stops moving.

The backpack arrives, and you did not pay for it. The travel solar panels arrive. A power station turns up because a brand wants to see it photographed somewhere hot and far away, which is exactly where you were going. A discount code goes out to your audience and earns you a small commission every time someone uses it.

Then the part almost nobody plans for: six months in, a brand you are already working with asks whether they can buy your photographs. Ours did — 15-plus images and clips licensed at $30 each, $390 confirmed in two months, from a sponsorship that began as free product. Two years later the same brand was inviting us into paid campaigns.

Who is telling you this

We are Ferenc and Evelin, and we have been travelling in our own vehicle since 2018.

A 20-month continuous drive across multiple continents
The full length of the Pan-American Highway
London to Singapore, overland across Europe and Asia
Budapest to Bamako, across the Sahara
London to Ulaanbaatar on the Mongolia Charity Rally, raising $2,500 for charity
Published and interviewed 15 times on other people's podcasts, magazines and sites — all listed, all linked, all checkable
Overlandsite.com, publishing gear reviews and trip writing for years

We are not a marketing agency explaining influencer theory. We are two people who needed gear we could not afford and worked out how to ask for it.

What you actually get sponsored

Gear — the expensive, trip-critical things first
Cash, which is rarer, and which the course tells you honestly how rare
Discount codes and affiliate commission
Repairs, servicing and spares — easy to forget, and the thing most likely to end a trip
Logistics — freight, shipping, customs, and getting a sponsor's product to you while you are moving
Licensing income — brands buying the photographs and footage you were making anyway
Exposure — a brand's channels pointed at you, which is how the next sponsor finds you

The record

Since 2018 we have been sponsored by companies across the whole range — small two-person outfits through to brands you would recognise in any outdoor shop. Recovery gear, roof racks, power stations, cameras, water filtration, straps, jerry cans, solar.

The part we did not expect, and the reason the course has a Part 5: the direction reversed.

2021–2022 — every sponsor was one we found and wrote to
2023 onward — brands started arriving on their own. Two separate companies approached us that year, one with a 14-message collaboration thread we never initiated
2025–2026 — thirteen more inbound approaches without a single email sent

That shift is the actual promise of this course. The outbound work is how you start. Being found is what the outbound work turns into, if you deliver on it.

Worth noticing what those thirteen approaches were not chasing. We are not a large account and have never been one. They came because the work was findable, specific and obviously done by someone who had actually used the thing.

One of them we will name, because it is the most recent and nothing in the agreement restricts it: Lensun Solar came to us in October 2026 with solar panels. We did not write to them. They found the site.

The rest stay anonymous. They did not give us permission to use their names to sell a course, and asking you to trust a logo we have no right to print would be a strange way to begin a course about dealing honestly with companies.

None of them is hidden, though. Their logos are on the truck in the photographs, their gear is named in the reviews, and the sponsorships appear in the trip writing as they happened. What we have not done is reprint their names on a page that is selling something. Look around overlandsite.com and you will find them.

The complete method, written out properly for the first time. 14 lessons, in five parts:

Foundations — what sponsorship actually is, what you can offer, and the honest trade-offs
Before you approach anyone — the profile, the prospect list, and how to find the person who decides
The three methods — the Net, the Sniper, and inbound. Each one complete, each with the real emails that ran it
Closing and delivering — negotiating, keeping your word, and getting a sponsor's gear to you while you are moving
Making it pay — the three-stage ladder from free product to licensing income

Six templates, included:

The first-contact emails — four of them, one per method, each the version that got a reply
The follow-up sequence — the emails that convert, since the first one usually doesn't
The one-page media kit
The prospect tracker — a spreadsheet with the twenty columns that matter
The sponsor report — fifteen minutes at the end of a deal, and the highest-return email in the course
The agreement checklist — every deliverable and rights clause written down before anything ships

Want to read some first? Two lessons are open to everyone: The honest trade-offs and Getting the gear to you.

What this would otherwise cost you

A media kit designed for you: $150 and up, and it will be prettier than ours and say less.

A consultant to review your outreach: more than that per hour, assuming you find one who has actually done it rather than taught it.

The gear on our own truck that we did not pay for runs into the thousands — fridge, recovery kit, rack, lighting, power, jerry cans. A single sponsored fridge is worth more than twenty times what this course costs.

And the real figure, the one we cannot get back: 700 emails, and three years of working out which 7 of them were the right shape.

$29

One payment. No subscription, no upsell, no second course waiting behind this one.

30 days, no argument

Read all of it. Use the templates. Send the emails.

If it is not worth $29 to you, reply to the receipt inside 30 days and we refund you. You do not have to explain, and you keep the templates.

Instant access. One login, all 14 lessons, all 6 templates, yours permanently.

Give as a gift?

What another season costs

Nothing dramatic happens if you close this page. That is exactly the problem.

The trip moves to next year, which is where it has been for a while. The gear stays on a list. And the brands who would have sponsored you spend this season's budget on somebody who wrote to them — not because they were better travelled, but because they asked.

The method in here is not difficult. It is just nobody's favourite afternoon. The people who get sponsored are the people who spend that afternoon.

One more time

Companies have money set aside for exactly this. They would rather spend it on real photographs from real places than on another studio shot.

They are not going to find you first — not at the start. The course is how you reach them, what to say, what to agree, how to deliver, and how to turn one free product into income that keeps arriving.

Nine weeks of honest work. $29. Thirty days to decide it was worth it.

Our truck crossed five continents covered in other people's logos. Not one of them was there by accident.