This is how you'll become a content creator in 2026 (FULL MASTERCLASS)

if you've been wanting to become a content creator but you just can't figure out where to start or how to start this course is for you maybe you're just tired of hearing the same advice the whole pick a niche be consistent provide value and you just want the actual tangible practical ways to become a content creator if that sounds like you grab a pen and paper or download the workbook that goes with this video because right now i want to teach you everything that you need to know to grow to 10 000 followers 100 000 followers and even replace your nine to five if that's your goal the roadmap we're about to go over is the three-part framework that i've developed over the past six years of coaching thousands of content creators during my time of being a content creator coach i've identified three patterns or phases that every creator goes through and then i turned those into a repeatable system so that i could teach it to you right now The three phases that we are going to go over are build. This is where you're going to set the foundations of your personal brand and business. The second is scale. This is like those growth strategies. How do you create content that's actually going to grow your platforms? Most people want to skip build and jump straight to the scale strategies, but without build, you won't see any growth. build is arguably the most important and then we'll wrap things up with profit this is how to make money as a content creator then at the very very very end i'm going to share with you the key to keeping your creator business running this is a method that i developed specifically for this video that i have never seen anybody teach anywhere so i'm so excited to teach it here for the first time and i think if you're going to learn anything and apply anything from this video it is going to be that final golden ticket nugget key i don't know i truly believe this one thing can be a game changer for any content creator trying to grow their career in the creator economy now this framework that we are about to go over is the framework that has helped Hundreds of my students hit huge milestones like growing to 100,000 followers on Instagram in less than six months or getting monetized on YouTube in three months. Having one single TikTok post bring in thousands of followers and I've even helped dozens of creators replace their nine to five income with content creation. So why am I teaching this framework in a who knows how long YouTube video completely for free? Because I believe content creation is one of the most powerful career paths, somebody can choose today. And you are not too late to start your content creator journey. Goldman Sachs has predicted that the global creator economy is going to nearly double in the next few years, going from a $250 billion industry in 2025 to over $480 billion by 2027. That means there's about to be $200 billion invested into the creator economy. And I think you deserve to have a piece of that. My business mission is to help creators build sustainable careers and to shape the future of the creator economy. So whether that means we ever work together, whether you buy a course from me or not, whether you subscribe to my YouTube channel or not, I want the best for you. creators. And the only way I know how to do that is to teach. Now I know my way is not the only way to grow online. There are thousands of creator coaches out there, and that's actually great news for you because that means you have so many options and different ways that you could try to grow as a content creator. My only hope with this video is that I'm able to become a great resource for you. And that one year from now, you could look back on your journey and say, wow. That video was the video that started the trajectory of my career. So as always, timestamps are below. Use them if you need them. Let's jump in. Now, I apologize for my voice in this. If you've been following me for some time, you might notice I sound a little different. I've been sick for a week now and I've been waiting for it to just pass and it isn't passing. It's not going anywhere. So we got to get this video filmed. It's going to get edited and live in about a week and a half. So we're just going for it. I got my tea and we're just going to have a great time. Okay, like I had said before, there are many strategies that you could follow to become a full-time content creator. Your strategy will vary depending on the creator you want to be or your goals. The three main strategies that I teach are the niche approach, audience approach, and identity approach, or like you as your brand. If you've been following me for a while, this part might be review for you, but... it's important so we're still gonna go over it now the niche approach this is probably the one that you've heard the most it's the traditional way for growing online the reason you hear this one all the time is because it works there's a reason everybody says it and it's because it is a proven way to grow any business is to niche down now the issue that we have with niching down or with what everybody says is nobody really teaches how to properly do that. And when you niche down properly, you are identifying who your content is for, what type of content you create, and how you help people achieve their goals. So if you can identify all three of those things, that's a proper niche. For example, if you were to say fitness, I'm sorry, but fitness is not a niche. That's just like a industry it's a category you need to identify what kind of fitness for who so maybe it's at home fitness for busy moms that is more of a niche and then with this strategy you'll probably hear the terms like okay after you've niched down now you need to identify content pillars yay and then content pillars are the sub topics that you'll be posting about and rotating between so you have at home fitness for busy moms maybe one of your content pillars are like arm or upper body workouts that's a pillar lower body workouts or maybe workouts that need equipment no equipment workouts or like body weight workouts or maybe a pillar is nutrition and how to fuel your body as a busy mom so like the subtopics under fitness now i'm not gonna lie to you this strategy you're gonna hate this it's actually my favorite strategy because it is 100 the way that you are going to grow the fastest if you want fast rapid growth niching down we'll do that for you people hate to hear it but when you do it the right way so many of my students have just blown up because they were just like you know what i'm just gonna bite the bullet i'm gonna niche down it works and that's why i love it but i digress there are other ways to grow if you can't figure out how to niche down or if that doesn't feel true to you that's okay there are other options so with the audience approach this is when you are just posting for a particular person. I just put part person. It doesn't mean it's part person. It's particular person. So you have like one person in mind and you are posting for them. You're constantly thinking, how can I show up for them today? What do they need in their feed today? I also really like this strategy because it thrives off of the algorithm. Algorithms across all platforms, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, algorithms identify audience behavior. That's really all they are. It's human behavior. And so if you can really understand your person's behavior, what they like, what they don't like, what makes them save a video, if you can really get into the psychology of a person, you're going to have no problem creating solid content. Now, the cool thing with the audience approach is you don't have to pick one topic, you're picking one person. So if this person is interested, let's say you're at college, you want to post for other college students, anything that a college student would want. or be interested in you could post about so if i want to post about plants because i love plants i can make a whole post about these are the plants that are in my dorm room and thriving indoors right or if you want to talk about like fashion or affordable amazon fashion for college students or even like food if you want to talk about these are the meals that i'm eating budget-friendly meals for college students you could talk about that Or if you want to talk about like study tips and how you're studying, how to stay organized, do that. You see there are multiple topics. It is an array of topics, but you're always positioning those topics to appeal to a particular person. With audience, instead of content pillars that you're rotating around, you're kind of rotating between your audience's interests. and different things that you think would bring them value. We'll talk about value later, but this is kind of what you're rotating around. Now the identity approach or the you approach, this is the whole like you are your niche. This is typically for the creators who are like, i'm a lifestyle creator i just want to post lifestyle content i'm not making fun i just use different voices for different things but if you want to be like a lifestyle content creator this is probably the avenue that you'll go down you just want to post really about your life and your interests this is where you're posting about your life your interests which you want to post about but where people fall into a trap of this they end up being like a little bit sloppy with their strategy so they're like well i just want to pose about whatever i want it's my lifestyle so i'm going to post whatever i want but then they forget that you also have to have strategy with it so they end up like not growing or growing really slowly but you can do the lifestyle approach with the right strategy layered on top of it so you still have to be intentional with what you're creating again if your goal is growth you can't just be like oh i'm gonna create whatever i want and i'm gonna go viral there's still ways to be intentional and have strategy now i will say this one is the fastest way to grow niching down audience i would say is like medium growth and then this one is sometimes the slowest growth so You get to kind of choose your own journey and you'll have to go in with the proper expectations of what that growth will look like. I'm not saying you can't grow with this one. You absolutely can. Just know that growth trajectory might look a little bit different compared to somebody who went to the traditional route of niching down and they grew like 10,000 followers in 30 days. So just go in with the proper expectation of what your journey is going to look like and you'll be. Fine, you'll be okay. Layer it with strategy and you will grow. Now, believe it or not, the strategy that you choose will affect the platform that you post on. The three main platforms that I teach and will be talking about in this video are Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. When it comes to strategy options on Instagram, you have to niche down. People don't like to hear it, but you have to as of right now. And let me tell you why. instagram their algorithm creates account based embeddings this means that they actually assign your entire account one topic so as you're posting instagram will say oh we see a common theme here this person's account is about food so let's only show people interested in food their content if you're trying to be a lifestyle creator on instagram and you're posting about your daily vlogs Kitchen reorganization. What you wore that day. Travel tips because you just went to Hawaii. If you're posting about all those things, Instagram will never be able to give you a proper account based embedding. And you'll just be posting and posting and posting and posting and like never growing the way you want to. And I say this with a specific person in mind. We started our creator journeys at the same time. We went to like, both went to like similar creator events back in 2019. place that they started because of this thing. They do not want to niche down, but they also don't want to pivot away from Instagram. And you just have to understand Instagram thrives off of niching down. If you don't want to niche down, don't pick Instagram. Pick somewhere else and you'll be fine. You'll see great growth. But that's how their account or their algorithm behaves as of right now. With TikTok, honestly, you could pick any. of the strategies that we talked about because with tick tock's algorithm each video is categorized separately so that's why with tick tock you could be a lifestyle creator each video has its own opportunity and is analyzed separately by the algorithm when you post a video about fashion tick tock will be like oh what's this video about oh it's about fashion let's show it to people interested in fashion instead of categorizing your account under one topic and then you're stuck under that topic so that's why tick tock works for any strategy niche down audience or lifestyle again audience is going to work here as well because algorithms thrive off of human behavior if you know your audience you'll be able to work with the algorithm instead of against it and it'll be easy peasy okay now youtube i will say any strategy works on youtube as well But you really have to, if you don't want to niche down and you want to go the audience or identity approach, you really need to take the time to understand SEO and how that's going to work with your given strategy. SEO is a huge part of YouTube. And SEO is not hard. It can be very, very easy, especially nowadays. I think back in blog days when people, everyone was building a website and a blog, SEO was hard. But now with modern day technology and social platforms, it's actually simplified a lot more. And so I think people have this preconceived notion with SEO where it's like, oh my gosh, it's too hard. It's intimidating. Yeah, it was back in the day, but nowadays it's actually pretty simple. If you're open and willing. to understand seo youtube is going to be a great place for you now for each platform your best bet for instagram is short form content vertical short form content aka reels that is going to be your best mode of content to attract new eyes and grow for tick tock short form vertical as well that's going to be the best platform or best form of content for growth and then youtube this is where if you want to be a long form content creator you're going to be on youtube okay let me help you identify even more similarities and differences between all these places let's just talk about instagram for a second it's going to be really great if you enjoy batch creating content you love filming content ahead of time and having like 20 videos in the pipeline, 10 videos in the pipeline, drafted and ready to go. Batch creators, perfect for Instagram. Instagram is also a really great place for coaches or educators. If you're a coach educator, this is going to be a really good platform for you as well. A lot of coaches will batch ahead of time because tips are usually evergreen. Like they're not relying on trends that are happening this week. So I can make a video right now on, well, here's some tips for filming your video and whether I post it now or in three months from now, it'll still be relevant. So that's why coaches usually do well with batching content and perform well on Instagram. They have a niche, they know what they're educating on. So that usually works really well there. Now I will say with Instagram monetization is not the best when it comes to their monetization tools specifically like you could have millions of views and they'll pay you five cents you know what i mean so the monetization tools on instagram not great but i will say if you want to go the brand collab route or even selling digital products those work really well on instagram brands are obsessed with instagram they love collaborating on reels or stories there so that works really well so if you're a niched down creator you'll probably get some great collabs and also automations for selling digital products that works really well on instagram with auto dm features or tools like many chat or stan who you can set up funnels make sure you're making money passively all that works really well on instagram now let's talk about tick tock tick tock is great for anybody who has no idea what their niche is and they want to test and post content in all places to figure out what is like their thing what creator do they want to be known for what type of creator do they want to be so if you want to test content TikTok is going to be your place. TikTok is also going to be really great for casual creators. And what I mean by casual creators is maybe you don't batch ahead of time. You don't have the time to, or you have a hard time with batching and you work better on the go, on the fly. You're like, ooh, I have a video idea. You record it right then and there. You want to post it right then and there. If you just want to like post, time doesn't matter. Don't want to have to think about batching ahead. TikTok is going to be really great, especially the format of just like a casual holding your phone, talking to the camera. That format works really well on TikTok versus Instagram. Doesn't work as well there as of recording this video. So if you're more of a casual creator, TikTok is going to be a really great place for you. Now, I will say. TikTok, they have some pretty good monetization options. They have TikTok shop, they have live streaming and badges and all these different ways creators can monetize with TikTok and get paid pretty well. So I do like TikTok monetization tools. I think they're really great, especially if you're somebody who wants to thrive off of affiliates. affiliates yeah if you want to thrive off of affiliate income i think tick tock is really great for that if you enjoy going live tick tock is really great for that now you can be an educator a niched educator that wants brand collabs and sell digital products on tick tock too tick tock is probably the most flexible of all the platforms so all these things here like niching down batching creating being a coach wanting brand clubs and selling digital products All of that can apply to TikTok too. It's such a flexible platform. So I'll help you identify which one at the very end, but let's talk about YouTube. We talked about the lifestyle strategy probably being the slowest strategy of them all. YouTube is going to be the slowest growth platform of them all as well. But they pay the best when it comes to monetization. They have it figured out. they have it down they've been in the game for a while they know how to monetize and treat their creators really well so i really do think they're like a creator first platform the creator first minded they have so many resources for creators and also if you want to build like die hard community community don't know why i'm saying that but youtube's gonna be really great so it's a slow growth But it's like so impactful and meaningful when you do get that growth. It's like the best thing in the world. Honestly, YouTube is my favorite platform, but I am biased. I've been posting to YouTube since I was basically in my mother's womb. So how do you know which one's going to be best for you? I have like a fun quiz to help you identify which platform is going to be best for you. It's linked in the workbook if you're following along in the workbook. But choosing a platform can be as simple as asking yourself. which platform do you enjoy being on as a consumer when you open your phone which platform do you naturally gravitate towards as a consumer? Which platform do you enjoy being on and creating for? For me, that's YouTube. I love watching YouTube videos as I get ready in the morning. I play them while I'm doing dishes, while I'm in the shower, while I'm driving. I don't watch them while I drive, but I'm playing them like they're podcasts while I'm driving. I love YouTube. I love being in the space. And so for me, I knew like I wanted to be a YouTuber. I just had that feeling. And so I just want you to ask yourself when you think of yourself being like let's say you are the next big creator you are the next ryan trahan the next alex earl whatever it is when people ask or identify you they're like oh yeah that's the tiktoker or that's the youtuber you know that's the instagrammer i don't know ask yourself like what platform do you want to be associated with as you grow and which platform also brings you the most enjoyment. For me, it was not Instagram. I had so much anxiety. Anytime I would open the app, look at the app, tap the app, like Instagram gave me so much anxiety and comparison. And so that I knew I was like, okay, that's not going to be my main focus. I know it's going to be a great resource as I grow and tool for the business that I'm growing, but it's not going to be my main thing. YouTube is going to be my main thing. So always do that gut check with yourself to figure out where you want to be. This advice might be contrary to other educators opinions and tips but i truly believe you only need to choose one platform in the beginning and what i mean by that is i want you to focus on one platform when it comes to strategy when it comes to creating content for one specific platform and doing content research, figuring out the algorithm's behavior, the