You already know it's the creative space. So tell me, do you consider yourself a creator?
I definitely consider myself a creator. I've been making content online for 10 years, although I don't think I thought of it that way when we started, because there really wasn't a clear way to make money from it initially. But yeah, creating content online has been my life for the last 10 years, as well as my wife's life. It's a family. I definitely consider myself a grater.
Awesome. So tell me a little bit about that journey. You didn't start out as a
creator,
did you? No, I was in medical devices, actually. I went to school for computer engineering and went into medical devices prior to doing any of this stuff. And it was my. To be honest, who we started her YouTube channel. This is way back in the day before YouTube even have had a partner program before you could even make money on the platform. And she started sharing her love for cosmetics. And so I was sharing her on, in the background, helping her with kind of the text business side of stuff.
And then the brands started knocking. So I started helping her with contracts and stuff like that. And then there was a lot of interest in our relationship. We hadn't been married yet. Hadn't had any. And so there's just a lot of interest in that. And so I started making cameos on her videos. I think one of the earliest ones I did was like a boyfriend, does my makeup tags, something like that.
I always, I did terribly, but I tried my darndest and yeah, and then it was just over the years, we started making more and more different types of content and the family space. And then in food started in cooking channel. And then when we got married and we had our first child Liam versus so much excitement and so much interest from the people who've been following us for years, that there was just this whole new avenue for me. To make content around family.
So over the many years that we've been on social media, we've worked with hundreds of different brands doing lots and lots of partnerships. So we've had a real varied set of experience. I would say we've been on YouTube for over 10 years now, Instagram, Facebook, Tech-Talk Snapchat, like pretty much every network over the last 10 years. And so we've seen the rise and fall of a lot of them and the monetization, or like our revenue streams have changed wildly over the years.
And so it's definitely been a while.
So talk with me a bit about those changes in revenue. What's exactly changed.
Yeah. I would say that one of the biggest changes let's say five, six years ago, like 95% of our. Revenue from our social media stuff was YouTube ad share for the revenue that we were making from the views and the advertising on our videos. And now it's 5%. So that's a gigantic shift in, in not that long of a time period. And there's a couple of reasons for that. Number one, obviously, if there's any. Massive proliferation in the amount of content and ad inventory that's available.
Now, there's just so much interest in wanting to be a creator. And so the percentage of your monetizeable inventory, quote unquote, in your videos is, has gone down. And so CPM Ray RPM rates have gone down on average, but then the other opposite trend is that there's so much more interest. Uh, influencer marketing now in terms of the creator economy and partnering with brands and things like this, and w partnering with, with companies has become a very significant part of our business.
And that's actually one of the reasons why I started creator wizard, which was all about teaching creators to be more business savvy, because. There is just so much that can change in just a few years platforms come and go. And so just goes to show how nimble you need to be in terms of projecting outwards, three to five years down the line to figure out where you want to be and what decisions you need to make as a creator today to ensure that you can get there.
How do you go about building your audience up now?
I, my audience by serving others, honestly, I have a belief that if you concentrate on just helping people, that the money will come eventually. So right now I would not say that my revenue strategy is very sophisticated. It's more just honestly about helping people. It definitely is rooted in like education and helping people improve their craft as creators because let's face it. There's no college for being creative or not yet.
And that's how I help people is I build my audience by and I inevitably it's just word of mouth, right? Like I helped one creator negotiate a brand partnership, and then they refer me to their friend. That's just been a slow and steady process, but I wish I could say I was very, yeah. Strategic about it. But at least to date, I have not been
as anything changed in that process over time. Well, in
the very beginning start building an audience. Like I said, it was actually by the way, favorable. Right. So it definitely had the luxury of a lot of people who have followed us over the years have followed my noodles. Creating content to help people, but in the beginning was very organic, but I will say one thing that I did do, which I think in hindsight was probably the Genesis of audience building, which was just that I started going into private Facebook groups.
So there's all these Facebook groups out there where creating. Gather and they help each other out. And so honestly, I had no agenda. I just went in there and started helping people, replying to comments when people had questions about like a brand deal terminology or something like that, I would link them, you know, a video that I'd be in on YouTube or something like that. And so that really was how it started was I just was like helping people again. Right. Go back to that.
And so walk me through your monetization now.
