Transcription
So, I've been making money online as a full-time creative for just over 5 years now. And the one thing that I've learned is that there isn't one correct path. The income system that you build is completely unique to you. And everybody finds their own way to make it work.
The creator economy is relatively new and it's completely different than the traditional 9-5 salary job where you make a net income and a specific salary every month. It's really volatile, but this volatility allows for scalability, and you can make a really comfortable income if you get really creative with the ways you make your income.
In this video, I wanted to break down how I've diversified my streams of income and how I make it work as a creator. It's a pretty nuanced subject, but I thought by sharing my thoughts, it might help somebody who's interested in getting into this field or someone who's just trying to add a couple different income streams to their lifestyle.
Just for some context, I'm a professional photographer and videographer based out of Tokyo, Japan with a social media presence. So, at the time of this filming, on YouTube, I've got around 250,000 subs. On Instagram, I've got about a million followers. And on Tik Tok, I've got about 500,000 followers.
I started my professional creative journey just over 5 years ago, making most of my money through client work. So, traditional photography and videography jobs. But over the years, I've been able to diversify into four major income streams. Those four categories are creative client services, long- form content, short form content, and digital assets. And I'll break down each of these and the percentages that they play into my overall income and break down how you can go about starting each of these revenue streams.
Okay, let's hop in.
The first stream of income is creative client services or just basically client work. And this chunk makes up about 25% of my overall income. This used to make over 50, closer to like 75% of my overall income, especially when I had a much smaller social media following. I find that a lot of creators currently don't do a lot of professional client work in the field for brands, for clients, and I think it's a really important skill set and income stream to have, especially if you have these skills.
I've kind of lumped it all together, but creative services include like dping, creative directing, directing, photographing on set, making social content for brands. And over the years, I've done pretty much half and half of either doing photography work on sets, or videography work on sets, specifically for social assets for campaigns.
So, this income stream is pretty self-explanatory, but basically, you're trading your time or your skill set for income. Most professionals have a day rate or a project rate. And basically, you're going to go in and work a set amount of time, set amount of hours, and you're going to produce a specific deliverable, whether that be like a certain number of photos or videos based on the project. And then you're just going to get paid your rate every single time.
And the difficulty with this particular income stream is that it's not the most scalable. You only have one of you. You can only do so much work every single week. And at the end of the day, you're only able to make as much money as you possibly put in the amount of time or hours into each project.
Most of the creative industry actually operates on this style of work where each person is specifically stylized or specialized in their job and they're hired to produce or create specifically that particular job or skill set and get paid per hour or per job for that skill. Whether you're a photographer, you're an editor, a colorist, an animator, a director, each person has a highly specialized skill set which they then in turn charge a specific rate for.
This rate that you charge is exponentially scalable, especially when you start out. And the more experience you get, the larger portfolio you have, you can charge more, but typically it kind of plateaus. There's only a certain amount that you can charge for your skill set. There's like industry standards. and it's a wonderful skill set, but it's highly dependent on how much experience you have, your portfolio, and your connections in the creative industry.
In terms of income streams, it currently makes up about 25% of my overall income. And the reason that this is kind of taken a backseat over time and really decreased is just because it requires a lot of time, a lot of brain power, a lot of energy to go and work on sets all the time. And it's not necessarily always in Japan and have to travel. And although it's not the most scalable, I still like to have at least part of my income come from the service because it allows me to keep sharp with my skill set, really make sure that I still have the creative juices flowing, and I'm able to create highquality work at a professional level. It's fun, but it takes a lot of effort.
My second income stream, I've bundled into short form content, and specifically, this is mostly the content that I produce for Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube shorts. It's basically vertical content. And this primarily is sponsored content or UGC.
Sponsored reels are where I share a product or a brand or a service with my audience on Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube, Shorts, and I'm basically endorsing that product and the brand pays you to endorse this. And these rates are extremely scalable and really depend on how large your audience is. My rates currently are completely different than what I started out with. And the larger that you get, the more that you can charge. It's not exactly onetoone exponential, but definitely the larger audience you have, the more that you can charge for sponsored content.
