How to become a UGC creator in 2025

1. Introduction : If you've decided that you want to be a UGC creator, then this is a wonderful space for you to grow your own exciting business in, but it does come with a lot of challenges, especially when you're starting out. On this course, I'm going to help you navigate your journey from starting up as a UGC creator, growing your business, expanding your portfolio, and actually making a success about something that you really want to do and that you're passionate about. I'm going to take you through setting up your portfolio, your emails, your social proofing, your creative network, and also your pitching to brands, your managing networks, your invoices, your fees, your charges, and of course, the entire setup of becoming a UGC creator. Let's get started with UGC. 2. Getting set up: The very first thing that you need to get started in UGC is, of course, a camera. Now, you can use your smartphone if it's got four K, if it's got FPS 60. These are all great options. You don't need anything expensively particular. You can do it on your smartphone and you can still create high quality content with your smartphone. The second thing is lighting. Make sure you've got a ring light or if you want a more professional standard lighting setup, that's a great idea. But a standard ring light is pretty much an essential for any kind of content that you're creating. Okay, now you've got a camera, now you've got your lighting. You may also want to invest in a mic. This is definitely preferential, in my opinion. It's not a necessity if you're shooting outside, it's sometimes good to use a mic, especially if you're trying to record audio, but it's not an essential. It's an added on and something that you might want to use later on down the line. Now, the next thing that you're going to need is you're going to have to put an email together I would always advise to be as professional as you can. If you want to create a named personalized email, that is great. But if you just want to use your Gmail or something simple for now, that is absolutely fine, but make sure you set up a dedicated email address specifically for your UGC work. Okay, so we've got our camera, our lighting, and our email set up. The next thing we need is we need to start building our portfolio. But how do we go about doing that? Because a lot of people that I work with, they say, Oh, Brands don't want to work with me because I've got no experience. Brands don't want to work with me because I've got no footage from my portfolio. They don't want to work with me, I've got no experience. Well, the way that you can build that experience up is by taking a look around you. Look around your house, look at all the things that you've got around the house in terms of maybe cosmetic equipment, maybe makeup, maybe moisturizers, maybe kitchen utensils. It can be anything. Anything that you've got in your home that you can create content out of. Start filming and creating content. It can be a product review. It can be inspiration video of a day in the life if you're using a certain product. Start to get creative with just filming things around your house. It can even be a day in the life video where you just document your day going out using different products and things like that. These are all great ways for you to start building up a portfolio, gets you exposure to editing and gets you just familiar with the process of creating UGC. You want to make sure that it looks presentable, so always put your best into it. Make sure you've got good lighting, make sure you've got a good setup, you're careful with your camera work and also you've got a great edit as well. That takes time. Just get used to editing, take your time with it, and just start familiarizing yourself with the process of filming content for pretty much everything. Ideally, I'd say you need three or four videos to start with your portfolio and you want to spread that out. You might want a product video, a product demo video on maybe I don't know, a bar of soap, cosmetics video, something that's to do with a certain niche, and then you might want to flip it over to maybe an electronic niche. You may want to do a phone case review or maybe a set of earpods or something like that. Then you want to switch it over completely and maybe do something about, I don't know, a t shirt for fitness or a pair of walking boots. Just try and spread it out as much as you can because that's going to help you identify your niche as a creator. 3. Your Portfolio: Take a deeper look at your portfolio. Now, this is an example of my portfolio. My portfolio contains a little bit of information about me. It's very human and I'd advise you to do that. Give people something to learn about you. It doesn't have to be all about your job. It doesn't always have to be about you creating content. Share some of your hobbies in there, just make it a little bit more human. Then as you can see as we expand down, we go straight into the visuals. Brands want to see straight away what you're capable of. Make sure you've got some of your best content at the you want to show some variations. So I've got some comedic sketches. I've got some product reviews. I've got some boxing videos. I've got a ton of different things here. And as you scroll down, as you can see, there's a lot more variation of the videos. Prices are at the bottom, a little bit more details about how to contact me, some images as well. And that's pretty much it. I've also got some links to social media, which is a great idea, and that is it. No need to overcomplicate things here, guys. Keep the portfolio versatile, keep it simple, make sure brands can see the very best of you. This is almost like your first pitch, your audition when you walk in the room. That's your portfolio. Now, I did my portfolio on Canva. Canva is a great tool for creators, not just for editing and preparing videos, but also for creating portfolios. A lot of my creator friends use Canva as well. Their monthly membership isn't too expensive, so it's definitely a worthwhile investment. But for me, I use Canva. There's probably some other options out there, but take a look, see what works best for you and go ahead with getting your portfolio done. 4. Social proofing: Now moving on to your