audience's interests, spending your time studying analytics. I want all of your strategy and effort to go into creating content for one platform. Be focused on just that platform. You can repurpose that content to other places if you have the capacity to do so, but you do not have to be everywhere in the beginning. and you could just grow on one and that is totally fine if you don't have the capacity to be everywhere else when you put all of your effort into one platform at least those that strategy effort into one platform that focus you're giving a hundred percent of your energy there instead of you're thinking okay i'm gonna make short-form content and i'm gonna apply it to instagram youtube and tick tock and then i'm gonna see okay well what went well here why did it go viral here and not here well this got more comments but this one got more saves you're then spending 33 energy here 33 here you have split attention you're chasing multiple things you don't have a clear focus When you focus on just one platform, you can really understand how to improve your content there and then distribute it elsewhere. Now, if having multiple platforms is important to you, that's okay. That's fine. You can repurpose. I found when doing my deep dive of Forbes top creators that the top pairing was actually TikTok and YouTube. So those two paired really well together. what i noticed people would do is they would create short form content on tick tock they would then do two things repurpose that short form content as a short or as shorts and they would then also create long form versions of that short from content and direct people to their long form platform or long form youtube videos so i noticed these two paired really well together That was the most common pairing. And I will also let you know that Instagram and YouTube, they did not pair well together. At least what I've noticed with myself and my students, when people have a YouTube channel and an Instagram, they would try to create short form content and then direct people to long form videos, but their audience would never go watch the long form videos. For some reason, the Instagram users were not interested in long form content at all, but TikTok short form users were interested in long form content. So that was just like interesting pairings that I had discovered with myself, my students, and also analyzing Forbes top creators. Okay. Now that you know the platform that you're going to be on, your platform options, let's finally get into build, shall we? No, that's all part of build, but let's start like building your brand and identifying the type of creator that you want to be. The first thing that I want you to do is have like a brand brainstorming session where you sit down and you journal about a few things. The three most important that I want you to actually take the time to answer, you could pause this video and fill it out in the workbook, but answer these questions. first thing that i want you to journal about is what do you want to be known for so there's different ways you could go about this let's say one year from now where are you what does your day-to-day look like how are you showing up what's that short-term goal with content creation with your platform one year from today where do you want to be what do you want to be known for same thing do that same exercise but think more like three to five years from now what do you want to be known for if you were to be interviewed or introduced on a podcast how do you want somebody to introduce you what are you known for how many followers do you have how are you making money how much money you making how much per month where's that money coming from so that's what i want you to ask yourself when it comes to like what do you want to be known for Then I want you to ask yourself, what kind of content do you want to create? This is just like a good way to identify what are those first few videos that you're going to be making? Is it like day in the life videos, inspirational content? There's no right or wrong answers here. So just like brain dump, what kind of content do you see yourself creating? And then finally, who is your content for? Are they male or female? Where are they located? what are they currently struggling with right now on top of that how can you help them with those pain points now if you i don't want to say are a very rare person who doesn't fall into any of these categories but if you truly cannot answer any of these questions i've actually worked with one student who could not answer any of these questions. So I'm throwing this out there as an alternative. Another question that you might want to ask yourself instead are what are some dream brands that you want to work with? The student that I had worked with, they didn't know exactly what they wanted to be known for yet or like who to create content for. But what they did know is some dream brands. They're like, would love to work with Sony. That would be really cool. Would love to get free lenses. that would be really cool and so they just brainstormed the type of brands they wanted to work with and that can also give you clarity on the type of content you want to create because if you want to work with those brands you got to create content in alignment with those brands and content that those brands would be interested in seeing so this is another way to start getting some clarity on your personal brand, the type of content you want to be creating as a content creator. If you're having a hard time answering any of these questions, something that helped me when I was trying to get clarity on what I wanted my niche to be, because I knew I wanted to niche down. So what I did was on one of our long drives, my husband and I, when we were commuting from San Diego and LA, I asked him, I was like, if you could come to me for advice on anything, what would it be? And he said, Instagram and organization. and i was like oh interesting he was like yeah you're really good at instagram at the time this is like 2019 he's like you're really good at growing posting consistently there and like staying organized even the closet like you keep our closet really organized or even like project management as a project manager in corporate at the time so he's like i feel like you're really good with organization getting things done and even instagram planning executing so that was how i niched down in the beginning was oh okay i'm going to teach instagram i taught instagram on youtube but i was like i'm gonna teach instagram so asking those close to you if they could come to you for advice on anything what would they come to you for advice on that was something that gave me a lot of clarity now the good news is it's okay to not have all the answers because these answers they're not final these are not the end all be all this is your brand you did it you figured out your personal brand we're done like no The goal here is not to have this perfect brand now. That's not what we're creating. This is just your initial brand brainstorm. You're just getting everything out. You're starting the brainstorm because this is going to give you a starting point. And then over time, as you take action on this starting point, more clarity will come. You have to be willing to take action. without clarity if you don't have that clarity yet that's the whole thing of being a content creator your content strategy evolves almost every single month so if you're willing to just like have something and like start to take action on it without knowing all the ins and outs and everything perfectly you're gonna be fine and just accept that you'll figure it out as you go everything's gonna fall into place if you're following along in the workbook you will probably notice with every activity that we're doing and everything that we're we're working on i also actually have different ai prompts to help guide you so if you need help getting clarity on like your branding there's different ai prompts that you could plug into chat gpt and be like hey can you help me with blah blah blah so you just copy paste the prompts and chat can talk to you and help you identify everything that you need for your branding and other stuff that we're going to get into so just know that that is another resource to help you ai okay now that we've kind of talked about picking platforms branding getting some clarity on that initial brainstorming i want to do some actual examples with you so you could see how this works in real time let's do an example and let's say this person they want to be on instagram so they want to niche down Now, all of the examples that we're actually going to be going over today are real life students that I work with in the BSP model, in our Slack community. If you don't know, the BSP model is the Ivy League for content creators. It's like an online university for content creators that teaches you what we're going over today, build, scale, profit model, teaches you everything from A to Z. how to become a content creator there's hours and hours and great templates downloadables of resources there so these are real examples of students that i've worked with and how we've gotten clarity on their brands for each of these platforms when you join the bsp model you immediately get access to 30 days of our private slack community so that's where i work with my students and help you get clarity on your niche profile audits content and after those 30 days there is an option to renew and like more of a membership fee to maintain access to the slack community but yeah that's just a little overview of the bsp model a lot of everything that you're learning today is part of the bsp model and all the examples we'll be doing are real students so this student that i worked with she wanted to niche down and so because she wanted to niche down we went with instagram and she also liked instagram that was what she was already on and familiar with so her niche and what she wanted to be known for was home organization and specifically she wanted to help busy moms with home organization and how to like maintain cleanliness aesthetic keeping the house clean all the things basically home organization for busy moms everything that they would need to know so then we went over her content pillars this is the post about remember if we're niching down we're gonna do traditional content pillars so the different content pillars that we created for the post about were space by space organization so that's like okay kitchen organization closet organization, bedroom, so location-specific organization. We also chose quick wins or methods as another pillar for her. So this is like 10-minute tidy routine. Do this reset before bed. So those quick hacks, tips, tricks, methods to create like instant wins and instant organization. Then there was more long-term systems or wins. This is more, okay, strategies for toy rotation, chore charts, getting things done, routines that you could establish, how to properly organize toys for your kids or toy rotation tips, chore charts and age-appropriate chore charts, morning routines. So these are more like systems that you could implement into your routines for long-term win and organization. Next was time-saving tips. how to schedule in cleaning into your day-to-day planners organization things like that and then our favorite one that we landed on was budget friendly hacks so this is like okay you don't have the biggest budget in the world but you want to organize your closet so like dollar store organization hacks with different items at the dollar store and how to make them look elevated or up leveled how to repurpose containers that you're getting to reduce waste and use those containers for organization this was the one that we kind of wanted to lean into and really make her more well known for that so we'll talk a little bit about how we positioned her for this one now she has a lot more clarity with this strategy of what she's going to be posting about who she's posting for and these are the different types of content that she will be rotating about on instagram and we'll talk about okay well now that we know what to post about How do we come up with actual video ideas? We'll talk about that too. So this is just one example for Instagram. Let's do another example. This one, we'll do this one for YouTube. I'm going to use an example that I see all the time with BSP students. And I feel like a very common niche people want to be in. If it's not lifestyle, usually people are like, I want to be a wellness creator. And I'm like, I love that. But that is so broad. We got to figure out like what's going to make you stand out among all the other wellness creators out there. So I actually had a student come up to me and she was like, you know what, Millie, I want to be a wellness creator. That's what I want to do. And I want to post about diet and nutrition, exercise, mindset, money, and all the things. immediately when i see this i'm like okay this is very broad this is going to be like talking to everyone talking about everything and it's not going to stick quite well you still want to have very targeted strategy so i was like okay well let's niche down by choosing a specific audience that you want to reach and i feel like that's like a common theme with the other one busy moms and then also this one this student she was like Well, I actually have a chronic illness. What if I focus on wellness specifically for other people with chronic illnesses? So she wanted to target other women with chronic illness. Her post about actually became diet, nutrition, meals, and clean products for people with autoimmune diseases or chronic illnesses. This became exercise. and autoimmune mindset. Same thing applied for chronic illness, money, managing money and finances while paying for different treatments or medications. We even added one other pillar, which was more chronic illness education and talking about how to identify that, what that means for you, your lifestyle, how you could, how she could help people with chronic illness. So we actually added this final pillar and now on youtube she has a clear audience so she could talk about any of these topics and youtube isn't going to care because she has narrowed down who it's for and that's going to help youtube tremendously deliver her content to the right people so the audience approach is what we ended up doing for youtube Now, finally, let's do an example for TikTok. Now, for this example, I'm actually going to be using myself. I felt like talking through lifestyle examples, just talking off the top of my head, not having a script, using myself as the example is going to be easiest when asking myself, okay, if I were to create a personal TikTok, what do I want to be known for? Lifestyle, right? I just want to be known. for me that's what i want to be known for i don't want to be known for like a topic i don't want to be niched down put in a box i just want to be known as millie so then when asking okay well who do i want my audience to be my answer is really i don't know i i don't know i just want people who are interested in me and my life you know what i mean so let's skip the audience and jump to post about and all i know is i want to post about my life interests maybe different life pillars or traits that are unique to me and my life these are going to be harder to identify because if you're doing lifestyle content everything feels normal like nothing feels wow this is so cool other people would be really interested in this so when i kind of brainstorm okay what do i want to post about i'm going to ask myself what are different interests themes or things that come up every day in my life. Because if I'm creating a lifestyle page, what are those recurring things in my life that I could create content on? For me, coffee is a big one. I make coffee every day and I love my coffee and I love experimenting with different homemade syrups, lattes, all the things. So coffee is like, okay, yes, I for sure want to post about coffee. And during my initial brainstorming, I was like, well, I get dressed every day and I enjoy fashion and finding my style as a new mom. So I want to post about fashion. And I also enjoy reading. I'm in a book club. Shout out book club. Nobody watches these. So I want to talk about books because I read often. I audiobook, Kindle, physical, you name it. Love reading. Also, I am a new mom. I have a 10 month old when you're watching this. So maybe I want to talk about just like things that come up as a first time mom. And then something else that I've been dealing with is like working out. it's different than before having a baby so talking about like what it's been like getting back to working out as a postpartum mom because it took me like seven months before i could actually walk without being in pain so these are just the recurring things that happen in my day-to-day life they are like the life pillars i do all of these things or These things come up every single day. So it's going to be really easy for me to create lifestyle content around these things that come up every day. And now my audience, I'm just going to be like people with the same interests or season of life as me. That's probably going to be like other moms, other first time moms, but I'm going to leave it kind of vague. People with similar interests. You could be interested in coffee and not be a mom. You could be interested in books and not be a mom or even like a guy or a girl, you know, like that doesn't matter. You could be interested in any of these things. You're welcome to my content. If a student came to me with this as like their initial brainstorming strategy, I'd say, great, that's exactly what you need to get started. But if somebody came to me and they're like, this is my final plan. This is never going to move. We're sticking with it. I'd be like, we'll see. We will see. Because. What you will find for me, this is actually exactly what I did when I first started my personal TikTok. I was like, these are the things I want to post about. This is my life. What you'll find as you take action on this initial brand brainstorming is sometimes the content's not going to click. You think you want to post about something and then you do and you're like, I hated that. For me, that was fashion. Personally, I love it. I love. piecing things together or try attempting to i don't think i'm like a fashionista at all this is from ross and i tried making some different fashion videos and it felt so not me it felt inauthentic it felt weird posting about it i was like i don't want to be known for this like i don't want to have to worry about like looking good all the time because most of the time i'm wearing sweats or pajamas but when i do dress up i enjoy it but i found that this over time became irrelevant This is such a normal part of content evolution, which is actually something we'll talk about in scale. But ideally at this point, after doing the brainstorming and answering and journaling about those questions, you have some brand clarity about what you want to be known for, who you want to reach, what you want to post about, or even the brands that you want to reach, the free products you want to get. All of that gives you a starting point. So with that clarity, we can start moving on and implementing. Now we are in the phase where you are going to start setting foundations for your brand, how to implement your brand clarity into your profile, which is arguably one of the most important steps that a lot of people skip. Putting your brand clarity into your profile is basically positioning. Positioning is the intentional way you shape how your followers see you. compared to everyone else in your industry. It's how you set up your personal brand and content to establish a competitive edge and hold a unique place in your followers mind, AKA how you're going to stand out. as you get more clarity on the type of creator you want to become the positioning that you implement into your profile will become more clear and it'll get more and more specific which will always help you so your bio will likely be changing and evolving over these next coming months and that's fine so let's talk about how to do that we have instagram tick tock we'll talk about youtube with instagram starting with the basics you have your username and profile photo ideally these pair really well together most of the time your username is going to be like your name or something related to your industry one of my students jess her handle is you can do it gardening and believe it or not she is in the gardening niche you could even do like fitness by sophie if you're in the fitness industry or just It's Millie Adrian. You could just do like your name. So have it be simple, easy to spell, nothing too complicated. And then ideally your profile photo will match your username. So if you're in the fitness industry, you got a fitness related photo. If you're doing fashion, fashion related. You want it to be like a good headshot, smiling, showing your face, no Snapchat or TikTok filters that are like overdone, solid, good lighting. profile photo. Okay. Now we have your name plate. This is the bold part of your Instagram bio. This is arguably the most important part. Even for TikTok, we have like your handle profile photo, and then you have like your name here, the bold