Transcription
If you want to be a full-time content creator this year, I'm going to be honest with you. Getting there is not about buying a new camera, having a video go viral, or even stumbling upon your next great idea. In fact, it's really not about your content at all. It's about how you monetize it.
Because here's the thing, you already are a creator, right? It's just the full-time part that you're working towards. In my last Habits video like this, I shared some essential routines that keep you filming, editing, and posting consistently, so that you can grow an audience. But in this video, I wanted to focus on the parts of being a content creator that actually turn it into a business. You know, the making money part. That way, once you've got the content side of things under control, you can actually start to make some meaningful money from it.
Starting with habit number one, actually reviewing your contracts. Look, I know you've quickly skimmed through a brand deal contract before just to get it over with, because let's be honest, reading contracts is boring and you were probably really excited to sign the deal. Trust me, I get it. But my friend, we need to leave that behavior in 2025, okay? If you aren't reading your brand deal contracts thoroughly, then not only are you most likely leaving money on the table, but you might also be signing yourself up for trouble in the future.
Because here's the thing you gotta know, these brands can be sneaky, and you know that their legal departments are putting in all of the clauses that are beneficial to them, and not beneficial to you. You are the only one looking out for you, okay? So make sure you do it. Otherwise, these brands are going to be getting benefits that they aren't paying for. Basically, there are three key things that I want you to start looking for in all of your brand deal agreements to make sure that you're not getting taken advantage of.
Because this is the thing that pisses me off about this. Not only do I just genuinely not want beginner creators to be taken advantage of by legal jargon they don't understand, but when newer creators give away these three things for free, which I'll talk about in a second, it ends up kind of devaluing them across the industry, which just makes things worse for creators as a whole. So anyway, look, this is going to be a difficult mental task, because I know you're excited and you're eager to just sign on the dotted line and get this brand deal locked in. And you might be nervous about trying to negotiate with a brand because you're worried about scaring them off and you don't want to lose this brand deal that you worked really hard for. But I promise you contract negotiations are a very normal part of the process. Any brand is going to expect them to happen and any brand that takes away a brand deal offer because you had questions about the contract is sketchy and you probably didn't want to work with them anyway.
Okay, so the first of those three things is exclusivity. Exclusivity clauses will typically state that you as the influencer are not allowed to work with competitor brands for the duration of the campaign and even sometime after the campaign. This is not necessarily a red flag. This is a normal thing, but it is something that you're going to want to charge extra for. Because here's the thing, if you need to be exclusive to sunscreen brand X that you just did a campaign for on Instagram for let's say the next six months, then two weeks from now when sunscreen brand Y ends up in your inbox asking to work with you, you're going to have to turn them down. And that's a whole additional source of income that you are now letting go of because you're still exclusive to sunscreen brand X. So basically you need to consider that in your exclusivity rates. It's like the opportunity cost of other potential projects that you're not going to get to do because you're still exclusive. So not only do you want to charge for that, but you also really do not want to let it get slipped into a contract that you agreed to without, you know, pushing back about that. You'd be surprised how often exclusivity clauses end up in brand deal contracts, even when the whole time that you were chatting with the brand over email, nothing was ever mentioned about exclusivity. Once again, they'll put it into the contract if it's beneficial for them, even if you didn't have a conversation with them about it. So you've got to look out for that.
Similarly with number two usage rights usage rights are basically giving the brand permission to use the content that you made for the campaign in other ways. So for example, the brand might post it to their own account as UGC. They might run it as an ad from their own account, or they might even boost the post from your account. All of these things would fall into the umbrella of usage rights. And again, you want to charge extra for them. Currently, my usage rights rates are set at 30% of the original package price per month of usage. So let's just say for example, if my rate for a sponsored reel was $3,000, then that means that my usage rights rate would be $1,000 per month of usage. Usage rights are such a primo way of making more money as a content creator without having to make extra content. For example, this past holiday season, I had a brand that I worked with previously reach out to me and ask for more usage rights on a video I had made like a year ago. So your girl made four grand off of a brand running my video as an ad. I didn't even have to make more content. Okay, that is sweet. You don't want to give that up for free, because you were negligent about reviewing your contracts.
The third thing you want to look out for is the right to use your likeness, aka your appearance, your name. This is something I am so protective of. This is thrown into almost every contract and I'm always pushing back on it. For sure, you don't want to give away the rights to your likeness and perpetuity. Never, never, never let them have it forever. In some cases, you might give it to a brand for a limited run for a campaign they're doing. But yeah, as a content creator, your identity, like your persona, that is your business. So you really don't want other brands just like using it willy nilly to promote themselves because it just really dilutes your brand and your credibility. So don't give that away for free.
None of this is legal advice, by the way, and obviously, I'm not a lawyer. And the safest thing you can do when it comes to contracts is get a lawyer to review them. But I'm going to be honest, I don't have the budget for that. I've got too many contracts coming across my desk. I can't pay someone like hundreds of dollars an hour to read through them for me. So these are the things that I've learned to look out for. It's kept me out of trouble thus far. So I recommend you do the same.