UGC on the other hand, user generated content is very interesting because it's not necessarily something that requires you to have a large audience. UGC is basically you creating content for brands for them to use and license on their platforms. It's sort of similar to client work, but I just bundle this into like short form content because it's very similar where you take your style, your skill set, and you create short form content specifically to be used as ads or content that lives on brand pages.
Brands will reach out to me with a creative brief. And basically what I do is just go ahead and create a concept and a video around, let's say, like a lens they want to promote. And once I've created this video, they're basically buying the rights to use this as their own promotion. I think as someone who's just starting out, UGC creation or UGC content is very interesting because you don't need a large audience. Again, you're not posting these to your channel, so it doesn't really matter how large of an audience you have. It's more specific to how good your skill set is. But in order to attract UGC jobs and really get connected with other people and other brands, the larger audience that you do have, the more stylized work that you produce on a consistent basis, the easier it is to attract brands and have basically brands go, "Oh, I I like the style of these videos. maybe this creator can create these style of videos for our company."
Short form content basically makes up 35% of my income currently. So, it's a little bit larger than client service. I guess it's kind of similar to client service in terms of UGC, but most of my money is basically through Instagram sponsorships or short form sponsorships.
Short form content is one of my favorite ways of income just because it's a lot easier to create shorter bursts, shorter creative pieces that are typically 30 to 60 seconds long than let's say like large client projects or long form content. The amount you can charge for short form sponsorships is pretty ludicrous. Like UGC is kind of capped because you can't necessarily charge based on your audience size. It's more of like an like a creative service, but show from sponsorships can get really ludicrous, especially if you have a larger audience. I know a lot of creators that charge at least 5 figures per campaign, some even six figures and beyond. And because it's scalable, it's one of my favorite forms of income because the larger you grow your audience, the more that you can charge. And honestly, the amount of work doesn't really change over time.
Next up is long- form content, which is basically everything bundled up into this YouTube channel. It's AdSense, affiliates, and sponsorships. And it makes up about 20% of my overall income. This income stream isn't my largest income stream, but it's actually one of the ones that I'm primarily spent the most time on the last couple years to really grow. And it's one of the ones where I really want to grow long-term.
YouTube, especially in the creative economy, is one of the most stable income streams. short form content, it kind of just depends on how many sponsorships, how many UGC received jobs you get per month. Whereas long form content, if you can really get up your AdSense and your affiliates and your long-term kind of recurring sponsorships, it's much more simplified and much more similar to like a traditional job. And honestly, the the comfort and kind of stability you get from long-term content is something that I'm chasing and it's one of the ones where I'm really pushing.
So, currently only makes up 20% of my overall income, but I'd love to get this closer to like 30, 40, even 50% of my overall income.
First up, AdSense. I don't get paid a lot in AdSense. A lot of the creators that I know don't get paid a lot in AdSense. It's basically the amount of money that YouTube or Google pays you to place ads on your videos. Those 15 seconds, 30 second ads that you see on videos. It completely depends on your niche. But even at my channel size, I only make just like $1,000 per month on AdSense. It's definitely nice to get, but it's not something that you can rely on super long term.
Affiliates, on the other hand, is a little bit different. I know a lot of tech creators who make a killing on affiliate sponsorships. And basically, affiliates are when you have a specific link or a code where you can share with your audience. The audience clicks on this and you get a percentage of that sale. Usually pretty marginal, but things like Amazon affiliates, different affiliate programs with different providers. The more that you sell, basically, the more that you can make. And although it's not like something super substantial, it's nice to get a little extra every month from your affiliate sales.
Affiliate sales are also something that you don't necessarily need a super large audience to make a little bit of money. You can just attach links and different things to say like a YouTube creator just in your descriptions. Having things linked to what you're using, people clicked on those all the time and make purchases and it's something that you can start immediately and it's super easy to have.
And finally, YouTube sponsorships. I'm sure you know what these are. When you have a midroll ad or an integration in your video where you talk about a product, you talk about a brand and that brand pays you a set amount of money to showcase their brand on a for a specific time period on a video.