part. So the reason that is so important is because this is the most search friendly part of your bio. Example, if I wanted to go find a brand strategist right now for my brand, I could go on Instagram and type in brand strategist. And the results that Instagram show me will be based off of who has brand strategist right here. In their bio, if they have brand strategist right there, they are showing up in search results. So that's why I have content creator tips, because if somebody goes to Instagram right now and they want to look up content creator tips, I want to be the person that pops up as a resource for that. So you want to ask yourself, what do you think your audience is searching for? How would they categorize you? Is it a mindset coach, home organization? art business tips, beginner artist tips, right? So what do you think your audience is looking for to find content or people like you? Same thing with TikTok, social media coach. I have that as like the name plate. The interesting thing with TikTok is when you comment on somebody's video, your name will show up as the commenter as opposed to Instagram. If you comment on someone, your username pops up. So if I say, OMG, I love this video. Great tips. It's going to say it's Modern Millie commented versus on TikTok. It's not going to say it's Modern Millie commented. It's going to say Millie social media coach commented. So I like to say social media coach on TikTok because if people find me in the comment section of another video and they're scrolling they're gonna see go to the comment section and they're gonna be like oh this person's a social media coach i'm curious click and so that's why i have social media coach not only is it search friendly but that's what people see when they see that i've commented on another video so if somebody finds me in the comment section they're gonna be like oh this social media coach is commenting so that's why i have those two things a little bit different then we have your bio. Your bio is not about you, believe it or not. It's actually about who you want to follow you, and you're going to tell them why they should follow you in your bio. Your bio is going to be a combination of your unique edge plus a call to action, ideally to somewhere you own. Now, I actually, I don't want you to follow my example because this is the whole like do as i say not as i do thing because right now my strategy is not growth i'm not trying to grow as a new content creator i've already established my platforms so my bio looks a little bit different than let's say you who are actively trying to grow and build a more established platform. We're actually not going to use my bio as an example, but I'll show you how to apply this unique edge call to action combo. So what is a unique edge? Your unique edge is the one sentence that clearly explains why someone should follow you and what sets you apart from everyone else in your industry. It's Similar to a mission statement, but I feel like a mission statement is more about like you, who you're about, what your business is about, and your values, your mission as a creator. Whereas your unique edge is kind of crafted to appeal to your audiences or your ideal followers, selfish mindset. You're trying to convince them with this sentence that they should follow you. This is going to describe who should follow you. how you can help them, and what is like an instant result that they will get from following you right now. For example, let's do mine as an example. Who I help. Who is my content for? I'm going to say teaching aspiring content creators. What's the how? How do I help them? How to replace their nine to five. and what's the result in under 12 months with content creation so if i am an aspiring content creator and i read that sentence immediately i want to follow because it's telling me exactly what i'm going to gain from pressing the follow button what results can i get I can learn how to replace my nine to five income in under 12 months. Heck yeah, I'm going to press the follow button. So that's an example of a unique edge. Let's do some examples from the other students that we had already talked about. So let me erase this. Some examples. We have my student who was doing the home organization. This is her unique. edge helping busy moms organize their homes with simple budget-friendly systems that only need 10 minutes a day the result is you can have a clean home in 10 minutes that practical number of okay i can do this in 10 minutes super relatable i have another student who she's an artist and she has like grown her own art business and so she wants on tick tock So this is her unique edge that's currently in her TikTok bio is helping you build your art business in 100 days. Her freebie goes along with that 100 day format too. I also have a student on Instagram. She's a bookstagrammer. And so this is hers helping you find your next favorite read. She focuses solely on fantasy and romance and then call to action, how to get free books. So we'll talk about the call to action in a second. These two, I didn't include the call to action. but that is kind of the framing of your unique edge if you need a little bit more support writing it i do have this little formula that you could try and see if this works for you i help audience achieve result through method or time frame i love the whole method time frame approach because i feel like that is what makes you stand out from everyone else in your industry also you don't have to say help it could say teach inspire educate what have you so that is your unique edge then you are going to layer that with a call to action for me i love to use a little emoji but i don't know how to do it on the ipad but i'll usually do like it finger pointing down or an arrow. And then the call to action will say free 12-month creator plan. With your call to action, again, ideally, you are leading people to some place you own. Because right now, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, you don't own those platforms. They can literally disappear overnight. We have seen that happen with TikTok. You want to get them somewhere you own, which is an email list. We're going to talk about more about call to action email list freebies in a second. Let's do or jump to TikTok. With TikTok, you have limited space when it comes to your bio characters. On Instagram, you have 150 characters. And on TikTok, you're limited to 80 characters. So when I have my unique... edge statement i literally will just plug it into chat gpt and i'll be like hey can you shorten this so that it fits in 80 character limit or even 30 characters if i want more space for things because i know some people i will say other bio strategies you can have some people you will want to put an email in your bio because That is a great way for brands to find creators that accept collaborations or do PR opportunities. So if you're a content creator who wants to pursue the brand collaboration route, having space for an email address will be important. So that's one thing that you could do. But basically, I would work with ChatGPT to fit both the unique edge statement. email and call to action all within that character limit so that is how you can apply it to tick tock same strategy you still want the unique edge which that one student was helping you grow an art business in 100 days and then she had her 100 day guide as the call to action now with youtube youtube is going to be a little bit different because the profile setup it's different you don't have the bio the call to action because most people they don't first land on your channel they first land on a video so your strategy is actually going to be focusing on packaging each and every video you post so your strategy most of your efforts will go into the title and thumbnail when creating a video There are strategies you can do to make sure you have SEO implemented in your description, in your channel tags, how you set up your account. I actually have a full video on my YouTube channel. It's completely free. It's a 20 minute tutorial teaching you how to set up your YouTube channel. So I'll put that in the card above and I'll also link it in the workbook. So it's easy for you to just find if you're following along in the workbook and that'll help you set up your channel. But then um coming up with video ideas packaging that's actually going to be more of the efforts for getting people to find you discover you and getting them to follow you it's really what you're putting inside your videos so this whole nameplate bio call to action unique edge doesn't apply much to youtube setting up your bio and profile is so so so important i have two examples of the power of setting up a profile with strategy and intention one I have this student. She was an esthetician. Esthetician? She did lashes. She had great content strategy, but she wasn't getting reach. And so I took a look at her profile. I was like, you need to change your bio. You need to add a bold, search-friendly part to your nameplate. And you need to update your bio to be a little bit more specific and explain why someone should press that follow button. All she did was change her bio. She didn't change anything else. She didn't change her posting strategy, videos, nothing. Within 24 hours, immediately started getting more followers because she was easily discoverable in her industry. And it explained clearly, her bio explained clearly why people should follow her. Just from changing her profile, she started getting more followers. She didn't have to post anything to get followers. It was just from her positioning. So that is so powerful. Also had a student, we were working together. And again, your bio setup will always vary depending on what your goals are. With this student specifically, they were posting kind of for two audiences. So they had creators and filmmakers, videographers, but also they wanted to be hired on set as a DP or to be like a cameraman on site or a producer on site. we had to make sure the bio appealed to both of those things so we made sure to put dp in the bio and email for contact and literally i'm not kidding the next day somebody reached out and said hey i need help with a shoot what's your day rate literally your bio is so important and people overlook this they're like oh whatever let me just type whatever i want but you got to go back to like what are your goals what do you do you want brand collaborations you do put your email address do you want people to follow you tell them why they should follow you it is not about you your life your interests it's about what someone else can gain and if you want to be hired for something or you do your gc say ugc with your email address say what you want to be hired for what you want to be known for just please follow my advice set up your bio the way that i'm telling you to and you'll see amazing results thank you come again have a great day okay welcome back let's talk about email lists because i've talked a few times about call to actions and getting people somewhere you own and that place is an email list if you are unfamiliar an email list is a list of email contacts you own because each of those people opted in raised their hand said yes i want you to contact me with XYZ. I'm going to give you my email address in exchange for said freebie. So you grow a list of contacts where you have 100% control of the algorithm. Anytime you email your email list, you have 100% reach. It's not like a 3% engagement rate. Like no, you reach 100% of the people that are on your list. Most of you will be rolling your eyes at this whole email list thing. And I know that because that was me i remember when i was growing as a content creator i had two hour commutes um from la to san diego because i was working in san diego but living in la at the time and i would listen to like jenna kutcher's podcast what was it called a gold digger podcast influencer podcast from julie solomon i was listening to all these content creator ones money made marketing made easy Amy Porterfield. She recently changed it to the Amy Porterfield show, but I would listen to these podcasts and they would always say, start an email list. And I was like, no, thank you. I want to be a content creator. I don't want to be a blogger. I don't want to grow a business. I want to be a content creator. I want to be an influencer. I don't need an email list. And I was wrong. I think every single person can benefit from having an email list. Content creator, whether you think you need it or not, it takes less than 24 hours to set up. So why not do it? What's your excuse? What's your excuse? Why not? Why not? Why the hey not? Whether you think you're going to need it or not, it's so nice to have because what if TikTok goes kapoof and all of a sudden you have to reach your people, your followers, and you can't because TikTok doesn't exist. you got an email list you could be like hey guys that's so crazy tick tock got banned and now like you can talk to your people because you have an email list i want to tell you a story i tell the story all the time so if you've heard it i had this student and we started working together we were working one-on-one and i asked her what is her goal and she's like i want to hit 10 000 followers by the end of the year and i said yes let's do it we can make it happen first things first let's do your email list and she was like i said i want to grow a hundred thousand followers on instagram this this has nothing to do with instagram what do you mean i was like just trust me you can do it in this weekend it's going to be really easy really fast just set it up and we'll jump to instagram okay just set it up and then we'll teach instagram she's like fine i'll set it up literally the next day she's like okay i'm done can we do instagram now i was like yes great perfect let's put your freebie in your bio think nothing of it now let's grow on instagram well Sure enough, not only did she hit 10,000 followers, but she hit up to like 30,000 followers and her email list was growing because her account was growing. So as she was growing followers, she was getting hundreds of people signing up for her email list. And again, she didn't know what this was going to be for, but hey, it was growing. Wow. Yay. Love that. And then after she hit that goal, we hit that goal. I think it was 30,000 followers. She came to me a few months later and she was like, okay, my next goal. I think I want to offer coaching. I think I want to like work one-on-one with people. And I said, let's email your email list. Let's send an email out when you're ready to start coaching and open it up to the people who are warm already and expecting to hear from you anyway. And so she's like, cool. She works on the coaching. She figures out the program and we send an email to her email list and it sells out. And with that one email, she replaced her corporate job, quit. put in her two weeks and ever since then this was in 2020 when we first worked together she has been a full-time content creator and has not gone back to the corporate world because this is what she wants to do that was what she wanted to do and it was possible because of an email list okay i love email lists um i used to not but now i do so i can't tell you how many students have come to me and they're like i didn't i was going through the bsp model and you tell us to do an email list and i didn't want to but because i'm in the bsp model i did and i'm so glad i did because blah blah blah blah and so it's worth it thank you so growing your email list basically you are going to offer something some sort of free ish that your audience wants and in exchange for that free ish they are going to give you their beautiful junk email I'm kidding. Actually, maybe, maybe they will give you a junk email. I don't know. I do that sometimes, but they're going to give you an email address. When they give you their email address, you will be growing your email list and it's going to be great because then you could start sending emails, send little notifications to people, and it's going to be so much fun. You actually don't have to send emails right away or nurture the email list, but you still want this like list of people that you can contact at any time. ready to go just in case now this product right here is called a freebie or an opt-in or a lead magnet people refer to it as different things for the sake of this video we're going to call it a freebie it's a free thing of value freebie that they will get when they give you their email address there are different types of freebies you have you have like a digital product you have templates you could create a planner you could make a i don't know a cheat sheet some sort of checklist honestly a mini course can still be a freebie or like a webinar in a sense this video is a mini course but along with the mini course you have the workbook that goes with it and that is the freebie that goes with this mini course so that's a digital product a workbook lots of different ways to give free value you can even do like a quiz another lead magnet the purpose of the freebie or the best way to create one is to solve a problem that your audience has with one simple downloadable solve a problem create a solution my first freebie was like VSCO editing templates or like formulas. I created this YouTube video that went viral for me at the time. And it was how to create your own Instagram aesthetic and edit your videos. And then I created like a series of like how to edit your photos to be fall vibes, how to edit your photos for summer vibes. So like I created a series and then with each video i put out i created visco templates where somebody could download it and then follow the visco formula visco is an editing app by the way and they could get the same results for editing so that was the first freebie i made it solved the problem of making editing easy the pain point is don't know how to edit don't know how to make my photos look aesthetic solution here just follow these templates this visco preset and you will have this type of editing or this type of photo. So that was my first freebie I ever created. The question is, how do you create a freebie? What the heck do you create a freebie on? What to do? For me, what I did was I went to Pinterest and I looked up different content pillars or topics that I thought my audience would be interested in. So I think what I had looked up at the time, it was like photo editing. and then apps ideas iphone formulas thought that was interesting and so i just kind of scrolled and saw oh people have like different presets what if i made like a bundle of these presets to light and airy a fall vibe so what if i made a bundle and that's kind of the strategy i went through you could even do if you're in let's just do like me right now instagram tips I'm going to search this, see what Pinterest is showing me posting guide, starting a brand new Instagram account. Here's what your first nine posts should be. So this is like quick downloadable, your first nine posts done for you. Seven quick Instagram hacks to boost your reach, how to go viral on Instagram, how to start blogging on Instagram, Instagram for beginners. When should I post? So how can I turn this into like a bundle of like a free guide for content creators. If we are in the home organization industry, we're going to just like look up home organization, 13 easy home organization ideas that actually work. I want it to be a little bit more specific. What do we do? Hacks. Here's a little cheat sheet. So a cleaning schedule planner, that could be a great, easy printable one, cleaning checklist. That could be a simple freebie. So you can use Pinterest to get inspiration. You could also go to other competitors or niche neighbors see what sort of free offers they're offering and see if that resonates with you if you want to create your own version or a branch off of it when it obviously would never copy somebody word for word but you're just getting inspiration when you have that idea of what you want to create you are going to go to canva templates and first you could literally look up the template like if you want to do a checklist you could look up checklist canva has plenty of free options ideally you find one without a crown this one has a crown that means you have to pay for it and this one's nice so you could click on that change the branding to match your own style if it's more of like a workbook you could type in workbook search already done for you i need one without the crown this is 14 pages i like the simplicity of this one though so let's customize this template now we're actually going to create the freebie together you're going to change the colors to match your own branding make sure to swap out all the text images but usually no matter what freebie you are offering whether it's a checklist or visco templates the format that i want you to follow is this i want you to have the cover image or the title this is going to be freebie title okay so you're gonna title page then i do want you to have a about page but this isn't about you necessarily this is more about the freebie it's like an overview of like hey this is how the freebie came to be this is what you will get after using it or this is how to use it the best way here are tips for how to get the most out of this freebie so it's