Transcript of You're gonna be a full-time creator in 2026, here's how

Okay, take a look at this. This is gonna be your plan to go full-time as a content creator in the next 12 months. I know you're probably worried about it being too late to start, but trust me, it is totally possible to become a full-time content creator in 2026. The creator economy only keeps growing and it's not too late for you to become a part of it. I find a lot of videos like this focus a lot on content strategy and growth tips, which don't get me wrong, it's definitely important. But what I think is often missing from the discussion is the business side of being a creator. Content creation is equal parts art and business. And so in this 12 month plan, we're gonna focus a lot on some of the financial milestones and strategies for developing a business model as a creator. Because what's holding you back from making this your job is not lack of ideas or passion. I'm sure you've got lots of both. But what you need is a concrete plan to take this from a hobby to a business so you can actually quit your job and become a full-time creator. Thanks to ManyChat for sponsoring today's video. All right, we're gonna break this 12 month plan down into four quarters of three months each. Our first quarter is all about getting started and setting goals. And the very first step in this plan, which might surprise you, is to just start posting. Listen to me, if you've been thinking about becoming a content creator, you need to stop, procrasta planning, and just start creating. Just do it, experiment, practice, put in the reps. The only way to get better at something is by doing it again and again and again. You don't need a complex content strategy to get started. And the fact that you're so focused on one, it's probably because you're a little bit resistant to just start creating already. So instead, copy and paste my basic beginner content strategy. And trust me, this will work for you up until like Q3. And then we'll come back to this, okay? I promise. Okay, so here's what you're gonna do on Instagram. And remember, pick your platform. We're talking about YouTube and Instagram here. Decide which one you wanna focus on. Bonus points if you do both, but that will be a lot of work. Okay, so on Instagram, you're gonna post three times a week. You're gonna post two reels. One of them is going to be a more trendy reel. You're gonna look up for those trending audios, text over B-roll, that kind of thing. The other reel you're gonna post is gonna be an original reel. One where you're like talking to the camera. Maybe it's a vlog, a tutorial. It's gonna depend on your niche. And finally, your third post is gonna be a carousel. Carousels are doing really well right now. Lately, my carousels have been getting consistently more views than my reels, which is kinda crazy. So don't sleep on carousels. If you're trying to grow on YouTube, you're gonna post one long form video a week. Trust me, that'll keep you going. You're gonna be tempted to post more often to grow faster. Instead of trying to do two long form videos a week, which will just burn you out, instead post an additional two shorts. These can just be like cut downs of your long form videos. If you're also posting on Instagram though, just take those reels, post them to shorts. It'll help you grow faster with less work. In my experience, working with, chatting with dozens of creators over the years, it's more important to just get started than to wait around for the perfect idea or strategy. You've probably heard the old story of the two art classes before. In the first class, the teacher assigns the students to spend the entire semester working on just one painting. They can have as long as they want to make it absolutely perfect. The second class though, is told to simply make as many paintings as they can and not worry about their quality. By the end of the semester, the class who produced the best work was actually the class who focused on quantity, not quality. Because ultimately they had more opportunities to practice and improve. Trust me, your perfectionism is holding you back from actually getting anything done and seeing the growth you wanna see. So just start posting using this strategy. Okay, while you're in the midst of posting on this schedule, you're gonna want to clarify your goal. I'm sure at this point, you probably have something in mind beyond just, I wanna be a creator. So we're gonna crystallize those goals and thoughts here. The more succinctly you're able to answer these questions, the better, because that's a good indicator that you've got a solid and clear idea. Question number one, what will your content be about? Look, you don't need to adhere to a strict niche necessarily, but you kind of do need to be able to answer someone. If you know, like let's say you meet someone new and you talk about being a creator and they're like, okay, cool, what's your Instagram about? If you can't answer that in just a few sentences, then that's maybe an indication that your direction is not clear enough. If it takes you five minutes to explain all the different types of content that you post about, that means when a new follower arrives at your profile, like they're not gonna be sure what you do. And so they'll be less likely to follow. Question number two, who is your content for? Having a clear sense of your target audience is so important. It means that you can actually design your content to be relatable or aspirational or interesting to a certain type of person. If you don't zero in on this question, chances are your content will end up feeling kind of generic. And number three, why should they follow you? This is key. Like for real though, why should they follow you? The internet is vast. There's lots of other people probably posting about similar stuff to you. So why should someone follow you instead of, or in addition to the other creators? Like I said before, content creation is one half arts and one half