Habit number two, establish a financial hygiene routine. Just like you've got your daily skincare regimen to take care of the health of your skin, you should have a financial hygiene routine as well to keep your finances organized and your business healthy. Okay, so here are just a few essential things I want you to do on a weekly basis. So things don't get away on you.
The first is you're going to track all of your expenses. If you're just starting out and you don't have a ton of business expenses yet, you could use something as simple as a notebook and a folder of receipts to track all of your business spending. If you prefer the digital route, maybe it's an Excel spreadsheet. It doesn't have to be fancy, but you do need a way of tracking what money you spend on your creator business. What counts as a business expense? Just like I am not a lawyer, I'm also not an accountant, but I'll tell you a few of the things that I count as business expenses are things like new cameras that I buy, software subscriptions, a portion of my home internet bill, a portion of my phone bill, the coffees that I buy when I go out to work at a cafe. Because of the complexity of my business, I use QuickBooks to track everything. It's so helpful. So I try to make a habit of opening up QuickBooks regularly and categorizing all my transactions, which are automatically synced from my credit cards and bank accounts. And I just review everything and make sure that it's all looking correct. Trust me doing this on a weekly basis is going to save you so much time and headache when it comes to tax season. And don't worry, we're going to talk about taxes specifically in just a couple minutes.
The second major thing in your financial routine is going to be checking on your invoices. It's easy to feel like once you've sent out your invoice, the work is done. But my friend, just because you've sent it, doesn't mean that they've paid it. Take some time each week to review your outstanding invoices, check and see which ones are overdue, which ones you're expecting payment for soon. And if there is anything overdue, make sure you send a follow up email to the brand asking them when they're going to pay that. And on that note, make it a habit to always send your invoices when the project is complete. In my case, that means as soon as I publish a sponsored piece of content, I'm sending an email over to the brand to say that the content is live, give them the links to everything, and then pretty much say, thanks so much. It's been a pleasure working with you. Attached below is the invoice for this campaign. And I'd love to work with you guys again sometime. And if you're really hustling, you could set yourself a calendar reminder for like a month or maybe two months after the campaign finishes and you send that email to basically follow up and pitch yourself again. When I was first getting into the brand deal space, I use that method a lot. And it's how I got a lot of my repeat sponsors. I think the main message here is to remember that when it comes to invoices, if you don't send them right away, you're basically giving a brand an interest free loan on the money that they owe you. So be prompt with your invoice sending and make sure you stay on top of your follow-ups when it comes to your unpaid invoices.
Habit number three, do an efficiency audit. As a content creator, your most valuable asset is your time. So you want to ensure that your creative workflows are efficient. Any time you spend struggling with tech is time that you could have been creating. And so it's important to evaluate the tools that you're using every so often to make sure that they're not a drain on your time. Like for example, if it takes you forever to set up a shot with your iPhone because you're trying to use the back camera to get the best quality and you find yourself doing this every time you film, it might be time for you to consider getting a camera with a flip around screen. So you don't have to struggle with framing yourself so much. Or if your editing software is more complicated than you need it to be and you're spending a ton of time digging through tutorials to find the basic features and effects that you want to use, you might consider trying Movavi to speed up your process. Like when I'm editing this clip of me talking, instead of having to manually cut out all of the pauses between my sentences, I can just use the one click silence remover. That was actually so quick. Then I can just go ahead and click and drag all of my B roll clips onto the timeline. Okay, so for this portion here, I want to give my B roll clips a bit of a dreamy nostalgic look. So if I go over to effects and I can choose a LUT like this one, I love how you can even adjust the strength of the LUT in your clip settings so you can dial it into exactly how you like it to look. And I might even add an overlay like shine on number three. I love this one. It gives it a bit of a filmic light leak effect, which I think is really cool. Honestly, this is one of my favorite parts of Movavi because I feel like they have a bunch of built in effects, ones that you would actually want to use that look really cool. And it's really easy for beginners to navigate. And if I want several clips to have the same effects, it's super easy to copy them and then paste them over. Finally, we are going to automatically add our captions with just one click. And then you can choose from a bunch of awesome preset styles, but you can customize them to look exactly how you want. Movavi is specifically designed for creators to help you edit faster without all the extra complicated settings getting in your way. If you want to try it out for yourself, you can get 25% off when you use my code Katie to sign up. The link to check it out is in the description below. And thanks to Movavi for sponsoring today's video.
Habit number four, save money for taxes. If I had a dollar for every time a content creator forgot to do this, then I wouldn't have to save money for my own taxes. Y'all. Okay. This is chronic. Here's the thing. When you're used to getting just a regular paycheck, your income tax is automatically withheld from you on that. So it's already forwarded on. You don't even have to think about it. In fact, you might get a refund at the end of the year. If you know you paid more than you needed to. However, when you're self employed, when you're a small business owner as content creators are, you are responsible for paying your own income tax. And eventually if like me, you have a corporation rather than just being a sole proprietor, then in fact, you're responsible for paying your own personal income tax as well as the income tax of your business. But we're not going to get into that level of complexity today. I just want to walk you through the first few steps that you need to think about when it comes to setting money aside to pay your own taxes.