like hey i'm millie you do want a picture of yourself to create that connection but also people want to remember who did they get this from so that when they're scrolling online again and they see a post from you they're like oh yeah that was the girl that made the visco template so having a picture of yourself on this front page is very helpful and again it's not about you it's about the freebie how to get the most from that freebie and then right after this is just one page keep it simple then you're going to get straight into the goods if it's a long workbook having a table of contents is great if it's not just delete table of contents and get straight to the point do the checklist do the planner whatever it is and at the end if you can you could do like a little thank you and have your socials listed everywhere some mistakes that i see happen i see people getting a little too messy with the branding or with the layout so they'll put so many words and then they'll make they'll have like all the words touch the edges which just makes it look so cluttered so overwhelming to read so that that's a little much it's a little overwhelming so always use canvas guidelines see that purple square i never like to put the text outside of the purple square that's usually what i'm focusing on and i'm spacing things out so it's there's a lot of like breathing room with your freebies so when in doubt simple is best once you're done actually creating your freebie you are going to download it as a PDF. If it's something that you want your audience to print and use like a checklist, make sure everything's black and white because most people are going to print in black and white and might not have color. So just keep everything simple. And then you're going to download it. Make sure you title it and download as a PDF. Okay. Once it's downloaded, the simplest tool to actually deliver your freebie to your audience is going to be Stan. I freaking love Stan. It's literally your all-in-one platform for content creation or as a content creator because Stan, this is your link in bio tool. So when you have a call to action, for example, on my Instagram, my call to action 12 month creator plan, it directs people to my Stan store, kind of like a link in bio. And so people go to my Stan store and let's just click on my Stan store. And this is what they'll see this obviously iPad. And then on Instagram, it'll like scroll or on mobile it'll scroll. So these are all the different things that I have set up. And the cool thing is all of these people can access directly within Stan. What I mean by that is you as the Stan user, you can collect emails by offering a freebie. you can sell a digital product and make money directly through stan you could do url so if you have like amazon storefront you could set up an affiliate link this is just the ipad app but on desktop you're able to set up courses and sell courses you could offer webinars you can set up a membership or community so any way you can think about making money as a content creator you can actually do directly through stan so that's why i love them and you have the email list option and you can email your email list through stan too so we're going to choose collect emails this is where you would put the title to your freebie subtitle button we're going to upload our file document canva this is the file open And then you press publish and it's on your link and buy. It's literally that easy. Boom shakalaka, you're done. On desktop, you'll have more customization for like the landing page or the email that gets sent when somebody downloads it. You could customize that email. That's how you set that up on Stand Store. With your freebie title, because you're going to put your freebie as a call to action in your bio, you want it to be like juicy and like people need it. You know, it's not just how to organize your home you know that's vague that's broad it's kind of like the unique edge where you want to get so specific on the transformation or the unique method that you're using so i have like the 12 month creator plan it's basically what it is it teaches you how to become a content creator in 12 months what you do every single month working towards your creator plan so i have again in the workbook there are prompts that you can plug into your ai bot of choosing and talk to chat gpt or claude whatever you're using to work on like that perfect freebie option and how to craft it and then of course like okay well how do i fit the title into like less than 50 characters or what should i write for the subtitle so all of those are strategies that go into choosing your freebie too is like making sure you have a strong title and call to action that gets people actually onto your list. And sometimes you'll make a freebie. This has happened with the student before where we made a really good freebie and we knew it was going to be powerful for their audience and they launched it. And like two weeks later, it didn't get any downloadables. So we just changed the packaging, the title of it. And then we got like maybe a few more. So we updated the title again. And finally, after like two title changes, people finally started downloading. the freebie so don't give up if right away a freebie doesn't work you just might have to restructure the title or the packaging of it a little bit before you start getting traction so you will be putting your freebie call to action in your bio and also when it comes to youtube where you're going to be putting your freebie is actually going to be in not only the description of your video but also you're going to put it as the pinned comment. So, so long as it's relevant to the video, anytime your, the videos that you're posting connect to the freebie that you have, you're going to put that freebie in your description and pinned comment. And that's how you can start building your email list on YouTube. You could also put it as the main link. We have five links here. I have different. link options but the main link is the place that you want to direct the most traffic to so you could also have it as your main link we're just moving on to scale phase two now we're in the like content creation phase of your journey you have the brand clarity you've updated your bio your profile you're ready to direct traffic to your profile because it's set up for best follower conversions now let's talk about where you might be at with your content. And each and every one of you will probably be in a different phase of brand evolution or content evolution. First, we have phase one. This is somebody who is just getting started and you maybe did that brand brainstorming for the very first time. You've never posted content and you're still trying to get some clarity of like, who the heck do you want to be as a content creator? So you are in that throwing spaghetti at the wall phase with your content. Usually there is no strategy here other than let me start exercising my content creator muscles. Let me figure out how to film, where to film. Do I need gear? How the heck do I edit? What editing apps do I use? Maybe you're just getting comfortable in front of the camera. So this is like those first, what's it called? Growing pains of, okay, I'm just gonna. throw spaghetti at the wall see what sticks see what feels authentic to me when it comes to like what kind of content i want to create how do i implement content creation into my day-to-day lifestyle where does it fit where can i improve so this is the throwing spaghetti at the wall phase next we have the brand clarity phase we don't really know how long the spaghetti at the wall phase lasts it's different for everybody you might be throwing spaghetti at the wall for a year or it might just be like two weeks and you're like boom i got it so this phase could last a while and over time as you're posting you get that brand clarity when you know what you want to do who you want to create content for who you want to be as a content creator and you start adding the unique edge into your bio and creating with more clarity this is when few things feel like okay balls finally rolling there might not be like a lot of advanced strategy here but at least you're posting with clarity and you're in alignment with okay i know what i want to do and in my content career journey and i know where i want to be in five years from now our next phase this is going to be clarity when clarity meets strategy this is the phase where you're like okay I'm gonna start taking things more seriously. I wanna figure out what to post, how to post, how often to post. You're going to start doing more intentional content research. You're gonna be paying attention to your analytics a little bit more. You're gonna start figuring out what kind of videos get more views. versus follows versus engagement so you're going to start being a little bit more curious about how to improve your content in all these different areas and maybe you're diving more into educational content and really wanting to figure out those like okay what are what are these advanced practices or these next best practices that i could do to improve my content and add strategy on top of my clarity This is kind of the stage where you'll notice you're starting to find your audience. It might not be like viral growth, but you'll notice things start clicking with your audience. Here, things are clicking for you up here. You're like, okay, yeah, we're getting clarity. But here is where things start clicking for your audience. you're getting a little bit more comments you're getting a little bit more followers you're starting to understand oh this is on the nose i think this is the type of content the audience wants so you're starting to get more clarity when it comes to strategy then phase four is your video packaging this is more than just oh what sort of videos do i post Let me rotate between content pillars. This is leaning into the psychology of crafting your video. You're thinking more about the hook. How do you capture someone's attention in the first three seconds? The editing strategy of, OK, now that I caught their attention, how do I keep their attention and retain them to watch 100% of the video all the way through? You're thinking about, OK, if I want to deliver this piece of content, what's the best method to do that? Is it talking to the camera? Is it voiceover? Is it green screen by sharing an article? Is it a trending audience? You're thinking more about, OK, how do I package this in the best way to deliver it for my audience? So there's this next level of advanced strategy. Here is where I see people going to that 100K mark. Here, you're probably getting one to 10 000 followers and then as you go to video packaging you're probably starting to get upwards to 100 000 followers when you get when you really understand video packaging you're like cool i've crafted videos i know how to do i know psychology this is when you go to that 100k mark maybe 50 i'll say 50 to 100k mark and then we have five this is getting into brand recognition This is when you're starting to dabble with the branding of it all. What people associate with branding and really fine tuning. These are my fonts. These are my colors. This is the text animation that I use. These are all the sound bites that I use in every video. This is how I always edit the intro to my vlogs. You're starting to figure out. What makes your content you? Very you coded as a content creator. You're realizing, oh, my messy bun. That is my signature look. You're realizing, oh, I love coffee. I'm always going to have coffee and hold my coffee in all my videos. That is brand recognition. You're starting to identify these little things that people can start associating with you. Colors, your location, where you're filming. If you're holding a pen while you're doing your videos, you're starting to layer in those elements of you and starting to recognize that for yourself of like, oh, this is. how people can start like immediately recognizing even like color grading or the filters presets that you're using on your videos that could be part of brand recognition and then after you get clarity on this one that is finally when you have created like your personal brand You've got it nailed down. Usually this phase here and here, that is when people are getting up to the 1 million follower point because they have their personal brand dialed in. They have clarity on everything. They got the strategy that feels in alignment with them. So this is usually the evolution that I see creators go through when it comes to their content. And it's funny because I feel like when a lot of content creators start or my students are starting, they want to start here or here and they want to like all right i need to dial in on my fonts and colors and i'm like you can do that but they're gonna change and they they always will change your content is always going to evolve over time and this clarity usually only happens as you're taking action on all of these things so I don't want you to go in with these expectations of like, OK, I'm going to make videos and they're going to be perfect. I'm going to have my personal brand from the jump. It's OK to not have the personal brand from the get go. Some people will because maybe you've been watching this and you've been here for a few years and you're just like, OK, I need to jump to here and you're ready to dive into video packaging. So everyone's going to be somewhere different. But I think. it can help take a lot of pressure off of your shoulders knowing like it's okay to not have it all figured out. It's okay to not know a hook or hook strategy yet or how to package a video properly and deliver it the right way. Like you don't need to know all these things because first you're here and then you're going to start getting clarity here. So there's this evolution that happens organically as you're posting. And so You'll probably hit all of these markers at some point, but wanted to kind of visually show you where you'll be. And now we can kind of talk about each of these stages and tips to kind of get you through each of these stages so that you have that personal brand clarity. And not only clarity, but I mean, we all love a good 1 million follower number. So not only is this going to help you with like clarity on your brand, but as you go through it, you have. these follower milestones that you will naturally hit not with like secret hacks of use these hashtags not because of hacks but because you understand your content you understand your audience and honestly content and brand clarity That is what brings followers, not little hacks and tips and tricks. So I'm going to start with some basics from stage one. I feel like most people watching will actually be in stage three where you're like, OK, I want those intentional clarity strategy layering and then phase four with like video packaging. So I feel like most people will be there, but I do get a lot of students who find BSP from YouTube and they're. they're also in stage one so i do want to spend a little bit of time talking about some basics that i think will be helpful for anybody who is at these beginning stages i didn't want to just like breeze right by them if you have learned something new so far be sure to give this video a thumbs up because that's going to tell youtube that other creators like yourself will find this video extremely valuable and if you learn two new things by the end of this video i want you to consider subscribing because it is simply a great way free way to support me my channel my business and it allows me to continue to make content like this for you and content creators every single week on my youtube channel so consider engaging with this video in any way you can send it to a friend or creator that you know that you think might find it valuable and just wanted to do that little call out before moving on Let's talk about getting comfortable in front of the camera because I feel like that's something a lot of creators on TikTok struggle with. The one thing that you could do to help yourself getting comfortable in front of the camera is film one thing every day. Just turn that into a habit. Film. one second of your life every single day. I have an app literally called One Second Every Day. And over the past two years, I just record one second of my life every single day. Sometimes I'm in it, sometimes I'm not in it. And it just gets me into that habit of pressing record. And it could be the most mundane things. Like sometimes I'll just record myself doing the dishes or myself doing laundry, or I just get a little shot of my YouTube setup or my coffee or my food. I want you to just start filming yourself. every single day ideally it starts with one thing every day and then over time it's film yourself doing one task every day you could talk to the camera you could not talk to the camera just getting into that habit is going to be that first barrier wall to break and it's not with the intention to post you never have to post anything but just practicing setting up your camera pressing record getting in front of it if you do that every single day for like two weeks by the end of the two weeks you're gonna be like okay this is feeling less intimidating let's take it up a notch and then you could like practice talking to the camera again without the intention of both just practicing and so that's just like one thing that i say just start filming one thing in your life every single day move that to filming yourself doing something every day and then you'll have a little bit more confidence to then film talking to the camera and you don't have to talk to the camera every day but that is kind of how you get a little bit comfortable in front of the camera When it comes to, let's talk about gear. Really, honestly, all you need is your phone. It could be, I put iPhone because I have an iPhone or Android, whatever the heck you have. Use your phone. My first few YouTube videos, I used my phone, filmed and edited and posted on my phone. So you don't need fancy equipment. One of my favorite quotes is from Arthur Ashe. I believe he was a legendary tennis player. It was, start where you are, use what you have, And do what you can. That is like the mentality that I want you to go into content creation with. Because believe it or not, I think 100% of my content on TikTok, for my personal TikTok, all phone. Never touch my camera. With my business, I'll go back and forth between phone and camera. If it's a brand collab, I'll definitely whip out the camera. If it's not, it's usually my phone. So most of the time, I'm just using my phone. No fancy tripod mic setup. and then what i like to do is as you hit certain milestones you could kind of like reward yourself with gear so one of the first things that i did i after i hit i think it was 10 000 followers that's when i got my very first tripod so when i hit 10 000 followers on instagram i invested in a tripod and then when i got like my first brand collab that's when i invested into a mic when my youtube channel got monetized that's when i bought my like first youtuber camera so after my youtube channel got monetized that's when i got a camera now when it comes to your phone let me actually just pull this out real quick because i'm sure this will be helpful for you camera settings we're gonna go here we're gonna go to our camera for video i typically film at 1080p 30 frames per second and i do 1080p because across platforms instagram tick tock youtube short form content auto defaults 1080 is the format that those platforms they're already at 1080p so i don't do 4k i don't think my content needs 4k so i will do 1080p if you want to do 4k because you have the memory for 4k and you want that crispness you absolutely can do 4k at 30 frames per second just make sure on whatever platform you're uploading to there's an option where you can choose upload at highest quality if that's not checked your videos will look blurry because the compressor when you go to upload a video like on 4k on instagram they have their compressor that will automatically compress your file to 1080p if you don't have that checked so That's why just keeping it safe, I always do 1080p. And then here, I like the grid, level, and mirror on. So those three I like on. Then I'm always filming with the back camera. Takes some time to get used to. In the beginning, I used the front-facing camera, which again is fine if you're just getting into the habit of it. But then over time, I started practicing the back camera. Let's talk about filming. Ideally, I know people are going to say lighting. The best lighting is natural light or like by a window. So filming by windows help if you don't have ring lights or soft boxes or anything. Back cam on phone is going to give you the highest quality. When I'm filming short form content, I love lots of headspace. I want it empty up here. I want lots of space because that's where I like to put text for my videos or closed captions as options here. So I think the biggest thing to think about filming wise is headspace. We're running out of space. Headspace. You want lots of headspace. okay make eye contact with the camera instead of looking at yourself and like you don't have to stare at the camera but just like for me if i'm using a teleprompter i'll still naturally like look off to the side because if