And she has been a big part of our monetization structure is brand partnerships. And then I recently launched a digital course, which is super exciting. The first time in over 10 years of being a creator that I've ever directly monetize your following, I guess that's definitely, yeah. I think a brand partnerships has been indirect way to monetize your influence. Right? Cause you're not really asking anything from your community or your audience other than, Hey, support me on this.
But when it comes to digital courses or eBooks or anything like that, where there's actually like a financial transaction taken. It's a different conversation that you have with your followers. So I was very like clear from the beginning that this is something that it's not for everyone, but basically the course that I created is called brand deal wizard. And it basically takes you from second guessing your sponsorship strategy to confidently tripling your rates in four
weeks, as soon as the, for somebody who already had. Existing sponsorship. Exactly.
So it's more of an intermediate level course for creators who have had experience working with brands in the past and have done some paid deals and to be candid. One of the things that I definitely learned over the course of launching this was that I do have a very significant portion of my mind. That is aspiring creators that have not done any brand partnerships before.
And so that led me down the path of, oh man, there's these other courses that are more introductory that I should be creating as well. So again, these are the types of things that you learn when you just come out with something and see what sticks, because the course that I designed, it definitely was for a, more of an intermediate creator, because these are the people that I'm dealing with every day for my influencer agency. And I'm interacting with them.
I see so many mistakes being made and so much like assistance that they could be doing so much better in terms of like the rates that they're charging and the relationships that they're forging with their brand partners and things like that. Yeah. I mean the brand hardships and the digital courses, those are the kind of the two primary revenue sources for now, at least. And then
tell me about the agency. Yeah.
So my agency is called trending family and we focus specifically on family friendly. So, you know, about six years ago when I started it, know this was when we were in the heyday of family blogging and there was so much interest with, for brands to partner with beauty creators, lifestyle creators, but the content was still very glossy and it felt like a TV ad and. Some brands that were on the cutting edge, experimenting with starting to partner with family vloggers and things like that.
And I just really felt that this was going to be the next proliferation of greeters because of the fact that they fit the demo that most brands want to partner with. Right. They're family-friendly, they're wholesome. They're not swearing a lot in their content. They're not talking about super controversial topics. So things like that, I just felt brands would over time get used to the idea of not having like a 20 person crew come and shoot a branded content spot. So that was why I started it.
And that really has been our wedge to date, which is just that we have this curated roster of creators, who we work with over and over, who just have a great well-established brand partner. And so that really has been, I've felt like I said, I've done over $2 million in brand deals that I've been able to pay out to other creators. So it's been a great ride.
Tell me a little bit about how you learned all this about brand
deals, man, through trial and error, candidly. Right. As a creator, there was nothing. It was the wild. Back in the day when a brand, like I remember the very first brand deal that my wife and I got was a company called Ima MoCo. And they were a Korean skincare brand that was launching in the U S and they paid us $700 a month for six months. That was like the deal. At the time it was so much money, right? Because it was like half our rent.
Really what the point of this anecdote is that that was when we first realized, wow, this partnering with brands especially could be a thing. It could be very lucrative for us. Imagine like getting 10 of those a month or something like that, the way in which we learn. Through trial and error. I had my family lawyer draft up a contract, just like a general partnership agreement and we got better and better at the language on the contract over time.
But, and then honestly started adding more and more causes as things kept happening. So for example, When the first time that a brand said, Hey, you need to reshoot this because we don't like it. When we felt that we had adhered to everything that they had requested, okay, that's going in the contract now. Right. You can only get one round of free shoes and we're only going to reshoot if we significantly deviate from the approved creative brief or something like that.
So there's language again, like we learned over the years, like doing that through trial and error and what I'm trying to teach all my creators in my courses too. So yeah, the honest answer is just through repetitions. And then honestly, the other thing too, is that having run the influencer marketing agent. For so long, I definitely have a unique perspective on the other side of the table being in the room with these brands and these advertising agencies.
And they're trying to figure out, okay, how are we going to spend $250,000? Which creators are we going to work with? What is our creative strategy? What is the distribution mix going to be on these different platforms? Right. So that has afforded me a different perspective that I can then teach other creators and be like, look, this is really what they're looking for when they want to partner with you on a campaign here. Yeah. And make the whole thing. Awesome.