Okay. Step number one is to figure out how to make a tax payment. Where I live in Canada, we have this handy online portal called my CRA or my Canada revenue agency. And you know what? I got to give some props to the government on this one. The UX is pretty good and easy to navigate website. And you can go in there and schedule tax payments to come directly from your bank account. That's how I do it. Your accountant should be able to walk you through this too. And of course, this is going to vary based on country.
Okay. Step number two, you're going to choose either installments or a lump sum. Again, I can only speak to my own experience as a business owner in Canada, but eventually you're probably going to be told that you need to make installments rather than doing a lump sum. Here's the difference. If you pay your taxes in a lump sum, then you just go about your day, you know, making your money all year long. And then at tax time you're given a big bill and you pay all of your income tax for the previous year. That's how I did it in my early days when I was still a sole proprietor. And before I was at like the six figure income mark. Now that I'm beyond that, I do installments, which basically means quarterly, I pay money towards my future tax bill, which is kind of nice because it means I don't have this giant bill looming ahead of me come April.
Step number three, decide on your saving method. There's a couple of different ways you could do this. The first method is to simply reserve 30% of every payout you get. So like every brand deal payment, every time you get an AdSense deposit, take 30% of whatever that is and put it into a high yield savings account. Your actual tax rate is going to vary a lot depending on where you live and how much money you're making. But I think 30% is a really safe figure, which in all probability will actually be on the high side, which just means there's a little bit extra left over for you at the end of the year, which is nice. The second method is you can calculate what you estimate you're going to owe and then just take that chunk of money and put it into your high yield savings account. Now, this is my current approach just because now my business has reached a level of stability where I can kind of estimate about how much I think I'm going to make in the coming year. Plus I have last year's tax bill to go off of to know how much I'm going to need. And so near the beginning of the year, I just make sure I max out that high yield savings account with the amount that I need. And the benefit of that is basically I can actually earn more interest on it in that HYSA across the whole year, rather than just like slow and steady adding money to it. Also, I find this online income tax calculator from Wealthsimple to be so helpful. If you live in Canada, I recommend using it. You just put in your province and then you can add in self-employment income or in my case, it's dividends income. And I can figure out about how much income tax I'm going to owe.
Habit number five, review your content like a strategist, not an artist. Being a content creator is truly such a blend of business and artistry. In my last habits video, I focused a lot on how you can lean into and prioritize your artist side to make better content. And that really is important. I don't want to downplay that. But when it comes to analyzing the performance of your content, I want you to lean more into your business side. And here's why it can be so easy to get emotional about the reach and engagement that your content gets. Like if I post a YouTube video and it gets less views than I want to get, like I feel crest fallen. Okay. And I'm trying to get away from that because I know it's not healthy. It's natural, right? Though like it feels so personal to us because it's our art, it's our creation. However, if you want to genuinely pursue this as a business, sometimes you got to put your emotions aside and try to look at your work more objectively. It's going to be better for you in the long run. When you see that a video didn't get as many views as you would have liked it to get instead of rushing to beat yourself up over it. That's my personal go to or crashing out and blaming the algorithm on it, which is another popular, popular choice. Instead, I want you to pause and try to consider things from the audience's perspective and really break it down to the component parts. Was my thumbnail enticing enough? Did the title interestingly and accurately describe my video? Was my intro interesting and was the rest of my content fresh, entertaining, or intriguing enough to keep people watching? When you let go of your emotional attachment to the work, even for a brief moment and look at things a bit more strategically, it's really going to unlock more potential growth for you. I think a lot of us can get stuck in that emotional place of just like putting work out there feeling shitty about how many views it didn't get that we wanted to get, but that doesn't actually help you reach your goal. So give yourself the benefit of a strategist's perspective, even just for a little bit, and then shift back into your artist brain after that. I really think the magic behind the best creators who really blow up is their personal connection to their work and their audience. So I really don't want you to lose the emotion entirely. Just learn how to turn it off briefly when you're evaluating your own content so that you can help yourself improve.
With these five habits implemented, I am confident that you're going to be able to grow your creator business in 2026. Look, I can get really nerdy when it comes to talking about finances and this video was just like the tip of the iceberg. So if you want a more detailed breakdown of how I've made over a million dollars now across my career as a content creator, you can watch this video next because I get into all of the details about that. Or if you'd like to see more financial breakdowns in the future, let me know. I've done a few years now of breaking down my previous year's income and expenses and stuff like that, but now I'm kind of at a place where it's kind of similar year to year. So you can let me know if that would still be interesting or if there's other financial topics that I could cover for you. Obviously I'm traveling right now. I've been in Barbados for the past week and a bit, so all I've got is my notebook, but I promise you once I get home, I'm going to break out the chart paper again so I could make a more detailed financial breakdown then. But yeah, as always, thank you so much for watching. I hope that your 2026 is off to a great start, that you're having adventures and following your dreams, and I will catch you in the next video. Bye!