i was in conversation with somebody i wouldn't just stare at them so again these things all take practice but i'll look at the camera and then like if i'm pretending to think i'll like look off to the side and like now i'm looking here and then i look there so have natural eye movement while maintaining eye contact when it comes to editing you could use the platform specific editor my preference is tick tock if i had to pick one platform specific editor i think tick tock is better than instagrams and youtubes so there's that even like instagram has edits but everything instagram has glitches so much so if you don't want to edit in tick tock there's also cap cut now something to know about cap cut the app they changed their terms of service so that any footage that you upload to the app they retain some ownership of so you will still own all your footage but they will also own your footage so that they could use it however they want to use it so that's something some people don't love about cap cut since they updated it for me I don't really care because I'm like, what are the odds that they're going to use my janky like coffee content in an ad? And if they do whoop-dee-doo, I guess where it could be run into issues for us, John, my husband and I, we don't show our baby's face on social media. That's something that we don't want to do right now. And so I wouldn't want to upload footage of my baby in CapCut because then they could. use it so alternatively there are other editing apps i did a whole comparison on editing apps on my youtube channel so you can watch to see what are good cap cut alternatives i do think adobe has premiere pro it's a newer app so they don't have all the features that cap cut does but they have a really good enhanced audio feature that i I love so much. It makes it sound like you have a mic when you don't. So I think Premiere Pro is really cool. If you have like crap audio, you don't got a mic, which not having a mic doesn't mean crap audio, but I'm over-exaggerating. You have crap audio, maybe you had to film from really far away and it's super echoey. Premiere Pro, enhanced speech, game changer. So cool. You also have InShot. So InShot is another option. Again, there's a lot of other ones depending on what you're looking for. So you can watch my comparison video on that. Okay. That kind of covers stage one, I believe. We already went over stage two, which is like you get brand clarity and you're starting to post. So now we could go into strategy, the whole what do I post about now? What you are going to post will vary depending on your goals. You know, if your goal is growth, follow the rest of this video because I'm going to teach you what to post about. If your goal is not growth, hey. What the heck, post whatever the heck you want. That's fine. It doesn't matter. You can post whatever the heck you want. But if your goal is growth and you don't have strategy and you're posting whatever you want and you're not growing, you gotta start asking yourself, oh, maybe I should be more intentional with my content research and what I'm posting. In general, all of you will be posting video of some sort because video right now is the best way to be discovered. so how do you figure out what to post about you are going to do content research now there are three places that we're going to go over to do your content research we have search engine with your search engine this is basically going to help you predict what your audience wants and what they want to see the search engine strategy is going to help you predict what your audience wants to see this is basically the strategy where You, your strategy is going to be, how can I show up in search results? Whether that's on Instagram search, TikTok, or YouTube search results, you want to show up in search. When people go to look for something, find an answer to something, or look up reviews on a product or whatever, how can you get in front of their eyes and show up in search results? Next, we're going to study is homepage or for you page on YouTube. It's like the homepage. TikTok for you, Instagram, it's like the Reels tab. And this area is going to show you what is currently being pushed and recommended. Not only that, but it's going to show you what's being pushed organically. Didn't have to implement any sort of like too much SEO strategy, but organically, what's trending, what results are popping up. Yeah, so we have like also like trends with this. so how can you show up on home and then we're also going to utilize your niche neighbors or competitors and you're going to study their content to figure out what is currently resonating with your audience this will make sure your videos are reaching your people. So these are the three different places that we're going to do our content research to make sure our videos are showing up across the board and reaching the right people. Let's do this together. So I'm actually going to go to Notion. I have a content calendar that I'm going to be using. This content calendar is part of the workbook. So you can get access to this and apply the same strategies that we're going to be doing together. with this content calendar going back and forth between good notes i'm gonna go here and we're gonna use my tick tock one for example of figuring out okay what can i post about and have a little bit more clarity so we're gonna look at maybe like coffee or post part first time mom postpartum books i want to figure out like what sort of videos are going to be working well right now so first thing we want to study is search engine so i If my goal is to grow on TikTok, naturally, what platform are we going to study? TikTok. So we're going to go home, search, and I'm just going to type in coffee and see what is suggested here. Now, I am looking at these suggested results first because this is literally TikTok telling you, hey, these are the most common searches when it comes to coffee. People, when they look up coffee, they actually are looking up coffee vlog. They want to see coffee blogs. People are looking up coffee TikTok, coffee aesthetic, coffee recipes. TikTok is telling you what people are looking for on their platform. It's amazing. So automatically I'm drawn to coffee recipes because like I said, I enjoy making my own little recipes and making my own syrups and all the stuff. So I'm going to write down coffee recipes first and we could just like elaborate. on that coffee recipes going back or anything else maybe like coffee at coffee bar station i think i have a pretty cool coffee bar station so let me just do coffee bar station so i'm just kind of like keeping track of these recommended results or suggested searches and now we're going to actually click on one that i would be interested in creating content on so i'm going to click on coffee recipes and i am going to look at these recommended results or these top results now what i suggest doing is actually applying a filter because you want to know what is currently working and currently performing well in search results so i'm going to do like the last three months and i'm going to apply salted maple latte maple vanilla bean it looks like maple fall has been kind of like the vibe salted maple That's funny. Maple, salted maple, brown sugar, shaken espresso. So I actually do have a salty mapes. I call it my salty mapes. I have a salted maple recipe that I think is really good. So I'm actually going to expand on this idea a little bit based off of the videos that I see. Salted maple latte, salted maple vanilla, shaken espresso, salted maple. brown sugar i'm gonna do the text that we were seeing on screen i'm gonna go to text hook text and i think what i want my video to be is salted maple shaken espresso and the emojis are important i noticed they were using emojis a lot i'm gonna do like that was there like syrup one i thought there was a syrup one no it's fine so we have a coffee recipe and that looks like it's a pretty good one and then i'm just going to kind of like keep going down the rabbit hole and any video that you see you're welcome to save it and create collections based off of the different topics that you'll be posting about so maybe i want to do a new collection and this is going to be my coffee inspo save and then you could come back to it anything that gave you inspiration for later let's do an example on instagram We're going to go to search. This time we're going to do books. So I'm going to say book recommendations, book talk. Let's go with book recommendations. And again, as you can see here, book recommendations, book recommendations, book recommendations. It's in their nameplate, the bold part of their bio. And that's why those people are showing up. Anywho, now I'm going to look again. We want to kind of filter out the older posts with the newer ones. So when I'm doing this search. I'm going to look at the date that it was posted to make sure it's relevant. So this one is January. Great. This one, December, not bad. But if I notice one is from like October, a little bit older, might not be relevant anymore. So I'm kind of looking more recent posts. What's working well. Books I knew were five stars before I finished. I like that hook. I think that's really cool. So I'm going to go back to Notion. and i'm going to write that down books i knew were five stars before i finished i think that's brilliant good idea it could also be the hook text so again if i wanted to i could save it add to collection books to grant save so we're kind of just getting inspo right now now bonus strategy when you are doing this I want you to pay attention to the viral follower conversion rate. That is totally the term. So this post I like, I'm like, ooh la la. It has 2 million views, which I'm like, okay, viral. If it went viral for them, will it go viral for me? Let's check. Let's go to this person's profile. What? 120 followers, 2 million views. Amazing ratio. Ideally, what we're shooting for is like, the views are two times the followers follower count so if like i came to this profile and saw that she had five million followers and two million views it's like okay well no wonder it had two million views they have five million followers so let's let me show you an example of maybe somebody this is 309 that's great conversion all these are great conversions okay here we go yeah hayley fam i love her follow her on youtube she's the best her and ryan they're great but as you can see 2.6 million views this might not be one that i want to implement in my strategy because the reason it has 2.6 million views might be because she has 1.6 million followers right so pay attention to someone's follower count same thing when you're doing your research on tick tock if you notice let's see oh this one's not showing views on ipad but if you notice a video has like 1 million go to the person's profile see if it's viral for them this one almost 2 000 followers and almost 350 000 views so that's a great ratio ash is definitely on to something her coffee content seems to be working really well at least this one and this one went viral for her are performing above average so those are the ones that i want to be paying attention to This same strategy works for YouTube, y'all. Go to search. If I look up Instagram, monetization, branding, edits, tutorial, reels, comments, reel compilation, Instagram, edits tutorial, it's going to show me like, okay, maybe I could do an edit tutorial. So same thing, YouTube, utilize the search engine, write down your video ideas. With YouTube, the video idea could be that. And instead of hook text, you're gonna do like the title inspo so you see okay i like this video it's performing well it has a good subscriber to view ratio again you're looking this person i wonder who that is they have 650 000 subscribers only 43 000 views not a great ratio so maybe this packaging could improve so let me find somebody almost a hundred thousand views and one million justin brown justin brown justin brown this one's looking good 2.2 million views and with the time frame on youtube i usually look within two years two years is like the max out i will go one year is great anything less than a year is like okay something's working well with the packaging of like the title thumbnail so i'm keeping track of instead of like the hook text i'm paying attention to the search phrase and the pairing of the title thumbnail. That's what I'm going to be writing down in my Notion content calendar. The second place that we were going to go over is like the homepage, which is basically just like the Reels tab, TikTok for you page. And you need to understand like you have an algorithm that's serving you biased content. So on the Reels tab, what you're going to see is catered to you and your interests, but it's still showing you what's being recommended to you. So you're just going to pay attention to like, What is somebody saying in the beginning of their videos? What text popped up at the beginning of their videos? Do you notice any recurring sounds and all of this stuff? Is there an industry update? How are people capturing attention? I asked an FBI hostage negotiator how to handle. That's too expensive. Here's his answer. Like, how are people showing up on home or in reels? That'll apply to TikTok as well. I know I focused on Instagram and TikTok for the search engine one. So I kind of want to focus a little bit more for the home on YouTube. with youtube sometimes what is showing up on your home page is not necessarily what will show up on someone's search results so when i'm posting videos to my channel some videos i'm thinking oh wow this is going to be a great resource when somebody searches up this term other times for example this video how to use hootsuite the best social media management tool for businesses instagram edits app full tutorial How to actually pick a niche. Like those phrases are things people are looking up. So that's me trying to show up in ranking and search results over time. That's not me trying to make a viral video and blow up and reach crazy audience. There are other videos that are more, okay, homepage. How do I get on somebody's homepage strategy? For example. i thought this video stop making just one video with your content that's not very like search friendly but i thought the thumbnail would perform pretty well on the home page or even like this format with like the tweet format i thought that would perform well on a home page so Sometimes there's different intentions behind a video and that's totally fine. So you just want to pay attention, like what sort of videos are coming up on your homepage? What fonts are people using when you're on your phone? Are the fonts easy to read? how are people using thumbnails to stop attention and stop a scroll and then how do they pair their title with that thumbnail most of the time i will say when you're working on your video packaging and you're pairing title thumbnail the text that you use in your thumbnail is not going to be the same text that you use in your titles so example this video from cody sanchez lock the f in She's not saying lock the F in again in the title. She's saying how to actually achieve your goals in 2026. So this captures attention of the scroll. And then this tells you what the video is about. Lock the F in. Whoa, wait, what is she talking about? And then hard now, hard later. Then you have the title, how to actually achieve your goals in 2026. So it's like, oh, okay. If I want to lock in for 2026 and hit my goals, this is the video I want to watch. Over time, you learn video packaging on YouTube. It's definitely something I dive further into in BSP. But again, those are kind of the things you're looking at on your homepage. For example, I have switch account. This one and this channel, this homepage is going to look a little bit different than my other homepage. So because I consume different types of content on both channels. So this can show me like another. aspect of content creation and it's like oh okay here's another style thumbnail that I could try for this style of content so that is how you can utilize the home page to figure out what to post about then finally we have your niche neighbors this one is a fun one and what you're going to do is you are going to actually let me pull up this is a creator that I follow on my personal TikTok Love her. Brittany girl. I doubt you watch this or follow me, but literally I follow her on my personal page and I love her. She's so cool. Okay. So she would be like a niche neighbor because she makes coffee videos. So I'm going to go to her profile. I'm going to filter by popular and I'm going to see like, what is popular? What viral videos have she created and recently popular? So I'm going to like scroll through again, look at the dates to see, are there any recent videos? the most recent viral ones and i'm kind of looking within the last three months this one 11 11 now let's analyze the video let's what was the starting frame what was the hook text what's the audio what what's the pacing how long is the video so then i'm like starting to analyze the video kind of studying editing styles how can i recreate this and with my own twist so this one resonated with her audience it was this one 34. 8 000 views compared to 20 000 followers i think that's really well really great i'm gonna like save this again as inspo for coffee in my coffee collection to recreate later so i could again i'll add that to my notion i could do coffee why do i keep doing three f's coffee vlog and then i could link specifically to her video britney's video share copy link we have notion paste done so now i could quickly reference that video as inspiration now that's one way to do it filter by popular and then find the most recent or just stay in the default view and kind of skim the last 20 pieces of content and check to see which one went viral for them above their average so it looks like average she's getting three to four thousand views on videos so i want to look for a video that's like six thousand maybe even ten thousand like this one ten thousand that's viral for you viral for her this one i want to study again entry shot audio hook text editing style length all the things those are that stuff that i'm paying attention to and i'm taking notes on it here i have text hook verbal hook but we could talk about hooks a little bit more a little bit later in this video, but we're taking notes. Once I noticed this, maybe I could try this. So you can take notes here too, what you're analyzing and noticing. Or let's go to Instagram. For example, if I wanted to do, let's say running tips, what the fart? Try running for beginners. And let's say this is my niche neighbor, somebody in my industry that I'm like, yes, I want to. create like them i want to post similar content to them again i'm going to look at their followers with 164 000 followers just going to go to the reels tab and see what is viral for this creator again paying attention to view counts and his average views look like somewhere between 20 maybe like 20 000 so i want to find something that's above that like maybe double that or more so here we go we have two videos over the 200 000 view mark so these might be good to add to my list of how to start running common running form mistakes so those would be stuff i would add to my content calendar save to a collection return back and create my own version of this is not the only thing you can do to study your niche neighbors not only can you study content that is performing well for them because if this your niche neighbor Let's say you want to do running content. Your niche neighbor is making running content and it's very likely that their audience is also going to be your audience. That's why we're studying that because if it resonates with their audience, it'll probably attract and resonate the right audience for you as well. So something else you could pay attention to instead of just content that's performing well for them, you can actually go to a video. and go to the comment section and check to see what sort of questions people have in the comment section looks like there's a comment here that says i need help with shin splints they're killing my ability to run i can make a video on how to deal with shin splints or how to prevent shin splints how to recover from shin splints So that alone gives me like three video ideas just from reading that comment or going to the comment section. I could also pay attention to their website and how they are making money. If you're somebody who you don't quite know how you want to make money as a content creator yet, you can look at your niche neighbors and look to see what sort of services they're offering or if they're doing. paid partnerships or selling digital products just study their link in bio and looks like they have a running app and maybe their freebie is like a half marathon challenge so ask yourself could i do something similar is that the route that i want to go down and just look at a bunch of niche neighbors and you'll find a lot of clarity there or direction there you can do the same strategy over on youtube when going to someone's videos is of their recent videos which ones are popping off and then which ones so it looks like one million but that's using ryan and i don't have a ryan trahan so yeah anything that's like with ryan trahan which like by the way love