How To Make Money As A Creator From Day 1

in this video I'm going to talk about the best ways to make money as a beginner Creator this includes when to do it how to do it what order to do it in and everything else you would care about when it comes to Creator monetization I call this framework the Creator money ladder so this will be a perfect guide for going from zero to 10K per month as a Creator now in order to talk about the Tactical ways to make money as a Creator it's really important you understand how the game works and how to

reframe your thinking about what being a Creator actually means think of content as Internet Billboards every tweet every video every podcast every newsletter they're all just Billboards on the internet super highway now each of those Billboards is essentially avertising space for something it could be a product it could be a service it could be the Creator themselves and that doesn't mean every piece of content is explicitly used to advertise but it means that every unit that you make could be advertised for something that's super important and the amount you could generate from advertising varies on

who looks at those Billboards and how many of them you get to look okay so content equals internet Billboards remember that now the whole framework and the way I think about this visually is a 2X two table comparing products and platforms on one axis we've got product and that can be either rented or owned if it's rented that means it's someone else's products if it's owned it means that you own those products or Services now rented are easier to sell but you'll make less money owned you'll make more money but they're harder to sell on

the other axis we've got platforms again those can either be rented or owned rented will be things like social media Instagram Tik Tok YouTube Snapchat the rented because you have your account but at any time they could ban you and if you don't think they could ask Andrew Tate or Steve will do it they probably wouldn't but they could own platforms are things like email newsletters podcasts communities the platforms that run those Spotify beehive substack they could go down they could ban you but even if they did you'd still have your audience that you could

Port over to another platform so in a way those are owned again rented works well for generating income but owned works better and don't worry I'll explain all this but I think having that visual just to be able to plot different things is super helpful okay the very first way you can make money starting on day one with zero following is called ugc user generated content now it turns out ugc is actually not great for creators long-term strategically and I'll explain exactly what I mean but it is the easiest place to start so we'll cover

it first ugc means you're making videos talking about a product or service from a brand and then you're sending those videos for the brand to post on their website or to run social ads against you're not posting them on your own social media accounts that's the distinction with ugc vers brand deals most brands will pay creators anywhere from $50 to $100 per ugc video now there's a few ways to find Opportunities to become a ugc Creator if you Google how to become a ugc Creator you'll find a bunch of agencies that are kind of like

the Brokers between Brands and ugc creators you'll obviously keep less of what you earn but those Brokers make it a lot easier to find Brands to work with the better way to do this if you want to keep more of the money you earn which in my opinion you should do is either go on Tik Tok shop or scroll Tik Tok and try to find the brands that are already paying creators to make content if you find them go on something like rocket reach or LinkedIn find the email of the Partnerships manager reach out to

them and ask them if they hire ugc creators with a little bit of hustle you'll probably be able to find three to five clients that will bring you on to make ugc videos and if you make $100 per video and a five clients making a video per day that's 10K per month just with ugc now what's the drawback of ugc and why did I say it's the worst strategically long-term for creators listen to this very carefully this is a very important Point people don't talk about this but this is kind of the secret sauce for

why being a Creator is so powerful the cheat code to being a Creator is that you get paid by others to increase your own earning potential said that another way if a brand pays me 5K to make a piece of content and my followers like it and my following grows my next brand deal might be $5,200 that brand paid me to grow my earning potential that's a cheat code at a normal job you get paid your salary you learn skills and eventually years later those skills will allow you to earn more money in the Creator

world one video to the next literally in days you can increase your earning potential poal from this flywheel that's why being a Creator is such a cheat code now this isn't the case with ugc because you're not posting these videos on your own channels like I said you're making the videos and then giving them to the brand to post so really with ugc you're just trading time for money and that time happens to be you making videos for a brand and it's not really the cheat code because you're not growing your own earning potential because

you're not growing your own following but why is ugc beneficial for beginners and why did I cover it first if you've never made content before the best way to make great videos is to start making videos in the first place and the best way to start is to get paid to start so if you start out as a ugc Creator you're going to be trading your time for money but you're going to be capturing the skill of how to make content and So eventually you can leave the ugc world and start growing your own channels

now in terms of that 2 by2 Matrix ugc doesn't even go into it it's kind of like a precursor option because you're not really growing your own social followings but again I wanted to mention it first because if you've never made content before ugc is a really good way to start getting paid to learn that skill okay next is affiliate now affiliate fits into the rented product and either rented or owned platform box it's fits into both those boxes affiliate means you make content advertising other brands products or services and then you get paid when

someone clicks and purchases those products or Services every time someone buys you get a percentage usually the affiliate percentage is somewhere between 10 and 30% of the purchase price now the reason it fits into both the rented and owned platform boxes is because you can create affiliate offers through social media the rented platforms or email podcast Community your own platforms you can do it through both but it's really rented products now here's the cool part and why it's so low on the ladder you usually can start with affiliate offers very early even at the very

beginning of your content Journey some affiliate deals do have applications but most of them don't and the way to find affiliate deals go to a brand that you like scroll all the way down to the footer at the bottom and you'll usually see a link that says affiliate or partner programs you can click that and then apply for their affiliate program some of them will approve you instantly other ones you'll have to show that you have some following but usually it's only a couple thousand followers you need and then you'll get the link now there's

a couple ways to do affiliate one way is to go to the individual brands or go to Amazon create affiliate link and then plug that in your Linkin bio or in a blog or newsletter if you're writing it the other way is Tik Tok shop as I mentioned before Tik Tok shop is essentially an affiliate program built directly into Tik Tok where you can make content link the products the products are right below if someone presses and buys the product it converts you get your affiliate commission now in this video I'm not going to go