social proofing and social network, it is so important to get your Twitter, Instagram, Facebook pages set up. Now, you don't have to have all of them. In fact, I only have two that I really rely upon that's X, and that is Tik Tok. On those two pages, you can absolutely share some of the work that you've been creating at home, perhaps some of the examples you've created. And you can also take the opportunity to start following other creators, type in hash tags like UGC Community, UGC Network, UGC creators. These are all great little hash tags to start basically familiarizing yourself with other creators. You can start engaging, commenting and liking and building a network. It's a very supportive community. Everyone that I know in the UGC space is very uplifting of each other. And it's also a great way for you to build up your brand awareness and build up your pages and following. Also, a great idea if you've not had any opportunity to collaborate with brands just yet, a great idea is to use some of those videos we spoke about in our portfolio, get them uploaded on social media, get them uploaded on TikTok, get them uploaded on X. There's no point in hiding them and keeping them locked away to one platform. They're there to be shared. They're there to get exposure, and they're there to be put out there. Make sure anything that you're utilizing, any work you've been working on, get it uploaded on social media. If it's working with a brand, you always want to get their permission first. But if it's for your own content, get it uploaded. 5. Pitching to brands : Let's talk about outreach now. When you reach out to brands via email, there's a certain way in which you can do it. I would always say the best approach is to be friendly, professional, but don't be too overly needy. I've seen it enough times, and unfortunately, it's not the best way to handle communication with brands. You know, you've got to have confidence in your abilities, and you've just got to be upfront, but down to earth. You know, if you're not an experienced creator, which a lot of people on here won't be, just say, look, hey, I'm a user generated content creator. I would love to work with your brand. I really like some of the ethoss of your brand. Make sure you highlight some of the things that are unique about the brand and what you like about it and make it personal. You know, brands get tons of emails every day. What's different about yours? What really stands out? It has to be personalized. Now, a good way to really make it personal and to give this a personal touch and to get it looking good is you can use AI platforms to just really refine what you're trying to get across with your message. So a lot of people use Chat GBT to just really refine the points. That's fine. As long as it's not too overly robotic, you want to make sure it's very natural when it's personalized. If you want to test that and you want to send me an email as well, guys, just to say, Hey, can you take a look? Is my pitch look okay? Feel free to send it over to me. I'll be more than happy to look over it for you. 6. Scriptwriting and how to do it: Scripting is a huge part of filming content. A lot of brands will provide their own scripts for you to record on. Some other brands may decide that they would like you to do it, and that's absolutely fine. Now, if you are in a position where they've asked you to assist with a script, then there's a number of ways you can go around it. If you're a naturally gifted scriptwriter, that's fine because you know what you're doing. If you're there's a number of ways that you can do that. You can look at a number of brands, perhaps that are competing with the brand you're working with, get some ideas of what they've done, see what's worked, and start to take some ideas from that to implement it into your own script. You can also absolutely utilize AI to give you some ideas. Chat GBT, as we've mentioned before, is a great tool to generate some creative ideas for scriptwriting. The best thing I can advise you here guys is practice, practice, practice makes perfect. The more scriptwriting you do, the more familiar you are with brands and how they wish to work in terms of their script, the better you're going to now, one of the other ways you can look at this is go on to TikTok and go onto Instagram and just start looking at viral videos. Get familiar with what kind of scripts work for different kinds of content. Some scripts are very kind of skip based and comedic, other scripts are more informative, but they all have very strong hooks in different ways. Start getting familiar with different types of content and familiarize yourself with those scripting ideologies and narratives. Once you've done that, just get started. Get started writing those scripts. There's nothing like practice, as I've just said. That is my advice when it comes to script writing for yourself. A lot of times brands will already have them available. I think probably in my experience, 80% of brands already have scripts ready. They're very protective and they have an invested interest of their own creations and how they see things. But you might get some brands, especially smaller brands that they want your expertise and they want your creative input. That is what I would advise when it comes to scripts. 7. Niche research : When it comes to sourcing brands to work with, there's a very specific way which I always like to advise people on to do this. The first thing is to break it down. Firstly, we take a look at niche. What is the niche that you want to look at at the moment? What is the niche you want to focus on? Let's say it's sneakers, We niche down just a little bit more. Perhaps it's sustainable brands, that work with recycled materials and they create trains and sneakers. What we do is we look at brands that create sneakers that are sustainable friendly, that have an environmental ethos, and we start to research that and then we scale it down. Perhaps brands that are local to your country, if you're based in the US, Europe, Asia, wherever you start to research that. A lot of brands are international these days, but it's always nice to start local and build your way up. Then you can start expanding, looking at brands that perhaps do have an economic ethos and have an environmental ethos. But then also they'll just create nice fashionable brands. It can expand to fit your needs. Start doing some due diligence, start doing some research on brands and niches that interest and just Google's your best friend. Start to research those brands and you can even use social media as well to research. A great option for those of you that are in Europe and the US is a TikTok shop. It's full of new exciting brands that have a variety of different niches and it's always great to find brands on there. There's no quick step to doing research. It's just a necessity that has to be done and it does take time, but it's all about creating brands that you identify with and want to work with. A great idea would also be to create a spreadsheet of all the brands that you found, make sure you include website links and information on the brand because you can always come back to it when you're starting to do your outreach. 