business. Now that we've covered the art side of things, aka the content that you're gonna make, now we need to talk about how you're gonna make money. So the third step in Q1 is to set your financial goal. There's basically one important number that we need to determine. And that is your minimum viable income. In other words, what's the lowest possible amount that you could be making as a content creator, but still feel comfortable leaving your job to do it full time. I find it helpful to define this number now because here's the thing. As a content creator, you're not gonna start making 100K overnight. Your income is gonna grow slowly bit by bit, kind of like this. Now, if you allow your personal spending to also grow slowly, kinda like this, then you never actually feel any richer. Because at least to me anyway, I think feeling rich is about this gap being bigger. It's that feeling of knowing that you have a cushion, that you could be spending more, but you don't, because you've got everything you need. So you can save for the future. This concept that I've just illustrated here, this is what we call lifestyle inflation. And I personally think that content creators in particular are quite susceptible to. So let's just say for example, this year you make $5,000 as a content creator. If your salary was originally 75K, and then now you're making 80K, because you're including your content creation income, if you get used to having that 80K and you're spending increases in proportion to that, basically now your minimum viable income has gone up. So instead, I recommend opening up a separate bank account for your creator earnings specifically. This is just good business practice at some point, you're gonna wanna set up your business completely separate from yourself, potentially as a corporation or LLC. But for now, this is just a really great way to prevent lifestyle inflation, because you're keeping that money separate, you're not just incorporating it into your everyday cash flow. Could even be good to put it into like a high yield savings account so that you make a little bit of interest on it while it sits there. Not only will you prevent lifestyle inflation, but you'll also be passively creating a little emergency fund for yourself, which will make the transition from having a full-time job to being a full-time creator feel a little bit more smooth once we get there later down the road. Now that we're entering the second quarter of the year, it is time for you to build your income stream while you continue to post consistently, okay? We're still following this plan, don't stop until I tell you do. So let's create an income plan for you. There are so many different income streams that you can set up as a content creator, but I always recommend that beginners start in a specific order. The first one being affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing programs are very beginner friendly because they don't tend to have any requirements in terms of follower count or video views. You can sign up for affiliate programs for products that you already love and use every day, and it would be very normal for you to post about them. I kind of see promoting affiliate products as like training wheels for brand deals. It kind of gives you an opportunity to soft launch being an influencer, especially if you have never done any kind of thing like this on your Instagram before. Like if you've literally never shared a link before on your Instagram stories, it's a really good low stakes way to get started. The important thing is that you naturally include these mentions in content that you would have been making anyway. That way it doesn't come across as like spammy or weird. And of course, remember to always disclose the fact that they are affiliate links, just by adding like hashtag affiliate or something like that to your store. Okay, so the next income stream you can unlock is digital products. Again, there's no follower count or audience size requirement for this. You just need a good idea of something that's helpful for your audience. Digital products that I have personally bought from creators that I follow in the past include travel guides, custom Google maps with like cafes and restaurant suggestions, workout plans, that kind of thing. You don't have to be an educational creator for this to work for you. Both of these income streams definitely will scale with audience size, but it's great to get them started before you have a big audience. Because then someday when you do finally go viral and start gaining viewers, your affiliate links and digital products will be sitting there ready to make you money. Like imagine how annoying it would be to finally like get a video with a million views and all of a sudden you have like thousands of followers coming in and you only then after the fact start developing ways to monetize it. Be a missed opportunity. Now, one of the most effective strategies in my opinion for both affiliate marketing and digital product sales is using DM automation. Basically automatically sending DMs to people who comment on your posts or send you a story reply. It might seem super complicated to set up, but it's actually really easy to do. All you need to do is go to Manychat.com and shout out to them by the way for sponsoring today's video. And you can use an automation like auto DM links from comments. One way that I personally use this all the time is when I create reels talking about different pieces of gear that I love. I'll always say at the end, comment gear and also do a link to download my free gear guide. And my free gear guide is basically a little catalog thing that I designed in Canva that explains all the different gear that I use for content creation. And it includes affiliate links to purchase those items. The template walks you through setting this up. You choose whether you want it to be active on all of your posts or just a specific one. You can even send it as a reply to a DM or a story reply to, and