Overall, again, this is about 20% of overall income. But the more that you spend time growing your long- form content, the larger that you can create this revenue stream. Again, it's scalable compared to traditional client work, which is something that I love and something that I strive for.
And finally, digital assets. Digital assets is slowly creeping up and becoming a larger revenue stream for me personally. It's about 20% of my overall income. And it's surprising how much money you can make selling your products online. Things that I sell with digital assets, my LUTs, my sound effects, my presets, my power grades. I've got a creator media kit. I've got a course that I created before where anytime someone clicks and purchases and downloads, they have access to this content and it's all done over the internet.
The amazing thing about digital assets is once you put in the time to go ahead and create your product after you go ahead and upload it, it's basically the closest thing you can get to passive income. Although it does take time to basically market this, create content on a very consistent basis to showcase what your assets can do. Besides that fact, you can just kind of just leave your store up and people will purchase it on the back burner and you can make money over time.
I like to think of digital assets as basically creating a solution to someone's potential problem. So the LUTs, for example, that I sell on my site, if someone wants something similar in terms of color to the videos that I create both on social media or on this YouTube channel, they can easily recreate the look, recreate the colors by downloading my digital asset, reusing this, and it saves them time in their process. You're basically making things to save people time.
Courses are again you're selling your information, your expertise over time so that it saves the person who's purchasing it a lot of time making mistakes making this trial and error process and you're paying a specific amount of money to basically bypass all of those things that cost you time. I think it's a great system where all you have to do is pay a certain amount of money and you basically remove that friction and you get to a result really quickly.
It's a great thing to start up even if you have a smaller audience. If you have a specific tool that has saved you time or you created a system that's really improved your workflow, just making that available on a simple, you know, like you could set up a Squarespace site, framer, custom coding, any sort of like website, just building a Gumroad or something. It's really simple to set up and it's honestly it's pretty frictionless. The fees are really minimal and you can create a lot of money selling your digital products.
There's actually a lot of creators that I know that make 90 to like 95% of their overall income solely through digital products. They've created just a great system, a great funnel, and then people just purchase their products all the time. So, they don't have to rely on things like sponsorships or traditional kind of UGC content. They're just creating their content. And the way that they make money is people purchase their digital assets. It's a great income stream. And I've spent a lot of time kind of like redoing my website, recreating new assets all the time for people to purchase. And overall, it's it's about 20% of my overall income.
So, for somebody just starting out as a creative or creator or somebody who wants to just diversify their income streams and make a little bit of money online, there are a lot of different ways that you can go about doing this. The one key thing that I've learned over time is that each of these are pretty volatile. You basically want to create systems where you have a kind of like general idea of how much money you're going to make every month.
So, the way that I like to do this is in terms of client work, retainer clients are amazing. Retainer clients are basically projects or brands that you work with on a regular basis and you sign longer contracts, maybe like at a reduced rate per asset. But by doing this, you're able to secure work every month and it's a great way just for peace of mind.
For sponsorships, both short form and long form, they're really volatile. So, the same thing. Signing like a retainer sponsorship where you do multiple sponsorships at a reduced rate is another great way to like secure long-term sponsorships and a specific amount of money set that you're guaranteed to make over time.
The biggest thing for scalable items is you have to create content online. You have to maintain a presence which generates traffic or interest in the things that you're doing. The more interest that you generate, the more eyes you get, the more funnels you get, and basically the more money you can make. It's really scalable. It's a bit volatile, but it's really fun because basically it's amount of effort that you put in comes directly back to you.
If you have any questions on a specific income stream, leave them down below. I'll try to comment or if anybody else in the community wants to chime in and and give them their insight, that's amazing as well. If you want to check out my digital assets and support this channel, go ahead and click the link down below. My shop again has lots, sound effects, presets, a lot of things that really save you time and can help reduce friction in your creative workflow. Thanks again for watching till the very end and I'll see you guys in the next one. [Music]