Become a UGC Creator in 2024

1. Intro: I have zero doubts that you have the skills and the knowledge to get started with creating user-generated content. What's got you stuck is all the details. And that's exactly what I'm gonna be teaching in this course. From creating your portfolio to sending out your first pitch, negotiating pricing, and delivering that first video, I've got you covered, Hey, I'm Casey, I'm a content creator and a UGC creator. I have so much fun creating content for other brands. But I also get how confusing and overwhelming it can be to get started as a UGC creator. So I'm here to break it down to the basics and show you everything I've learned along the way to get started. 2. Project: Your project for this course is to pick one of your favorite things from around the house. Then you're going to use that product to plan, film, edit, and create your first UGC video. This could be anything from skincare too close to that afternoon caffeine picked me up that you can't live without and don't worry, there's going to be a worksheet with all of the details that you can download to help walk you through this whole process. It's also in one of the lessons we're going to cover. Not only is this a great project to get you started on your UGC journey? This video is going to be the first of the videos you create to build your portfolio. That portfolio is going to be essential for pitching yourself to break them. 3. What you need to start in UGC: Alright, let's start off with what all exactly do you even need to get started creating UGC and pitching brands? First up, you'll need some sort of website or portfolio. This doesn't have to be complicated and we're going to talk about this in its entirety in a separate lesson. Next, you need an email address. I strongly recommend that email address that is separate from your personal regular email and pick something that is professional sounding. It's not uncommon for people to get something like Casey ugc@gmail.com and use that specifically for your UGC creation. If you already have a more professional email like hello Casey jordan.com, That's a great place to I do recommend trying to stay away from e-mail addresses like skater girl 8725. Again, we want to establish you as a professional. You'll need a way to invoice and collect payment from the brands after you've completed the work and you get paid and you're going to need a smartphone and somewhere to create your content. Now you might notice I didn't say anything about needing a social media platform. This one, some people will say you need, some people say you don't. The key element of UGC content is you're often not posting it to your own platforms. That's why anybody can get into it anytime it's one of the beauties of UGC, I will argue there's some benefit to having UGC dedicated platforms because you can use that as an ongoing part of your portfolio. But if that feels overwhelming, don't worry about it yet. Again, to get started, you need a portfolio, a professional sounding e-mail address, a way to send invoices and collect payment and a smartphone and somewhere to record. 4. Key terms & phrases: Let's talk about some key terms and phrases that it's really helpful to know, not only for this course, but as you start having conversations with brand first up, let's talk about the CTA or call to action. This is a quick phrase often at the end of a video reminding the viewer what they can do. Now that the videos done, this might be a call for them to go buy, a call for them to click the link or call for them to drop a comment. It's not uncommon for brands to have specific CTAs that they're going to ask you to use in your videos. Also, having multiple CTAs is something we're going to talk about when it comes to packaging and pricing. Next up is the hook. This is the first two to 3 s of the video, the first sentence out of your mouth. This is what it's going to hook in the viewer and keep them watching for the duration of the video. Next up, you'll occasionally hear brands talk about the thumb stop rate or even just the stop rate. This is essentially a metric that measures how effective your hook was. How many people stop in that first 3 s and watch past the first 3 s. Another one you'll hear talked about, especially when it comes to paid ads, is the CTR or the click-through rate. This is the measurement of how many people watched the video and clicked through to what's on the other side of the video. Especially in ads where you can literally click on the video and it will take you to an outside link. That's that click-through rate. What are the number of people that clicked versus the number of people that watched? And last up for the sake of this course, we're going to talk about inbound versus outbound leads. Oftentimes starting out, you're going to rely heavily on outbound leaves. These are pitches that are coming from you outward to the brands in order to find work. So the inverse of that, one of our big goals is to get inbound leads when brands reach out to us, that's inbound and that is ideal because it takes less work from us because we aren't having to pitch and chase them. Alright, now that we've got some language, we've got some foundation of what we need to create our UGC, let's dive into building our portfolio. 5. Creating a portfolio: Now we're getting into the meat of this. Let's talk about creating your portfolio. I'm going to talk real quick about what you need in your portfolio, a few common mistakes to avoid. And then I'm going to show you one quick overview of one way to create your portfolio. So first up, what do you even need in your portfolio? Definitely need your name and headshot of yourself, preferably a newer photo, a few sentences about yourself and your area of expertise. If you have additional experience in content, content marketing, content strategy, be sure to include that here. Your portfolio is also going to include several samples of your work, both in video format and photo format. And don't worry if you haven't had any UGC jobs yet because we can still create those portfolios, videos and photos with products around your house. And to round out our portfolio, we're going to talk a little bit about packaging and pricing. So what are a few common mistakes that I see people making on their portfolios? One of the number