So walk me through, what exactly does your sort of agency do? How do they interact with the creators and then how do you interact with brands? Yeah, we
sit as the liaison between the brand or the advertising agency, because there are other advertising agencies that hire. Even though we're an influencer agency. They are, maybe let's say the media agency and they come to us and say, Hey, like we're doing all these other pieces, TV and broadcast, outdoor and print and all this stuff you handle the influencer activation. So we definitely do work with advertising agencies as well.
So typically what happens is they will give us a request for proposal. So they'll RFP. And they'll say, Hey, no, this is the budget. We've got 50 grand, a hundred grand, 300 grand, 500 grand, whatever it is, this is the campaign that we want to launch. What would you do with this basically? And there's some parameters around that. And so we put together a comprehensive proposal based on their brief in the RFP. We will essentially say here's a creative strategy.
Here's some influencer partners that we think would be great for this campaign. Here's essentially how we would allocate it between creator fees and paid media boost, the content production, et cetera, et cetera. And then they say, Yes or no, and then we move forward from there. And so then once we get the green light from the client, we will then go to the influencers and be like, Hey, great news. The brand would love to move forward with you. Here's the deliverables.
Here's how many posts and what you'll talk about. Here's the timeline, et cetera. And so we essentially sit in the middle there to help manage the entire process, the campaign.
Yeah. So I think it's about time for the lightening
round. All right. Lightning round. All right. Yeah. What's
your primary source of revenue? What's your north star metric for success? How do you know you're on the right path?
It's how many creators they have? I think one thing that's been elusive to me throughout my career and has just been feeling the tangible impact that my work has. And honestly, ever since we can create a wizard, right. People make like life-changing amounts of income. I've helped people get jobs, and yet it's been a truly transformative thing. So that'll always be my success metric.
What's your current goal as a creator, try to make it smart. If possible
goal is to get my name out there in the creative community. Honestly, I am a resource that they can turn to for complex issues with them. I honestly, haven't quite figured out the best way to do that yet. Obviously I've been creating a lot of content on social media and been doing collaborations with different startups in this creative space and stuff, but still trying to crack that nut and find my true tribe. I
think, I mean, I think you start a podcast and recorded on Twitter spaces, but
if you could
send a tweet back to your. What would it be? And when you get to choose to start,
uh, man, I think that I would probably send the tweet back to when I started my influencer marketing agency, that was 2015. And I would tweet to myself to focus on helping creators directly rather than indirectly. What I mean by that is that when I started the agency, I was really excited to bring brand sponsorship opportunities to creators. And that was, again, that's like an indirect way of helping them with money. But what I learned was that's really not.
It doesn't get at the root of the issues that they experienced and their businesses as creators. And if they don't address those one little brand deal, isn't going to help them turn their business into something sustainable and scalable. Could you dig in on that? Yeah. So again, if you don't have a comprehensive strategy, especially if brand partnerships is a big part of your business.
In my experience, what happens with most creators is they work with a brand and then they literally never talk to them. Like they fired themselves from their nine to five job every single month. And it's a big part of what I teach is a lot of creators have never had a real. So they don't understand what professional business relationships are. Like. They don't understand how to operate within those.
They don't know how to build relationships so that they can turn those from this, these one-off deals into a protracted partnership. And so if you don't have that mindset and you go in and you get a brand deal, what's that saying? Where if you give a man a fish or you teach them to fish, right? It's the same type of idea, which is, I want to be an in the business. My north star is like helping teach creators, like how to think. Much more holistically.
Yes. Brand partnerships are great, but how can you turn that one deal into low gear, long ambassadorship or year long partnership for all of your brand partners that you're working with. And you turn this into an actual career where you have recurring income, Aidan anxiety about how you're going to pay your bills next month.
That's really the mindset that you need to have, especially, or a social media creator, because you can make so much money and just have a much more peaceful existence and be able to concentrate on what you truly love, which is creating content rather than hustling to find your next deal. Every time.
Total sense. And so is there any last piece of advice or anything you'd like to leave the audience
with? My advice always is if you're an aspiring creator or you've always wanted to start and you haven't, there is still time, right? Like we talked about earlier, like this is the early days of the creator economy. And I know it seems like it's not a lot of people think it feels still very saturated, but I totally disagree. I think that it's going to be even 10 times what the size of it is now in five years. And my advice is always just do it, just get started and you'll be surprised.