I made $10k last month as a college student doing UGC. Here's how it started (Ask me anything)
Hi guys, I wanted to share my experience because six months ago I never would've believed I'd be where I am today. I'm still in school, and around six months ago I was looking for ways to make some extra money on the side and around that time, a friend asked me if I'd be interested in creating a few videos for her brand to post on my social media. I didn't think much of it, so I made the videos for fun and didn't really expect anything to come from it.
A few weeks later, I started noticing that a lot of people were making money through UGC (which is actually how I found this subreddit haha). I spent hours reading posts, learning from other creators, and trying to understand how everything worked. So I decided to take it more seriously, I built a portfolio, signed up for a creator platform, started improving my content and treated it like a real business. After a while, I landed my first deals, nothing huge at first, but enough to make me realize there was actual potential if I kept improving, infact, the more content I created, the more I started understanding what worked, what didn't. Then a few of my videos started performing really well, and some even went viral, like the one in the photo (from that video I've gotten more than 3K followers) One of the brands I worked with offered me a CPM deal, which was completely new to me, basically I would get paid based on the number of views a video generated. For example, if the CPM was $4 and a video got 100,000 views, I'd earn around $400.
As time went on, I started creating more and more content for two larger brands that kept coming back for additional videos and instead of constantly chasing new opportunities, I was spending more of my time producing content, testing new hooks, learning what worked, and getting better with every batch of videos. Then this past month went crazy, a few videos went very viral and at the end of the month, I had generated around 3.6 million views, over 136,000 likes, and over $10,000 in earnings.
It still feels surreal ahhahaha, six months ago I was just looking for a way to make some extra money and now I'm building something that has completely changed how I think about my future. So if you're curious about anything like finding your first clients, building a portfolio, negotiating deals, going viral or literally anything else, ask me whatever you want. I'm an open book :))))