one mistakes I see is while some portfolios are absolutely beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, they take way too long to get to the details and the important information about you. There's no need to explain what UGC is two brands, or to give them statistics about the value of UGC. If they've found you aren't interested in hiring you for UGC, they already know this stuff. Dive right into telling us who you are and why you're the right creator for the job. Ideally, we want brands to be able to start seeing your portfolio, the examples of your work in a scroll or less, one of the quickest and most cost-effective E free ways to get started with building a portfolio is actually using canva.com. All you need is the free account. And you can use Canvas templates to build and host a website. Once you've got your account setup, you're going to click that create, Design button, select website. This will open the Canvas website builder Interface kinda already has a wide variety of templates, including a couple of portfolio specific templates. Select a template that fits your needs and a suture aesthetics. I highly recommend something that is not to clutter. Colors are great. Clutters to be avoided from there, customize it, add in those things we talked about. Get us that headshot, your bio, what you specialize in, and dive right into our portfolio, videos and photos. And on the bottom of the website, put in your packages and your base pricing. Once you're satisfied with that website, click Publish, and you're good to go. This will generate that URL that you can now share whenever you need to share your portfolio. Again, this does not need to be big or fancy or complicated. We're looking for a few scrolls on the screen that tell us who you are. Show us what you can do. Tell us how much you cost and tell us how we can read you. That's it, That's all we really need. If you already have a website, I would recommend adding a portfolio page and again, keeping all of this information on a single page within your website. If you're feeling really stuck about what to create or how to make it look good. You can check out Etsy. There are a lot of pre-made Canva templates ready for UGC creators. So you can buy the template and all you need to do is plug and play your personal info, add your personal videos and photos. But really it's not that much harder to do it on your own. Now that we've got your portfolio, I'll set up, let's head over to the next lesson and start talking about pricing. 6. Pricing & packages: Welcome to lesson four. Let's talk about pricing packages and a few tips about getting paid. Pricing ultimately is a really individual process and decision. That said, I think the market standard right now at the time of recording this course is about $150 per one-minute video. A lot of new UGC creators want to market themselves a lot below that. But you're undercutting the market and you're doing yourself a disservice because there's a lot of work that can go into creating a 62nd video. So make sure you are charging for the time it takes to script and film and edit and build out that video is not just a 62nd video that you're charging for. It typically takes me about 2 h start to finish to create a 30-second video. When I'm pressing my packages, I need to keep that in mind and make sure that I'm compensating myself fairly. Also, if you're going to list your pricing on your website, which I think is a great idea. I would label it starting at the dollar amount. This gives you room to negotiate if and when you're ready to negotiate. When it comes to packaging videos, It's very common to have a set price for a single video, a discounted price for having three or more videos in a package, I use a set 20% off if it's three videos or more. So whatever that total would be for three videos, I take 20% off that. And that's the package price. Same if they were doing a package of phi of videos, what is the total price for five videos? Take 20% off that and that's their final price. And then you can also look at mix-and-match packages where you have videos and product photos. Pricing those a little bit higher than you would for a package with just video, because you've got to take time to take those photos. Another way to package content that is growing in popularity looks something like this. You're going to provide the brand for different hooks, recording each hook and cutting that video off two different bodies of content. This is gonna be the bulk of the video and then two different calls to action. Now the brand can use this to mix and match those hooks, bodies, and calls to action so they can create a whole bunch of different videos for themselves. I see this package style growing in popularity because it also gives brands the flexibility to be able to test and see what's converting better for them. Now I would pick one package styles starting out whether it's three videos for x amount or a package of hooks, videos and calls to action, just one package style and stick with that for your pricing structure to start out. One more really important thing about pricing. As you get more experienced and your quality improves, increase your prices. So you've got your prices. Let's talk real quick about getting paid when it comes to sending out your invoiced brands, there are a couple of options. Some creators prefer to charge 50% upfront and 50% upon delivery of the video. And some craters just at 100% upfront. There's not really a right or wrong answer. There are pros and cons to both. So do which one feels right to you when it comes to actually collecting the money. A couple of your best options are Zell, which has no transaction fees, but not all companies will use it. Another great option is stripe, but they do take a small transaction fee, but it's much more widely accepted. I personally have stripe ends l, So I can have an option for the business. A third option is using a service like honey books, which is a complete client management process. This software would be amazing for tracking everything from the invoiced and the contract all the way through collecting the payment. But this is a full software that requires a monthly fee. And so I'd hold off on using honey books until, you know, you've got some money coming in. But once you're ready to manage multiple projects at a time, this is a great way to go. So you finally have some money coming in from your UGC creation. Let's talk a couple of things about getting your finances in order so you don't get surprised when tax season rolls around. 