8. Price points and package deals: Hey, guys, more into the business side now when it comes to the finances and bidding on work and pitching to brands, you'll often find yourself in negotiations sometimes with brands because they are also operating a business and they want to get great value for money. There's nothing wrong with negotiating with brands to provide your service. If you're an experienced creator with a proven track record of viral content and you've worked with a lot of high profile brands, it's to be expected. Okay, so you have a standard rate. Some brands may say, Hey, look, is there flexibility. And sometimes if you believe in the brand, you love the product or the service, you may be flexible and say, Hey, look, I'm willing to do this, this, and this. It's whatever you feel comfortable doing. There's no fixed role here, guys. If you want to lower your rates for a certain video, you feel it's quite a simple project. That's fine. You can absolutely do that. But for the most part, I would say, it's important to stick to your guns, guys. If you've got a fixed rate, and brands tend to value your content, and if they really want to work with you, they will make it happen. A lot of brands do have big budgets these days. UGC is something that they've well prepared for, and if they're looking to get content made, they probably got some budget. It's really important to remember guys, if you want to negotiate with a brand and you're going back and forth, don't go overboard. Don't quote them insane numbers, but gradually go back and forth and find that sweet spot, be fair. It's really important to be fair. But if a brand comes to you and they want a package, for example, it's always good to roll that up into a nice package. Perhaps if they say I want two or three videos, think about providing a bulk discount. That's something that I do quite a lot and it works very well. Always going back to that point of providing value for the brand. So Always remember guys, negotiation is good if you are negotiating with a brand, don't go overboard, be flexible, but also stick to your guns on what's important. Sometimes if you feel the need to walk away from a brand and a deal, that's absolutely fine. I've done that many times. You always have to understand your own value. You have a lot of value as a creator. If you're an experienced creator, don't be afraid to turn down deals because if they don't work for you, that's okay. I've turned down deals because the finances didn't add up. Brands weren't prepared to pay the rate that I feel it was worth. And also, sometimes I've worked on content I sent content and ideas that brands want me to do that I just didn't agree with. They wanted me to do things that I didn't feel comfortable with, and sometimes the best thing that you can do is say, You know what? I'm out. This isn't for me and move on to something bigger and better. 9. Raw Footage and the importance of it: A hugely popular term is the term raw footage. And what is raw footage? Raw footage is basically when you provide content that is not edited, it's not made into a video. It's just you providing raw scene footage of perhaps B roll or perhaps you talking to a camera or some product videos. It's basically a ton of scenes that you can send over to a brand and they will probably want to edit it themselves in house, and they'll do it all themselves. But crucial thing to be aware of is B roll and raw footage is very lucrative in many ways because it provides a brand an opportunity to create many variations of content unlike a singular video. I a brand asks you for raw footage, make sure that you do and initiate that understanding that it is something that you will charge for because it is very valuable. It's something you can also include on your add ons. Hey, would you like me to include raw footage as well? I charge a state fee, which is, you know, maybe $150 for ten scenes. That's something that I do. But always make sure you are acutely aware if a brand does ask for raw footage, you know, make sure you get an understanding of how long they're going to use the content for Okay, because if they're making a lot of videos off raw footage, you want to make sure that you're compensated for that. But that's what raw footage is, and I wanted to make a real point of that in this course because it's something you guys will absolutely come across in your time working as a creator. Raw footage is something you will become familiar with, and I want you to understand how valuable it is to brands, and I also want you to understand that it's something that you must understand the importance of. 10. Upselling your services: Okay, moving on now. You've been creating content for a number of months and let's say you've got some experience under your field and you're ready to increase your prices and perhaps offer an array of different services. So one of the great things about UGC is you can absolutely diversify your list of services. So you may perhaps want to offer a standard video rate, which would include what we call a hook, which is the starting of a video a body, which is the body of a video and then a CTA or a call to action long form. That makes up a whole video and included in that is editing and also you can include your usage as well and that comes as a whole total package fee, which I think tends to work