ryan trahan as a youtuber if you don't already follow him I think the best YouTuber at the moment, setting a best example of what it's like to be a YouTuber. He uses his phone in all of his videos. and they're high quality. They're amazing. So definitely check them out. It's a good one. This one is a good one. So you would look at similar strategy, look at their profile, look to see of the recent videos, what's viral for them, or even like sort by popular, see what's their most popular ones. Make sure you only focus on like the ones from the last one to two years and then see if you could recreate it. But I will say something that I notice a lot of my students do and the mistake that they make when studying niche neighbors, whether it's Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok, is they'll actually choose viral creators like Haley to study. And that's not necessarily what we want to do yet. We don't want to study people who are already viral established 3.8 million followers. Obviously they have done something amazing to get here, but let's go to oldest. She's been on this journey for seven years. So her growth strategy probably looked different than her current. maintaining posting frequency strategy. So you actually want to try to find people that are currently in their growth strategy phase, or maybe somewhere under 500,000 followers. That's kind of the range that I would go for is like, who is currently growing? They're in that growth strategy. They're applying these concepts. They aren't already established. For example, let's see if she's still there. So Kat Stickler, the content that she created to grow her account, is likely not the content she's creating now so i wouldn't study her recent post and be like oh i need to make this this is what i have to be making because she's already established she might not be trying to implement like growth right now not to say that's never the case but in general you'll see the best results if you're studying creators who are actively growing trying to grow in that strategy phase as opposed to creators who have been established for years and already have millions of followers because they might not be following any sort of strategy So I kind of want to jump into video packaging specifically hook layering first, because this is like that first element that you will learn and study as a content creator when crafting your videos. because now that you have this list of ideas of like okay i can make coffee recipes i can make a coffee bar station video i can make a coffee vlog like now that you have like a general idea how do you practically create said video well first thing you want to study hooks and not just like what somebody is doing in the first few seconds but there's three elements of a hook that you want to study and this is something that hook layering i discovered two and a half, maybe three years ago, I did a deep dive video studying viral short form content. And when I was trying to figure out what is a viral hook, I figured out that viral hooks actually layer three different hook elements. Like I've heard so many different things, but really what it comes down to, there's three parts of hook layering. You have the visual hook, the text hook, and the audio hook. You want to use all three. all three you want to be thinking about all three of these in those first one to three seconds of your video to do this you're going to ask yourself with the visual hook what will the viewer see that will capture their attention with the text hook you're going to ask yourself what will the viewer read that will capture their attention and with the audio hook you're going to ask yourself What will the viewer hear that's going to capture their attention? And if you could layer all three of these things in the first few seconds, you're master at hook layering. The seeing element is the visual, like the actual first frame, the video, the shot. Is it lighting? Is it what someone's wearing? Is it what they're holding? Are they stirring their coffee? Are they making a dessert while talking? So the hook layering is like visually what is happening to capture someone's attention and keep their attention. Text is the text on screen. As soon as you see a video, if there's text on screen, that's the text hook. what text is that and yeah what is the viewer reading that's going to capture their attention then audio is the audible the listening the hearing is it a trending audio is it somebody saying something to the camera is it a voiceover so verbally what is someone saying now i want to show you typically the similar to youtube with youtube we talked about how the thumbnail and title the text is not really going to be the same because you don't want to waste real estate right and say the same thing in two places the thumbnail stops the scroll and then the text kind of summarizes what the video is about that's kind of a similar strategy with the hook layering the text on screen is not going to be the same thing that you say out loud for example let me actually just erase all this hook text the hook text says how to edit aesthetic photos in under five minutes this is kind of summarizing what the video is about or what somebody if they watch to the end of the video this is what they will gain and then verbally though what i say is not this is how to edit aesthetic photos and under five no no no no i don't say that verbally i say if you want your photos to go from this to this here's how i do it or here's how i edited this photo to go from this to this in under five minutes you know so it complements the hook text but it's not identical to the hook text and then visually we had an animation going and there was like a typing sound effect and then immediately after the sound i had a pop-up and a pop-up it was like right so Within those first three seconds, not only do we have animation, we have a sound effect, we have pop-up with the sound effects, and then closed captioning is down here. So there's a lot happening in those first three seconds to capture attention. So how can you apply hook layering? That's what you're going to study. When you are studying and doing your content research, you could study and do content research just to get content ideas like this. Or when you do, let's do coffee at home. When you're doing this part of it, you are now starting to pay attention to, okay, what's the hook text? What's those first few clips? And you're gonna take notes on that. So I'm going to see, oh, morning iced coffee routine. That's nice. Let's see, three days ago, 51,000 followers, 13,000 views. It's all right. Lacey has 31,000 followers. ooh 122 000 views okay let's study this one we have honey vanilla bean iced latte no syrups needed this is another coffee recipe so i'm gonna do the hook text is honey vanilla bean iced latte honey vanilla bean iced latte no syrups needed i have verbal hook here but that's like audio what is playing Let's turn the volume up. Just to let you know that I'm still... Okay, so it's just an audio, so I could actually, like, save this audio piece. See if I could find it. Okay. And then the visual hook is the espresso pouring, and so I'm just gonna document that. Espresso pouring close-up into latte. So now that visual hook is the same visual hook that I want to do in my own version. So maybe this is the visual hook that I use for my salted maple shaken espresso, because it looks like that worked. And then I could use a currently trending audio to kind of pair everything together. So that's hook layering. That is just one element of video packaging. something else to consider and pay attention to when you're doing your content research are the different types of video formats that you will come across and this is again going to help you decide okay what's going to be the best way to deliver my video idea or piece of information we have about five formats that are the most common formats people create their content under we have face to camera like this i am talking to the camera face to face you and me This could be educational videos. It could be vlogs where you're talking to the camera. It could be storytelling where you're just like, oh my gosh, the craziest thing just happened to me. You could be giving a tip or something that you learned. You were listening to a podcast and had a revelation. Pull your phone out like you're on FaceTime with a friend and you're talking to the camera super casual. So you have face to camera. That's an option. Next, we have voiceover. This is when you... have obviously your voice recording over the video that is playing again this could be storytelling it could be educational inspirational could be a vlog talking through your day what you did issues you ran into so voiceover style then you have b-roll with trending audio and then usually there's a text hook so a-roll mainframe b-roll is like the show don't tell and so it's like clips of you at the gym working out doing laundry you're not really talking to the camera it's just clips of things coffee typing on a keyboard b-roll so you have a b-roll paired with a trending audio and then text we usually see these in like a seven second format or it could be like an entire morning routine in a 30 second aesthetic coffee vlog or something there's no talking no voiceover it's just relying on the music you also have reaction based content or even like stitches duets where you're reacting to other people's content even if you're doing green screen videos where maybe an article came out of something relevant in your industry you could talk and react to the article or the thing event that is happening reply or stitch other creators content do you agree disagree with the video so you have reaction content and then we also have like the lip sync if there's a trending audio and you're like lipping whatever the audio says or even like just dance trends lip syncing trends those are kind of all i kind of put into one thing so there's lots of different video formats that you could deliver your content in and then another thing that you can think about when it comes to video packaging is the value that you will be delivering within the video so i like to think that there are four main different ways to deliver value you have and i call them value pillars but you have educational content entertaining inspirational and relatable now i know this is like a lot so Let me just say these are all options and what I want you to do is to try all of the options. Try everything. I think that is one of the biggest mistakes that I see creators and my students making is they will find one video format. and one value pillar that works for them or that they feel comfortable with and they will just stick to that and then they'll only do that for like 30 to 60 posts and they'll they'll come to me and be like millie i'm not growing what's going on they look at their profile i give them an audit and i'm like well you are sticking to b-roll style videos seven second videos with the trending audio and text and it's inspirational it's like motivational quotes and that is all you've been doing for two months you gotta change it up so that is one of the biggest mistakes that i see people make and the reason i'm sharing all of this is not to overwhelm or confuse and be like oh my gosh i have to do all of these oh my goodness like you don't have to do them all all the time But when you're in these initial phases of growing and trying to figure out what's going to connect with your audience, I want to show you that the options are endless. And that's an exciting thing, not a scary thing. It's exciting because you're like, if you did one video and you're talking through, here's my salted maple ice latte recipe and talking to the camera didn't work, you can make the same thing. This time, do voiceover. just record yourself making it and then do a voiceover talking how to make a salt and maple blah blah blah blah okay if that didn't work fine shorten it again make it like a 10 second quick little thing with like text saying salt and maple ice latte recipe parentheses no syrups needed recipe and caption it's like a quick 10 second aesthetic with an aesthetic trending audio it's the same video idea just delivered in so many different ways and so it's really cool that all the outside of the box thinking that you get to do when you play with different video formats. Same thing with the value pillars. If you are creating coffee content, how can you create coffee content that's educational? How can you create coffee content that's entertaining? Brittany does an amazing job at that because her vlogs are so fun and fast paced and The editing is great. The transitions are phenomenal. So she does educational because she teaches different recipes, but she also does entertaining. And then how do you make coffee content that's inspirational? She has this storytelling where she's like, okay, a year ago from today, I got this espresso machine and now I have 10,000 followers. And it's like this inspirational aspirational, like, oh my gosh, that's so cool. That's motivating. I want to do that. And how do you make relatable coffee content? Oh, you threw the milk up in the air and then it fell to the floor and it spilled everywhere. So like it just opens your mind to see all the different options and ways that you can create content. And so these are not to overwhelm. I don't want you to see these and go, oh my gosh, I have to do all these. No, these are just tools that you can keep in your back pocket. And when you're feeling stuck, you could come back to these tools and go, okay. What do I need to change up? What do I need to dabble with today? When's the last time I did face to camera when I was talking to the camera? Oh, I haven't. Let me try that. When's the last time I tried an educational piece of content? That is just like my little spiel. there's so many different ways to create content even with one video idea i did a whole video on this too where it was like turning one vlog into 10 pieces of content and so that's another video that i can put in the card but it's it's fun it's exciting it lets you explore so many options and yeah we'll talk a little bit more about piecing all of this together at the end this will all click together so i'm just like wanting to show you all these little things. And at the end, I'll show you how to piece everything together to come up with a solid brand strategy for your content creator goals. So it'll all click, but now that you have your content calendar create, and by the way, this content calendar is really cool. I have, these were other examples that I did in another video, but. what's really cool is like when you have an idea that you want to do you can click and drag it to like okay cool i'm gonna prep this and now like oh i'm gonna move this one to editing and so everything is like drag and droppable and then also if you have dates on anything i have the content calendar set up so that it automatically syncs to the calendar view so if i change the date to this coffee recipe to march 9th and then we go back now march 9th it is appear it has appeared on the calendar ideally you do have a content calendar because it helps again with the batching ahead if you're a batch ahead type of a person or even brainstorming i think brainstorming in a calendar format or somewhere other than a notes app helps keep all your thoughts organized because you could really analyze hooks and editing and pacing pillars all the things so that's why i like to use more of a dashboard like this instead of a notes app but once you have some ideas ready to go content ready to create you'll probably want to know okay how often do i post that's a question we're briefly going to touch on because i get it all the time the key word here and you are going to hate it is consistency yay all you have to do is post consistently the end what does consistency mean notice consistency isn't The definition isn't post every day. Yeah, posting every day is a form of consistency. But ideally, you want to be a content creator, full-time content creator. You need to find a frequency and posting cadence that works for you and your specific lifestyle. If you have a full-time job and seven kids, posting every day might not be realistic. That might not work out for you. Maybe it does. I don't know. But what matters at the end of the day is finding a schedule that you can realistically stick to for the next year if you were to go all in for the next year what's something realistically you could stick to for a year and when i say realistically stick to i want to rephrase that what is the minimum posts per week you think you could do for a year minimum not like oh yeah i'm feeling good let's do every day it's like okay well if i'm sick or if it's that time of month or if i'm having a bad week i think i could probably but i could do three posts so ask yourself what is your minimum posts per week that you can do because with that as your set schedule let's say that's three posts a week monday wednesday friday with that as your set schedule that means other four days the world is your oyster you can still post on those days but if you don't post those days no biggie because your consistency is monday wednesday friday You're always posting every Monday, Wednesday, Friday to TikTok. And then those other days you have, maybe there's a trend and you're like, oh, I want to hop on this trend to let me do this real quick, post it on a Saturday, be crazy. That's what I do. My team and I, our posting schedule for Instagram and TikTok is Monday. Wednesday, Friday. We leave Tuesdays and Thursdays open for trends or for brand collaborations. If a brand comes to us and they're like, hey, do you actually have room to fit this collaboration into like your content calendar two weeks from now? We usually leave Tuesdays and Thursdays open just in case a collab comes up. So minimum posts per week. Now, I will say typically what we hear, we hear on Instagram, if you could post three to five reels per week. On TikTok, everybody says one post a day. And then YouTube, the average is one long form video per week. That is just like the average. I'm not saying that is the way to be successful. It's just the average of what people have said works well, but it's not needed. the last thing you want to do is say you're going to post every day and burn yourself out and then quit and then stop posing for five months because the the cool thing with consistency is not only is it great for the algorithm and it's great for your audience because they follow you and they know they can expect from you but also brand collaboration wise, you're going to get more opportunities for PR and collabs when you're posting consistently because brands, when they're deciding who to work with, they're looking at how often you're posting. And I'm not saying they look to make sure you're posting every day. They look to see, has this creator been consistent in their upload schedule for the past few months, three months, right? But if they see you post for two weeks, and then you stop for two months and then you post for two weeks and then you stop for two months doesn't matter if you post it every day for two weeks they want to see oh this person posts three times a week they've been doing that for six months i know i can rely on them to send them pr work with them collab with them they're serious they're a serious content creator so that's like the perk of consistency the creators that are the most successful are creators who found a way to implement content creation into their day-to-day lifestyle i think that's like the secret of being a content creator is finding a way to blend content creation into your day-to-day life for me i had them separated for a long time of like okay there's content creator millie and then there's real life millie and that's fine to do that worked for me for about four or five years but now that i am a mom and i have a baby It's harder for me to separate the two and separate time for, okay, I carve out time for content creation. Now I have to figure out how can I just add content creation into my day-to-day flow? That's why I started posting coffee videos because I'm like, I make coffee every day. I need to be filming and have content ready to go. So I'm just going to start filming what I'm already doing. So I think the most successful content creators or creators who have been doing this for the longest, they have found ways to implement every phase of the content creator process, filming, editing, scheduling, posting, coming up with ideas. They found ways to implement that into their routines, their weekly routines, their monthly routines, their daily routines, and just overall new habits, just like going to the gym. That's kind of what content creation becomes. It becomes a lifestyle, a habit to film, a habit of a routine of, okay, I edit my videos with my morning coffee. So Your frequency will just depend on you, your lifestyle, and how you're layering and implementing content creation into your day-to-day life and what works well for you. Now, as you're posting, you're likely going to be doing some analytic check-ins. These are super important. It's going to guide you in your future content to tell you what's working, what isn't working, or could be improved on. and these are what i like to do every 30 days and i still do