7. Financial tips: My biggest tip when it comes to finances for UGC creators is treat this like the business that it is. Keep everything separate from your personal finance. Ideally even set up a separate bank account for everything that is business slash UGC related. I also have my UDC creation setup as a LLC sole proprietor business so that I have some legal protection for me separating me from the UGC work. Again, I'm not an expert in this, so I'm going to refer you to other people to learn more about setting up an LLC and why that matters. Keep in mind that this money that you get paid for UGC creation, you're going to have to pay taxes on it. So think about setting aside 30% from every check you get. But that number could vary state to state. So again, I would check with a tax professional to see what kind of percentage you should be saving for tax purposes. Also know that gifted products for UGC can be taxed. So keep a running record of all of the products and the value of that product that you are being gifted for videos. Next big tip is to save all of your receipts for anything related to creating UGC videos. In another video, we're going to talk a little bit about backgrounds. Save the receipts when you buy those materials, anything you bind specifically to help you with filming, editing, delivering your videos. Save those receipts for tax time. When tax season comes up, be sure to hire a CPA in your area to help you do this. Running your own business is slightly more complicated than just punching in some numbers on something like TurboTax. And so I think at least for you're starting out, it is absolutely worth every penny to hire a professional to make sure you do it right. Now that we have everything in your business and your portfolio all laid out. In our next lesson, we're going to start pitching to brands. 8. Pitching brands: Finally perfected your portfolio and now it's time to start finding some brands. Where do we find brands? There are a ton of ways and places to find brands to pitch to. So let's talk through wrong idea number one, when you're scrolling through TikTok or Instagram, when you see one of those add videos for a brand you want to work with, save it because you know that brand already works with UGC creators reach out to marketing agencies. Some of them don't actually have in-house UGC gigs yet. It might be able to help connect you with work. There's quite a growing UGC culture on Twitter, but be sure to really vet those jobs because there's also some scammers that are figuring out Twitter when you're scrolling Instagram or TikTok and you see one of your favorite brands and you know, you can help them out with a video from the user's perspective. Write it down, be sure to pitch them. A great option that a lot of people are missing out on is local companies. Local companies need UGC content too. So think about the companies in your area or local manufacturers that you'd love to work with and get to know other UGC creators on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter because often they're passing on jobs that don't fit them or that they don't have time for. So you could make connections and find other jobs through other graders using freelancing apps like fiber can be a great way to start. Fiber is actually one of my main sources of jobs. You just list yourself, your portfolio and your pricing there, and brands come to you. And there is also a growing number of absence services like below, B-roll, brand meet creator that are helping connect brands and creators. So be sure to get signed up with those apps and services to most of them are free to join. I recommend that you keep a notes app or a notion board where you keep a running list of these brands that you are finding all over the place and these opportunities that you're seeing. So you can make note of them so you don't forget for later. So now sit down with your list of brands and let's talk about pitching. The number one thing to pitching. Please. Do not use copy and paste email template scripts. Brands can tell from a mile away and they're going to digit as soon as they open it. One of the best ways to go about pitching brands is to do a little bit market research on them, See what they've got out there, see what the competitors are putting out, and see if you can see a gap in the brand's social media presence that you could help alleviate for them. You're going to come up with a little strategy, maybe the ideas for a couple of videos for them. You're going to pitch that to that. And this might feel like a lot of work. These steps can take maybe 15, 20 min. It doesn't have to be super deep. But getting custom and getting personalized to that brand and setting out better quality pitches is going to get you more yeses and save you tons of time of sending out, copy and paste super cold gross pitches. So let's take a quick look at an example of what this can look like. Ideally, market research also find the name of somebody who is in charge of marketing if you can, because that really helps if you can send the email directly to a person and not just to a general info at kind of email address. So it's going to look like this. Hi Rebecca and Casey from Instagram. And I have been noticing in your comments that a lot of your customers are asking for more tutorials on how to use your products. I'd love to do a series of rules about how to properly use your product for the best results. I'm UDC creator and I specialize in organic content for non-toxic companies, I'd love to send over some examples of the style of work that I'd love to do for your brand. If you have some specific results about thumb stop rate or click-through rates from previous work. This is a great place to include them. Don't worry if you don't have these numbers yet, wrap up the e-mail with would you like me to send over my portfolio? A lot of times it's advisable to hold off on sending the link to the portfolio right away. Because sometimes e-mails with links in them are the ones that get marked for spam. And this also gets a little buy-in from the person receiving the