very well with clients. It's very easy to understand. Of course, it's easily something that you can just say, Hey, you get the whole thing with total fee. Now, you can also offer additional add ons as well. Something that I like to include is revisions. I always say brands will often say I want a revision of the work, which is fair enough. If it's something extensive like they want the whole scenes redone and it's something that's outside of the agreed script, that's something I would say you can charge for. There's nothing wrong with saying, Hey, look, I charge $70 for an additional revision, if it's outside the spec of what's been agreed or if it's something additional you want in there. If you make a mistake with the script, understandably, you're not going to charge your client for that, you're going to have to fix it because that's just your mistake at the end of the day. Think about add ons. A lot of creators like to maybe add still images in. If it's a product video, if you've sent a product, you can always include some very nice images with that product and see if the brand want to purchase those images of you. You can include additional usage fees. If they want permanent usage or extended usage, you can provide that as well. You can negotiate that fee. That's also something you can do. Then you can also provide additional hooks as well, which is something brands love because they can test more with more content. Adding additional hooks is a great way to add value to your list of services. It provides a client an opportunity to also get additional content from you and to test more content with those ads. Always think about ways that you can add value to the client. Always think about ways that you can also increase your list of services, especially when it comes to a singular deal. If it's just a singular deal for one video, how can you add additional value to that? Could you provide them some additional images? Could you provide them an extra hook? Could you go and add a couple of other additional thing? 11. Delivering your content and invoiceing : So you and a brand have agreed to work on a package of content for two videos, let's say, and you've agreed a rate. You've got contract signed, they've sent you the scripts, or you've created the scripts and you've allowed yourself, and I always advise seven days for the content to be done. Very importantly, guys, make sure that you can accommodate the timings. If a brand asks you to have content ready before a week, think about this. Do you have the capacity to do it? If you don't you don't have the capacity to do it. If you do, then it's something you can also negotiate. I include a rush fee if a brand wishes to have content ready before seven days, then I include a rush fee of $100 to ensure that I work on that over all my other content because they've paid an extra fast delivery service. Again, guys, another add on which is really important. But let's say that the content is completed, it's done. What do you do now? Well, you send it over to the brand. You make sure that it's in a high quality file, so ideally ten ADP or if they prefer it in four K, they can. Always make sure that you have it ideally on a Cloud storage device such as a Google Drive, because this allows for anything anything bad or anything wrong that could happen with people forgetting links or, you know, content being deleted, it can always be stored on a Google Drive or a Cloud storage. So send it via a Cloud storage. Send it to the brand, wait for their approval, and then it is time for you to send your invoice. Invoices. If you haven't got experience with them, it is not a problem. Take a look online, things like YouTube paved, a great insight of how to form an invoice. Again, I mentioned Canva earlier, Canva is a great option for invoicing. It's got a lot of templates on there and it can just provide you with a platform to include all of your relative information. And usually brands will probably pay within 30 days. That's the standard turnover agreement. Sometimes it's less, but always make sure that you include all of the important information on. Don't make any mistakes on there because it delays payment. Once invoiced, all you've got to do is wait. 12. Conclusion : Okay, guys, so we're at the end of our course here on becoming a UGC creator. Now, we've gone through quite a lot of information, and I understand it's a lot to take in, so make sure you go back throughout this course, and you really specifically look at certain bits that are of interest to you, refer back to different subjects and points that we've gone over because there's a lot to take. Don't be deterred by all the things that we've spoken about here. I know it's a lot, but in the long term, it will be a benefit to you and I'm pretty confident you're going to have a flourishing UGC business. It's really important to remember guys that this isn't a kind of business that you can just anticipate work constantly. It does take effort and there's times when you may question, what are you doing here? So mindset is so important, okay? There's often times where I've been in the situation of having an incredible run of work at a certain period and suddenly things just go ever so quiet and it's so concerning. But it's always important to remember that that doesn't matter because you're in it for the long run the more experience you build, the more prolific you are and the more experienced you are with content creation, it's only going to get better and you'll be in a position which I am sure that many brands will continue to want to work with you. The better work you do, the more retaining deals you can get, the more brands will want to work. So mindset is really important. Always keep pushing the boundaries. Never stop developing your skill, never stop learning, never stop speaking to other creators and never stop trying to improve your craft. That being said, guys, we are at the end of our course, and it's been an absolute pleasure to share some of my insights on the UGC space with you. If you do have any questions about today's course, then please feel free to contact me and I will always do my best to respond in the best way that I can to help you. Thank you so much for watching this course today, and I will see you hopefully soon.