this every 30 days because the fun thing about being a content creator is like once you lock in and you find a video style that works it's only going to work for some time because interests change social media changes and you and your content are always going to be evolving and growing and innovating so i do analytic check-ins every 30 days if your goal is growth That's what we're focusing on in this video. There's other goals like making money, increasing engagement, et cetera, et cetera, but gross. I want to go to content you shared. This is my professional dashboard. We're going to filter over the last maybe three months, filter, and we're going to sort by metric. I want to see what content is giving me the most followers. It looks like an edits tutorial. brand collaboration example and this cool how to turn one video into 10 posts hack i'm looking at top videos it looks like brand collabs are a common theme we have brand collab brand collab pr making money video engagement and i'm also going to scroll to the bottom because i'm curious like what doesn't get followers because that's also important to know i don't care about stories I just want to see my reels follows okay so the ones that don't bring in followers are like the personal stuff so my last November to this November one little reminder making Thanksgiving meal in a bag donations inspirational content relatable content those aren't getting like follows but my educational stuff on brand collaborations and making money those get me follow so if my goal is to get more followers i'm going to focus on making more videos similar to this as opposed to the inspirational relatable stuff doesn't mean they don't perform well it just means again if my goal is growth we're going to focus on the thing that is bringing us growth i typically do my content research and analytic check-ins once a month and i'm always planning for the next month to come or i'm one month ahead when planning for content so that is going to be your content strategy for growing organically across platforms i know i focus mostly on short form content i feel like that is mostly where my followers and viewers are interested in so again if you're interested in youtube i have plenty of youtube growth strategies on my youtube channel or videos related to that on my youtube channel and also i have a full youtube course that's inside the bsp model and it teaches everything youtube for sake of time and i've already been filming for five hours we're gonna jump to profit now there are lots of ways to make money as a content creator you have ugc user generated content making merck platform monetization brand collaborations affiliate digital products having a membership offering some sort of like coaching I mean even even courses so there's a lot of different income stream options I want to finish that okay for this video though I want to focus on like the top three that students are usually the most interested in so we are going to talk about brand collabs digital products and platform monetization i will say affiliates and ugc are probably the secondary most popular income streams that people are interested in i have videos on both of these things so you could go to my channel and again these income streams i have they're fully fleshed out and taught in the bsp model but for sake of time and my apple pen dying we're just going to talk about the three most common ones starting with platform monetization let's talk about instagram when it comes to just instagram specific monetization tools you have badges you have gifts subscriptions or membership bonuses And then of course, you could like sell digital product with your LinkedIn bio or land brand collaborations. But I'm talking platform monetization tools specifically. These are the four and eligibility is going to vary depending on each individual income stream. So like badges, you have to have 10,000 followers to get access to it. Gifts, you only need 500 followers to have access to it. So the eligibility will vary depending on the tool or feature. Then we have TikTok. TikTok. You have a lot more options. You have the creator fund, TikTok shop, subscriptions or memberships again, series, video gifts, live rewards, TikTok one, incentive programs. I spelled that wrong. And even like work with artists, but that's like specific to artists or et cetera. Again, eligibility will vary depending on country follower count or depending on features. So like creator fund, I think you have to have 10,000 followers. TikTok shop, you have to have 1,000 followers to promote within TikTok shop or 5,000 to promote other sellers. So eligibility will vary. And then of course, our big kahuna, our lovely YouTube monetization, which I love. They have ad revenue. So that's like when ads play on this video and you get a percentage of it and then membership options supers or gifting youtube shopping so you could link products in your videos it's kind of like affiliates and player for education now youtube monetization i'm just going to read off of my notes here because there's two different tiers there's audience funded income which is like supers and membership so it's where your audience are kind of paying you can get access to that or qualify for that when you hit 500 subscribers you have 3 000 watch hours in the last 12 months so 500 subs and then 3 000 watch hours Or if you're focusing on shorts, you need 30 or 3 million shorts views in the last 30 days. So that unlocks fan funding. Then to get access to like the main monetization, you do need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the last 12 months. And then that gives you access to all monetization on YouTube. Honestly, I really don't think Instagram's monetization is that good. I've never heard good things. I don't have a good experience with it. I've never heard of an Instagram creator being like, yeah, I make all of my money on Instagram monetization. It's usually like brand collaborations or selling digital products. But I do hear people saying they are making full-time incomes with both TikTok and YouTube. If platform monetization is your goal, one of these two are going to be your best bet. If you're a short-form creator, TikTok. If you're a long-form creator, YouTube. Because remember, YouTube is going to take you a little bit longer, but the monetization is pretty good, pretty high over here. TikTok's quicker. It'll work best with like TikTok shop here and even like maybe live. So again, depends on your goals. Now let's move on to my personal favorite, and that is creating a digital product. I personally think every single creator can benefit from selling their own digital products, just like having a freebie. Offering a digital product is going to be so, so, so powerful. Because you can set it up in a way where it's passive income. You create it one time, you put it in your link in bio, and it's constantly generating revenue for you as you grow. My personal favorite way to set up your digital product is if you have a freebie, you can set up an email automation so that people are upsold to your paid digital product. Let's say this is like a $29 product. Anytime somebody downloads your freebie, You set up a sequence in Stan store where they get to the delivery email, right? They're like, Hey, here's your freebie. Woo. And then maybe like a day later, they get a little educational email about, let's say this freebie is 50 hooks to increase engagement on your Instagram reels, right? This one is here's some extra tips for going. making viral reels and then this one is like a testimonial of here's how jess grew 100 000 followers on instagram in less than six months and then you have like this boom if you want to create viral reels here is a 29 mini course that's going to teach you how to grow to 100 000 followers right so like this digital product relates to the freebie which was like 50 reels hooks to increase engagement and then ultimately people probably want more followers naturally they're connected that way you never really have to sell because some people don't like selling but you have the emails do it for you and all of that is just set up again in your stand store digital product approach is going to be similar to a freebie approach where it's like oh identify a problem create a solution knowing that people will always pay for convenience let's do some examples together industry problem solution if we're in the social media industry specifically content creator tips like myself maybe a problem that people face They have a hard time landing brand collaborations or they don't know how to even work with brands, how the heck to set their rates or anything. Maybe my initial solution, land collab solution is, okay, here's some free pitch templates. Here are how you can write emails and land brand collaborations. Pitch email templates. So that's the free. solution and then later the more advanced solution or transformation i could offer them is like a collab master bundle this is going to be everything you need to land brand collaborations not only is this going to be extra pitch templates but it's also going to show examples of how those pitches were used negotiation email templates it's also going to have a rates calculator and a dashboard like a notion calendar to track all collaborations so that you could stay organized and grow your income as a content creator landing brand collaborations so this is the one that i could charge for same pain point brand collabs we solve the initial interest which is okay how do i land on pitch templates okay well like now that you're landing them what else we need to learn how to negotiate you need to learn how to set your rates you need to organize your brand collapse so this is like that initial pain point that entry point of okay let me solve this one thing for you and then that's going to probably lead to more problems down the line and you're going to need answers to those so the paid one is going to be down the line here is how to solve the rest of that problem that is one example another example let's say you are in the gardening niche or industry solution or problem somebody faces is they never know what soil to use when repotting plants or plant planting season the seasonal seeds they never know what soil to use so your solution maybe you have like a soil recipe book which is actually a thing recipe book with over like 20 different soil options depending on what the person is planting repotting etc indoor outdoor all the things this could be the free thing it helps with that first pain point it's like soil planting right that first pain point and then down the line that'll probably open up other pain points even though you know the soil okay well now how do you actually care for the plant it's going to be a full plant care guide Never kill another plant again, right? That's like the subtitle. And this is going to include how to identify different pot sizes, when to plant certain plants depending on the season, lighting. watering, making sure a plant doesn't die, how to identify how to fix a plant if it's dying, like identifying different issues. So it's like a full plant care guide. Again, you can work on like craft the title to make it sound even catchier with Chachapi tea. But this is kind of how my brain works when creating a digital product is the freebie helps with that first pain point. Somebody wants it. They're like, this is what I want right now. It might not be like what they need, but they want it. And then this is going to deliver on the rest of the need and the rest of the path. For tools with creating your digital product, Canva. My students and I, we've all used Canva for creating digital products. And then, of course, set it up and sell it through Stan. That setup is literally so easy. You go to your store, new product, sell digital product. You set your price. You upload your file. Boom shakalaka. You're able to make money. It shows up in your Stan store. and you get 100 of whatever that's one of the things that i love about stan is there's a lot of other lincoln bio tools they actually charge per transaction so if you're selling something for 27 that lincoln bio tool will actually take 10 or whatever percentage of every transaction whereas with stan store you're paying 29 a month and if somebody buys a 27 product you get the 27 so that's what i love about that of course they have another tier for like create the pro version which is i think 99 a month that's for the advanced email automations and funnels but if you just want to set up your stand store set up your freebies set up your digital product to sell set up make money 29 a month no this video is not sponsored by stan i have worked with them in the past and i am like an ambassador for them and i've been since the beginning of time i just genuinely love what they're doing i believe in their product now we'll talk about how to make money with your digital product in a second but what i want to first talk about identifying what to make as a digital product can be the same process as identifying what to make for a freebie using pinterest studying your niche neighbors seeing what they are selling and ask yourself if that's something you want to sell or even the answer can come from your audience. I have a student who she's in like the growth phase where she's just getting started on YouTube and she's just creating vlog content there. And right now she's just not able to come up with the. right digital product. It just doesn't feel right for her. And that's okay. Because I think as you grow, sometimes the answer will come from your audience themselves. They will ask you, Hey, how do you do XYZ? Or, Oh my gosh, I need all the products you recommend for curly hair because she does curly hair content. And so maybe her freebie is going to be that list of like all the products you need for curly hair and then like the order in which to apply them. So that could be the free product, but. Those ideas can come over time. It might not be something that you set up right now. It might be something that you set up later, but the sooner, the better, because the sooner your income streams are set up, the sooner you're going to be making money. So that's why I like to be thinking about monetization in the beginning. That way, if you have that clarity of knowing what you want to make money for, you can set that up and start that from the very beginning. It doesn't matter how many followers you have, you can start making money. But sometimes that clarity doesn't come until a little bit later. all right let's talk about working brand collabs we have changed batteries on everything like 500 times we are in the home stretch everything is dying cameras mics ipad pencil okay ipad's not too bad but the pencil keeps dying so we're gonna make the most and keep doing as much as we can before everything goes kaput when it comes to brand collaborations there's some tips that you can implement to get started with working with brands. So let's first talk about how to get started and getting on brands radars. So let's say getting started. You want to get free lenses. Start making content with your Sony camera. about lenses if you don't have them do the green screen screenshots talking about different lenses and product reviews start creating content now that's going to capture the brand's attention you can even tag the brand in your content that you're creating for example for me i totally manifested this, but I wanted a new espresso machine. And I had started posting coffee content on my It's Modern Millie TikTok and Instagram. And coffee has obviously nothing to do with teaching content creators how to make content. But like I had said, I needed to figure out a way to integrate content creation to my lifestyle. So I started filming my morning coffee. And instead of like coffee tips, coffee recipes, I started storytelling and sharing. how I got started as a content creator, creator tips that I wish I knew when I was getting started. And just from creating these creator tips series videos through visual coffee content, I got sent a new espresso machine because the brand's like, hey, we want you to use this espresso machine in your content. So create the content now that you want to capture brand's attention. Even the first big name brand that I worked with. I only landed the collaboration because I kept tagging them and engaging with them on socials. It was on Instagram. I had just hit 10,000 followers and it was Forever 21. At the time I was doing portrait modeling. I wasn't teaching content creation. I was doing portrait modeling and I was always wearing Forever 21. So I tagged them in every single post where I was wearing their clothes. And if they posted something on their stories, I was replying to their stories. I was commenting on their content. And sure enough. I get a collab with Forever 21 and I get $500 to buy whatever the heck I want at the store and post about it. That was literally it. So that's what you need to do. You need to start creating content now relevant to the collapse that you want. And don't be afraid to tag the brand. Mention them in your stories. Post about the content, the brands that you love now. If there's a specific face serum that you love, post about it now. Make content about it now. brands see that you're already creating branded content they're more likely to want to work with you and same with your audience if you're already talking about products that you love it's not going to be whiplash to your audience when you get a brand collab because they're like oh yeah sally may already talks about the her favorite coffee syrups oh it makes sense that this brand partnered with her because she's been talking about these coffee syrups for a dang long time so tag them Create content now. Start talking about it. Share your favorite products. That is how you practice and build the skill of creating content that feels organic and natural when relevant to products and brands. Instead of like, you never create a branded thing ever. You never talk about your favorite products. And then you get to this brand that's like, we want you to talk about our tea. And then you're like sitting there with their tea and you're like, oh, I don't know how to talk about a product to my audience. this is my favorite tea. And then you don't know what to do because you haven't been practicing. So start creating now. We already talked about consistency before. So that's important. I'll put it here just as the reminder. We also talked about putting your email in your bio. So put your email in bio. There are third-party tools that brands use to scout out content creators and those third-party tools. they're often on their laptop desktop and what they could do is they could filter by creators who have emails listed or they could even just search dot com and anyone who has dot com in their bio will appear in search results it doesn't matter if you have the email button on your instagram profile because when you're on desktop if they go to your instagram profile they don't see the email button They don't have any way to contact you if your email is not in your bio. Make sure your email is easy to find, easy to access. Same thing with TikTok. Same thing on YouTube. Make sure it's public and easy to access. Now, another thing that you could do is to join third-party platforms. I talked about how brands use their party tools and platforms to scout out content creators. There are third-party platforms for you as a content creator where you could apply to campaigns and apply to brand collaboration opportunities. My favorite is Aspire IQ. This is the platform where I landed my first paid brand collaboration ever. And I've landed multiple collabs through Aspire IQ paid. My first paid collab was like... Not great, not authentic. I just said yes to it because I was like, oh my gosh, it's paid. It was like a skinny tea product, which regrets. Don't just say yes because it's money. That's silly. But then I ended up getting, what was another paid one I did? Hippies, the snacks. Oh my gosh, love hippies. And the paid partnerships that I did, multiple that I did with them was through Aspire IQ. Another one is hashtag paid. There's popular paid. there's obviously ly and then if you are just interested in ugc specifically you have join brands that's a really good one honestly though just from doing these three you can automatically start getting pr and partnerships this one will help increase the chances of getting those opportunities for paid partnerships because those will often come via email and then this is just like that extra cherry on top if you're not seeing a lot of traction you can absolutely do the third-party platforms now when you're comfortable and you have some videos under your belt where you're like yeah i'm comfortable talking about products in my content you can pitch to brands too the conversion of landing a paid collab on a first pitch is low but pitching is a great way to make connections and introduce yourself to a brand get your foot in the door with the brand it's not to oh i'm gonna land a paid collab just from pitching this brand that's not the intention it's to create connections and see if there's a space for you to work with the brand in the future let's talk about pitching for a second when it comes to pitching if you like really want to get the ball