through fully how Tik Tok shop works and how to take advantage of it but I am building a free Creator Community with all of these types of things monetization how to do Tik Tok shop how to find topics to make video about everything you'd want to know as a creator it's going to be free in my community it's called wavy world you can go to wavy. or the link in the description if you want to join that'll have a bunch of more modules free content to learn how to do this stuff I'm not going to

cover that in this video now I find the biggest affiliate rewards come from going to the brands directly so even though this is more monotonous I'd recommend doing that now a couple quick notes on affiliate the cool thing is given the shift to interest based algorithms you could be a creator with zero videos and your first video if you have an affiliate link linked and the video goes viral you could make tens of thousands of dollars so the Bey is you don't need to have built these huge platforms if you have affiliate links ready to

go the challenge though with Affiliates is you only get paid when someone converts and buy so if you do have a video that goes nuclear goes Super viral and nobody clicks and buys you actually make no money from that via Affiliates so it can be a kind of a volatile strategy relying solely on Affiliates for your income now a couple of tactical notes in terms of where to start so Amazon Associates you can apply for right away you can go to any individual brand some are free some you can apply for right away for Tik

Tok shop you do need 5,000 followers on Tik Tok so it takes a little bit of content a little bit of follower growth in order to activate that one and then YouTube actually also just launched their shopping affiliate program where a bunch of brands are embedded directly in YouTube but you need 15,000 subscribers to qualify for that as well so it varies some programs you do need a substantial audience to qualify but there are ones where you don't and so that's why I included Affiliates kind of lower on the ladder now the next Creator monetization

path is what I call platform cpms in The Matrix this is for rented products and rented platforms kind of that bottom left Square platform CPM include things like YouTube AdSense the Tik Tok Creator Rewards program or the Instagram reals bonus program so in this method the platforms actually just pay you free money when your content does well it's kind of like a thank you for keeping people on the platform will share a split of the ad Revenue with you to be honest I don't think the platforms wanted to do this YouTube started doing it that's

how AdSense came to be and then everyone had to adopt it but this is kind of like a free money situation so the cool part is you don't really have to do any extra work once you qualify for these programs you can just turn it on and the checks will keep coming in the drawback is kind of like some of those affiliate programs you do need some bit of an audience to start capturing this for YouTube AdSense you need at least 1,000 subscribers and either 4,000 watch hours or 100,000 qualified shorts views in 3 months

for Tik Tok Creator rewards you need at least 10,000 Tik Tok followers and 100,000 qualified views in 30 days and for Instagram same thing 10,000 followers so you can't really take advantage of this free money right when you start but if you grow a little bit of a following I'd recommend enabling these turning these on and just letting the checks come in now in terms of how much you'll earn it's pretty low YouTube traditional AdSense you can earn up to $5 to $7 per thousand views so that's really healthy but with shorts you're only earning

about 5 cents per thousand views with Tik Tok you're earning about 60 cents per thousand views at the top end and Instagram is almost immaterial I wouldn't even worry about it so for this it is free money and you want to just capture free money when you have the chance to but I wouldn't rely too much on this Revenue unless you're doing YouTube AdSense long form the next monetization PATH on the latter are Creator brand deals now this fits into the rented product bucket and either the rented or own platform bucket and this is where

the bigger money really starts coming in Creator brand deals are basically ugc except you get to post them on your own platforms which triggers that you know infinite Creator reward loop I talked about plus they often come with affiliate links as well so this is where you start to double dip in these deals and you can really stack the money to give you a little sense of scale my first brand deal came was about $3,000 for one short form video posted on Tik Tok and Instagram and I was able to get that when I had

around 75,000 followers on Tik Tok and 25,000 followers on Instagram and that was about 6 months into me starting to make content so it depends how you look at it I think that was fairly early I was able to grow that fairly quickly and start monetizing via brand deals it doesn't take as long as people make it seem especially with these new algorithms on the short form video also worth noting sometimes brand deals do include free products free services free access so the kind of total package is pretty interesting the flat upfront fee affiliate kicker

commission plus you get some free access so brand deals is where the value really starts to add up again in this video I don't have the time to break down the ins and outs of where to go for brand deals what categor to choose to get the best brand deals how to negotiate the ins and outs if you want to learn that again just join wavy World wavy. Soo that's my free content Community everything you need for creators is going to be in there it's completely free so make sure to join that all right so

up to this point is kind of the typical Creator monetization stack this is Affiliates cpms and brand deals if you pick a lucrative audience and you stay at it for a year or two you can get up to earning 500k per year is in Revenue so you can do really well as a Creator monetizing now if you want to go beyond that you want to start earning Millions per year that's when you have to shift into this owned product owned platform bucket this is where you start to create private communities paid communities paid memberships physical

products digital products agency Services these are all different business models where you can own the product own the service and use your content as a distribution mechanism in now there's a ton of examples and I have a lot of this knowledge that I will break down another video but I promise this would be like a beginner monetization Playbook if you want the part two if you want me to break down the advanced options in this just leave a comment and if I get enough I'll make sure to create that video as well that's it for

this video if you're a Creator I hope you got a ton of value from this if you want me to make that part two with the more advanced Creator monetization strategies how to go from like 500k a year to a couple Millions just drop a comment let me know and hopefully we'll see around if you're trying to build a Creator business see you in the next one peace