e-mail before we just dump our stuff on now, so you've been sending out pitches and starting to get yeses. Head over the next lesson and we'll talk about what to do next after you get a yes. 9. Starting a UGC job: You've got a brand that's interested in working with you. Now, what do you do before you start creating anything? Let's gather some more information. This is a great place to go ahead and create a form list of questions you can send to brands to make sure you cover all of these points and you don't miss any important information. Some of the things you want to be sure to ask about our brand guidelines. Are there any things you want to make sure you do say or don't say, ask about any colors or logos that they want to have included. If they don't provide you any information about the target audience, you may need to do a little bit of research on your own, but know who the video is aimed at and also be sure to get a creative brief and be clear about what style or objective that they're trying to reach with that video. Are they looking for an unboxing testimonial, a product demonstration, a how-to video. These are things you're going to need to know. Also ask about details like if they want captions, background music, text on the screen, things like that. And then last up, one of the most important details is you need to make sure you know what kind of ratio they want this in. If this is going to be for Instagram or TikTok, they're probably going to want to in nine by 16. But on the off chance they want it for something like YouTube, they might want to buy 16 by nine. So be sure to ask, You can avoid a lot of revisions and miscommunication by making sure you get all of these details upfront before you start creating anything. If they're not going to give you these details and they tell you, just do what you want. I get that in writing. Just to make sure we'll talk about contracts and negotiating in the next lesson. 10. Negotiations & contracts: Welcome to lesson eight. Let's talk about negotiations and contracts. I'm going to start this out by saying if negotiating with brands freaks you out, don't worry about in the start. Negotiation is very common in this industry, but it is not a requirement. And as you get more comfortable with how this whole creation process works, getting creative briefs and asking questions, you'll become more comfortable with the idea of negotiating. This is why it's also really important on your portfolio to say that your prices start at instead of what the price is because you have no room to negotiate if you just flat out told them their price, a great starting point when negotiations is actually to ask the brand what their budget is for this project and then tell them how much work you can do within that budget. That way, if their budget for that scope of work is just too low for you, you have the ability to come back and tell them how much work you could do for that price. There will be times in negotiation that brands are going to say no pass on your price and walk away. It is not a personal reflection on you or your skills. It is just part of business. Regardless the outcome, try not to internalize it too much because you know what your worth, you know what it takes to create this content for them after you've negotiated your price and all the details about what's going into this project, get a contract signed. Now I'm gonna put a disclaimer here. This again is not legal advice. I am not a legal professional. This is a high-level view of a couple of things to keep in mind. If you want to get a contract template or you need help with contracts, be sure to contact a professional, but having a solid contract in place can make or break you should something go wrong with a project. There are lawyers out there that specifically write contracts for UGC creators if you can, and you need to find one of them to get your base contract from. So here's a few things to keep in mind as you're building that contract, start date and end date. This will vary a lot with your business and your schedule, but a good timeframe is 14 days from the time you received the product. Let them know that they're going to be getting watermarked content until they have paid in full. Let them know how they're going to pay in full and when that payment is due by also include what that amount is that you agreed upon in the negotiation. A good practice is 50% upfront and 50% before the final delivery. Included within this price is how many rounds of revisions? Most common is only one round of revisions. And what the rate is, should they want more revisions than that one given round also makes sure that you, the creator, are not liable for any damages that are incurred from the content. Once you've got your contract written up, you can send it over as a plane PDF, but ideally send it in a way that's really easy for them to sign using a service like DocuSign. Or if you're using the honey books app, it's built right into the app. The easier it is for the brand to work with you, the happier they're going to be the contract is signed. Let's head over to Lesson Nine to talk about scripting and filming. 11. Scripting & filming: Alright, before we dive into lesson nine and talk about scripting and filming, I want to clarify that this lesson can be an entire course of its own. It can also vary widely depending on your skills, your equipment, and the software that you choose to use. Today, I'm going to cover the basics, assuming you have a smartphone to record and a place to do the recording, I actually do the majority of my UGC creation in the native camera app on my phone. I used cap cut for my editing. I use the TikTok pre-approved music library if I'm putting music with the video, and sometimes I'll use Canva if I need an additional graphic or sticker that I want to overlay on the video. It doesn't have to be fancy at all. Again, I'm going to walk through all of this on the PDF worksheet that comes with your project for creating your first video. So don't panic those details. Are there walking you through this again. Now I personally highly recommend with storyboarding your videos before you start recording anything. This does not have to be fancy. Here's what some of mine looks like. Here's another example. This helps you get really clear on how many clips you