rolling typically you could send and schedule 10 pitches every single week and Again, the intention is not to make money. It's to create a genuine connection with a brand and genuinely ask, is there a way I can support you with your business goals right now? Are you exploring influencer marketing? Do you have upcoming campaigns that I can assist with? I saw that you recently launched this product. Is that something that would be helpful to post to my audience about? So it's genuinely wanting to help and spread the word. Pitching comes from a more authentic place when it's a brand that you already love and use and post about. And you can use that as proof in a pitch. I'm going to pop a... free pitch template that i have used in the past to create connection it works it's like a timeless one it always works and it's a great way to get your foot in the door and introduce yourself to brands and like i said you're maybe pitching 10 brands a week you're not expecting a response okay you don't have to do 10 brands a week either it could be like five brands a week so let's say five to 10 brands a week if you like pitching in brand clubs is your main goal you're pitching maybe five to ten times a week and you're sending the emails probably i would say on like a tuesday or a wednesday maybe earlier in the morning because monday they're catching up from the weekend friday they don't want to respond to anybody so tuesday wednesday is kind of like the sweet spot and i would say probably before a lunch break so figure out where that business is based figure out the time zone and make sure you're sending your pitches before someone's lunch break because after lunch we're snoozing we don't want to be productive so ideally it's like a morning pitch that you're scheduling to auto send and then when you pitch don't do attachments friends okay no attachments that is how your stuff ends up in spam in junk you could do hyperlinks instead Like if you want to hyperlink to your TikTok or your Instagram page, that's great. I want you to keep it short and sweet, like three paragraphs, three to four paragraphs. And by paragraphs, I don't mean there's like 20 sentences per paragraph. Maybe there's like three to five sentences per paragraph, short, sweet, to the point. And again, you are going in with a service-based. mindset okay how can you help the brand that is a successful partnership when you work together on a main goal as opposed to what can I get from you can you send me free stuff can you pay me ish that's not what we're doing brand collaborations are the most successful and brands will keep coming back to you if you are always working with them to achieve said goal now something I forgot to touch on was the fact that brands love a targeted audience they love a targeted audience if you your audience is moms and they are like a postpartum workout set brand oh they're gonna love to work with you because your audience is exactly their audience so having a very specific audience and a demographic of maybe like u.s based or a city based or knowing your ratios of like demographic male female country all the things knowing those demographics are huge pulls for brands because you could show them be like hey guess what my audience is literally your audience and that's why we can work together so that is something i had forgot to mention on the how to get started what's important for brands what they look for when it comes to how much to charge there is no set standard unfortunately i think that kind of what people say is they say to charge one cent per your follower number but that doesn't take into account, like, I don't know, your experience as a content creator or even your expertise. Like if you are a certified, you've been a certified fitness coach and you've been coaching for 15 years, that doesn't take into account your certifications, your level of expertise, your not only experience as a content creator and work with brands, but your expertise level in your field doesn't take into account the time. that it takes for you to create said content so i i don't love this method i it just doesn't calculate everything that you need so i actually have something average impact level times follower number plus contract terms this is kind of the general formula that i use again it is not the only way there's no set formula this is just like a starting point that i use because i feel like it works best to calculating all of your different levels of expertise so let's say you have 10 000 followers and then you want to figure out what your average impact rate level is which i could talk about brain collaborations for literally hours but i don't have hours follow a number of times average impact level plus you need to know how to read a contract so you're going to want contract terms average impact level this takes into account your engagement rate because brands do look at that it takes into account your experience with brand collaborations your expertise and your impact how well known are you in your industry right now so like on a scale of one to five how good is your engagement rate this is like very tight I'm kind of breezing through this because I have a whole video deep diving on this formula. So if you want like a full deep dive video on the formulas, I have like platform specific videos, an Instagram one, how to calculate your rates for Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. I have videos on all those again, free on my channel because each platform is a little different. Like for YouTube, there's long form collabs and then there's shorts. And then there's also like integrations, which is a 30 to 60 second mention in a YouTube video, but that there's also a dedicated. YouTube partnership, which means they want the whole video to be it. But then there's also like an, another type of integration where it's like two minutes. So there's again, so many different things that go into it, but this is kind of a summary on a scale of one to five. How great is your engagement rate? Let's say it's a two. What's your experience level with collabs, never done collabs, your expertise, pretty solid impact, not well known. Add these up two plus two plus one is five. there are you finding the average so five divided by four let's do that oh where's five divided by four 1.25 so this turn that into a percentage that's your average impact level again i know math boo that's what you'll multiply followers for a starting base rate 125. this is for the smallest like a mention starting and then you're going to add the contract terms okay so it's kind of like the general formula that i use i have a full breakdown but i do want to quickly talk about contract terms because i want to make sure you're not taken advantage of when working with brands and things to look out for first thing to look out for is usage rights This is going to state in a contract who owns the content that you're creating and what they're allowed to do with them. So if the brand wants to obtain usage rights to your content, they could obtain organic rights where it's like, hey, we could post your content to our socials. Or paid, hey, we could run ads to your content. Or full, hey. We can use your content however the heck we want. We could put it on a billboard. We can put it in ads. We could put it on our website, in our email list. Full and the big red flag, perpetual. You'll see this as perpetual in perpetuity. This is like, hey, we actually own your content for forever and could do whatever the heck we want with it. So if you ever see perpetual in perpetuity in a contract, that my dear. is red flag red flag we do not want that these three you can charge for and you will charge extra for and so these three are fine and usually there's an expiration date so it's like oh we want to obtain organic usage for three months or want to run ads to this for six months and you will charge for that We had that 125 as like our starting rate. So if they want paid usage rights, you're going to add paid usage to your price. Now, there's also exclusivity. I love talking about this stuff. Okay, exclusivity. This means that the brand is saying you cannot work with certain competitors. Ideally, in the contract, you ask them to name. them specifically so if you're working with colgate toothpaste and they want 60 days of exclusivity you want to see in the contract okay well what are those brands that you don't want me to work with is it crest is it hello is it what have you so you're gonna ask okay can you list out the brands if it's 60 days of exclusivity you can charge for that typically 30 days is included because that's just like natural like i'm not gonna talk about a competitor in the next 30 days that doesn't make sense that's not organic but anything beyond 30 days you can charge for okay i guess another term this isn't anything that you would necessarily charge for technically but deliverables is usually like the the listed content that's being asked of you so it's like oh we want three reels two story mentions and then the reels repurpose to tick tock that's the deliverables that's the ask that's what you were going to be delivering to the brand so it's just like a good term to know that's usually what's listed out it's under the deliverables that you'll be creating for the brand something else to pay attention to is like the turnaround time or when you need to post a video by if it's a quick turnaround say under two weeks you could usually charge extra for a quick turnaround money and same thing with revisions how many revisions do they get for free check see if that's in the contract because then if if this isn't mentioned anywhere in the contract you could be going back and forth 10 times and you're like i have to keep refilling this because there wasn't a revision clause so i do like up to two revisions included and then after that x amount per additional revisions You could even charge extra for if the brand wants you to put their link in your bio. So you could charge extra for that. So all of these things are things to consider and add to your final total. Again, there's no standard set rate. Usually I'm going to be quite frank and honest with you. Most of the time content creators are pulling numbers straight out of thin air. Okay. We're making numbers up and what you charge for one brand. might be different from another brand full transparency lady where's my phone my dog's behind me full transparency let me tell you how much i charged for like a reel with one brand versus another brand for one brand a reel where i was mentioning their product it was three thousand dollars for a different brand and that was because they bundled multiple reels so it's three thousand per reel another brand they wanted one singular dedicated reel that they could run ads to for a certain amount of time and that was seven thousand dollars another brand a reel was closer to ten thousand dollars another brand thirty five hundred dollars so it's going to be different depending on all of these things and even the brand like if it's a big name like forever 21 they may have a budget for a bigger spend and they might have more strict asks versus a smaller brand or a small business, they may not have the budget and that's okay. You don't have to charge a ton for every single brand collab, but just keep that in mind. Numbers are going to change for every single collaboration. And so what I say to you then is if you're going to be charging for brand collaborations, if you say a number and you're like, cool, this is going to be $300 and a brand's like, okay, let's move forward. That is a sign. Next time you need to charge a higher rate because if they immediately said yes, after you said a number, you probably could have gone higher and then negotiated down. So I always say, try to say a number that's a little higher because you could always negotiate down. But if you say a hundred, it's harder to go back and ask, oh, actually it's going to be $500 now. There's so much that goes into negotiation too, but this kind of this basics of rates and what you could charge for some things that you could charge for and how. things will affect your pricing i could talk about brand collaborations for freaking forever but i did want to wrap everything up with like okay how does all this come together because you've been here with me from the beginning of this video and there's probably some loose ends but i want to tie up and give you like your ultimate strategy that is going to drive the needle forward and move the needle forward for you your business and make sure that you are staying focused and having a business that is realistic to maintain and constantly keeping your business running. So how do you come up with a strategy for that? Okay. There are four main drivers that are going to drive the intention of your content. There's going to be money, right? You need to make money as a content creator, growing your email list, because all of you have an email list. There's going to be nurturing your audience and making sure people who do follow you are connected or even like growing your audience. So there's focusing on your audience. And then there's also you making sure you are having fun. You're still creating videos that you want, even if they don't have strategy. So these are kind of like the four main drivers that really will keep your business running and have your business well-rounded as a content creator. You are going to use these as like the big picture to lead and guide your content. Now we talked about. different content pillars or content buckets or life interests, right? With content pillars, there's like those subtopics. So if I teach social media, it could be like Instagram growth and then how to make money and then how to film, right? Those are the subtopics under content. Let's do my lifestyle example, right? So if my life pillars or those interests that I had were coffee, mom life, and workouts. If those are like the pillars that I'm rotating between topic wise, great. We just want to write that down. Then we have our method of delivery. These are, we have face to camera, voiceover, B-roll, reaction, and then trend. Okay. Those are the ones we went over. As a reminder, our value pillars, we have educational, entertaining, relatable. and inspirational this is how you're going to drive your content decisions boop boop okay first i want you to pick your intention what do you want to grow what do you want to focus on if that is money let's say one of your income streams is brand collabs okay so i'm gonna put brand collab here you want to make money with brand collaborations you're gonna pick a pillar where you want to do brand collaborations let's say for me it was like that coffee content and so i'm going to do a collab video related to coffee i'm going to choose my format of delivery let's do face to camera and it's going to be educational that is how i'm going to come up with my content so maybe it's going to be a okay ready a coffee related content where i'm talking to the camera educational that's going to attract brand collabs i'm gonna do how to use a ninja luxe cafe for the best iced lattes boom i have a ninja so if i wanted to work with ninja boom it attracts the brand i will be sure to tag them It is coffee related. So it fits in my pillar. I'm going to talk to the camera and talk through how to use the Ninja and this marks and checks off that educational value pillar. So that's one way to create a piece of content that's going to drive income for my business. Let's do another example. If your goal is to grow your email list and your freebie is ab separation. healing for postpartum women that kind of fits in like workouts and mom life. So email list, I'm going to do workouts and we already did face to camera, but maybe I want to do like a B roll with trending audio and I'm going to have this be inspirational. So it's going to be maybe like a seven second video with B roll doing like an ab workout. and the text on screen text hook is going to be something like pov you heal your ab separation after having a baby and can finally work out without being in pain again so that's the pov hook text and then the caption is call to action to the email list where you're directing people to download this workbook or this guide is going to teach them different exercises that they could do to heal their abs after having a baby so again we're just trying to figure out okay how can we constantly make sure every piece of content is being intentional and touching on all of the things that we learned today with audience there's different approaches to that so there's like audience growth or audience engagement we already know growth strategies but maybe with engagement that is replying to your audience's questions maybe they comment on a reel and they're like hey how do you do this you make a video answering that question because it's directly from your audience maybe that's about mom life balancing mom life with a newborn and you do it as a voiceover And it's a little bit entertaining because it's a vlog, but also educational because you're kind of talking through, okay, this is kind of how I balance mom life. This is like what my day-to-day looks like. It's vlog style. So that's nurturing your audience by posting about one of your pillars. That is how you can create a sustainable career as a content creator. Anytime I'm posting, I'm asking myself, okay, what is the intention with this video? Is this driving traffic to an email? list is this driving traffic to a course that i have is this gonna attract brands that i want to work with or is this a brand collab post right it's a brand cloud post and then also at the end of the day you want to make sure you are creating whatever the heck you want so layering in and making sure there's space for you to like it's okay to not have strategy sometimes. And you got really inspired to create a really cool book related idea where you're like, oh my gosh, there was a little free library in my neighborhood and I wanted to redo it and repaint it and give fresh books in there. So I'm going to just do a fun vlog documenting that process because it is fun for me and I love it. So this is how to make sure well-rounded you're hitting all these pillars that are going to drive your business as a content creator. i truly believe this video found you for a reason and the fact that you're watching to this point really shows how dedicated you are to becoming a content creator and i want you to know like you are not too late to start this journey you are not too far behind you are right where you need to be your path is set and ready for you to pursue and you honestly you deserve to live the life of your dreams and pursue this with resilience and passion and fire to have the dreams of being a content creator come true like you deserve that you can do it you are capable the fact that you're literally watching to this point if you've made it this far in your comment on this video use an orange heart because that's going to tell me who made it to this part of the video and y'all are the real ones you're y'all are the ones where i'm like okay you got this i believe in you you know so I hope this video brought you so much value and excitement and showed you that yes, you can become a content creator. I hope you got a lot of value from the workbook. If you didn't already download it, be sure to grab it. It is completely free. And at some point, if you need more guidance or you need more step-by-step in-depth tutorials on each of the things that we talked about and then some. of course i have the bsp model which is always open to you and you will get 30 days up the slack community where you can work with me and my team and get one-on-one feedback to improve and increase your the quality of your content your bio your strategy and your brand pitches everything that you need as a content creator so i hope you consider bsp model at some point in your creator journey Thank you so much for watching this video and I will see you in the next one. Follow your joy. Bye.

Welcome to my longest, most in-depth breakdown on becoming a Content Creator. In this video, I'll walk you through exactly how to BUILD your Content Creator business from scratch, SCALE it for real growth, and PROFIT so you can focus on becoming a full-time Content Creator. This is the same framework I teach inside The BSP Model®, laid out step-by-step with no gatekeeping. So, print out my free workbook, grab some popcorn, dim the lights, and enjoy!

FREE Workbook! Download ‘The Ultimate Creator Plan’ here: https://go.itsmodernmillie.com/creator-plan

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This masterclass-style video & thumbnail was inspired by Caleb Ralston: https://youtu.be/Ch4Sl0POBhU?si=tRVFwZm1b0h2CIBm

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - 00:00:40 Introduction
00:00:41 - 00:04:09 3-Phase Creator Framework
00:04:10 - 00:11:00 Growth Strategy
00:11:01 - 00:25:09 Primary Social Media Platform
00:25:10 - 00:43:00 Personal Brand Clarity
00:43:01 - 00:57:43 Optimize Your Profile
00:57:44 - 01:35:40 Email List and Freebie System
01:35:41 - 01:58:00 Content Research
01:58:01 - 02:21:30 Hook Layering
02:21:31 - 02:56:09 Monetization
02:56:10 - 03:03:09 Drive Sustainable Career Growth
03:03:10 - 03:05:10 Final Thoughts

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