need, what you need clips of, and how your video is going to pace and make sure that your videos the right length of time per whatever the brand agreed to. Another bonus to storyboarding your videos if you're working on a really big project or if a brand You gave you complete creative freedom and you're feeling a little anxious about that. You can always send the storyboard back to the brand and ask for a little bit of pre-approval and feedback with the project in the way you are envisioning it. Now once you've got it scripted and storyboarded, it's time to start filming. Here's a few tips for filming how a well-lit area with minimal distractions in the background. If you're doing close-up video or photos of a product, you can actually create backgrounds. These can be created with items from the dollar store, craft stores, Home Depot and Lowe's, the backgrounds and this picture actually came from the dollar store. Whatever video and photos you're taking, be sure that there are no other branded products in the picture. Brands want their stuff and their stuff alone highlighted, make sure every other brand and brand label is off screen. I recommend always filming in for K and 60 frames per second. Even if the brand wants the final product in 1080, this is going to give that 1080 just a little higher-quality feel and flow when you're filming. I highly recommend doing each take a couple of times and maybe even from a couple of different angles. It is much easier to set everything up once and do a bunch of takes than it is to do one take and have to bounce between editing and refilling because things aren't working out quite right. I did a video for a brand with my dog Mika, in which it was crucial for her to give me a high five. I swear we did 100 high fives that day. But it was so helpful when I sat down to start editing to have so many options of high fives and angles of high fives to pick through and grab the perfect clips to fit the video. If you're doing a video where you are onscreen and make sure that the clothes you're wearing our clean, the wrinkle-free, and make sure they don't have any distracting text images or other brands on them that take away from your video. Now that you've got a pile of raw footage, Let's get that script recorded. Any scripting that wasn't already part of a video. You're gonna do a voiceover for doing your voice-overs, if possible, use an external microphone. You can get a cheap one on Amazon for like 20 bucks. You can even use those corded headphones that came with your phone. The microphone on that is actually pretty decent once you've got all your raw footage and any voiceover that you needed, it's time to head into your editing app. Like I mentioned, I use cap cut. There are tons of options. My personal recommendation is edit your audio first, I find it much easier to edit the audio and the voice-over and get that all laid out. And then I can easily match the raw footage into fit with the various clips throughout the script as I want, I find it much easier to edit and add the raw footage in and get things trimmed where I want to match the script if all the audio is already done, as opposed to trying to edit the audio to match the video. That's harder for me, but you do what feels right to you. In the last step before you consider a video done, go back to your creative brief or your contract and double-check all of the details. Did they want captions or not? Do you have non copyrighted music in the background if you're adding music, did you mention any key phrases that they specifically wanted in that video? Whatever the details are, make sure you've held up your end of the deal. Once I finished the video, I always add a watermark. I created a PNG image in Canva. It was super easy. I keep that on hand and I can just add it as overlay layer in the video really quick, I export this version with the watermark, and that's what I send off for final approval. Once the final video has been approved and I have received payment in full, then it's really easy to jump back into my editing app, delete that watermark, re-export it, and send them their final version of the video. Again, this is a very fast simplified look at scripting and filming your videos. But I hope it gives you a good sense of the workflow and some of the process in order in planning and creating your content. Now that your video is finished, Let's head to the last lesson to talk about delivering that video to your client. 12. Delivering your final product: It's our final lesson, y'all, once you have finished creating your amazing content, it's time to deliver it to the client. Again, as I mentioned in the previous lesson, do not send them the final video until you have been paid in full and everybody agrees that the contract has been fulfilled once you've been paid and it's time to send that final video. I recommend Google Drive. You can also do this with Dropbox. This is a great way to create a folder for that client with the client's name and the date of delivery on it. But all of the videos and photos that this client has purchased into that single folder and share it with them. Also give the brand the heads-up that they have 30 days to grab that content out of the folder. That way you can delete it and keep the space freed up on your Google Drive. Like I said, you can do the same thing on Dropbox. Either way. Just make sure that the settings are set so that the brands can access that folder and download their products unless it's otherwise stated in the contract, images should always be delivered as jpegs or PNGs. And videos should always be delivered as 1080 and the dot MOV file type. And that's it. The deals done payments in the bank and you are a UGC creator. 13. Conclusion: Congratulations on taking your first steps towards becoming a UGC creator. Now, you've got the skills and knowledge to build your portfolio. Start finding brands, start pitching those brands. Make sure your negotiations and contracts are on-point. Scripting and filming amazing videos and getting them into the hands of your brands. If you haven't already, be sure to head over to the project tab, download your worksheet and create your first video for your portfolio. Thank you for trusting me to teach you and getting you started on this path. The best of luck in all of your UGC creation to come.