then you choose your trigger word. So like in my example, it would be gear. And then you just fill out what DM you want them to receive when they comment that. And recently, Manychat even introduced a new feature where you can automatically DM new followers, which I think is a really great way to engage people who have just found your stuff, introduce yourself and maybe even share some other content with them like your YouTube channel or like a podcast. Overall, I really think Manychat is a super helpful tool in the journey of turning your content creation from a hobby into an actual business. And if you wanna try it out for yourself, you can actually get 30 days free of Manychat Pro if you use my link in the description. And thanks again to Manychat for sponsoring today's video. The third income stream you wanna start thinking about at this stage is brand deals, but not maybe in the way you're thinking of. If we're honest, most likely at this stage in the game, you're not gonna be getting paid brand deals yet. But I want you to start now by creating a list of the dream brands that you'd love to work with. Think of brands of some of your favorite products and stuff that you already use all the time that would be relevant to the content that you make. Bonus points if you've seen these brands work with other content creators before because that means they have an active influencer marketing program and it might be easier to set something up with them. This list is gonna come back in handy when we get to Q4, but start thinking about it now. So you're ready once we get there. Okay, so we've reached Q3. You've got six months of content creation under your belt. You've done some building out of your income streams. Now it's time to lock in your content strategy for some more serious growth. You know, we've got a good thing going with what we came up with over in Q1, but now that you've got that down pat and you've been consistent, it's time to make some tweaks and really optimize it to see even more results. I really believe that you can't just craft a perfect content strategy from the start and then like repeat that and repeat that for infinity. I think for one, you need to give yourself some time to practice and experiment and learn the fundamentals before you can really get strategic with it. Just like an artist would. You need to learn the rules of the trade before you can start to break them. Okay, so here's your forced out plan to develop your content strategy. First, you're gonna start by analyzing the content that you've posted so far. Seeing what has performed the best for you and asking yourself why. Okay, so the best way to start doing this on Instagram is to go into your professional dashboard, which will be linked on your profile. Under insights, look for the content you posted tab and tap on that. From there, you're gonna go ahead and select the last six months so we can see everything you've posted so far in this journey. And you'll probably just wanna leave it as sorted by the highest views, at least to start. You can scroll through those top posts and really ask yourself, why did they perform better than the other content that I posted? Is it the format? Like maybe your audience really loves voiceover vlogs or maybe it's a specific topic. Like maybe every time you share about your favorite coffee shops, that does really well. Take a couple notes on this and consider how your future content can take advantage of the same themes that major past content perform so well. Next, we're gonna perform a competitive analysis. Research what other adjacent creators to you have done and what's performed well for them. You can just take a scroll through their profile. Unfortunately, you can't see how many views other people's carousels get, but if you go up to the Reels tab, you'll be able to see how many views they got. Alex just perused through and looked for those standout hits, like which videos got so many more views than the others and try to figure out why those did so well with their audience. Similar to your own content analysis, make sure to take some notes on this and really think about what you could lean into to take advantage of that success. Okay, step three is to plan a signature series. Having a format that you can repeat again and again is so key. You can see why so many creators do it now. It just works. It immediately communicates to your audience what type of content that you make and implicit in the fact that it's a series, you will be making more of it. It's kind of like a promise built into the concept itself. If someone comes across an episode from your series, you mentioned that it's part of your whatever 30-day series, they know that if they go to your profile, they will get more videos like that. I think so many of us out in the algorithm world are so used to just seeing one video once from a creator and then they kind of like disappear into the ether. A series cuts through that and immediately tells audience members, hey, if you follow me, you will see more stuff just like this. So if you like this video, you'll probably like my other stuff too. So it's just a really great hack for actually turning reach into followers. Okay, step four is to increase your posting frequency. Ideally by this time, you know, at the Q3 mark, you've gotten some practice in, maybe you've been consistently posting your three posts a week or your one long form video a week, you've become more efficient because you've practiced that as you've gotten faster, which means maybe consider throwing a fourth post into your weekly posting routine. Maybe another short on YouTube. It doesn't have to be a lot, but if you've been seeing a little bit of success already with this strategy, implementing this analysis, creating a series and increasing your frequency is really gonna add fuel to the fire of your growth. The final stage of this 12 month plan is to get yourself some brand deals. For the vast majority of content creators, brand deals are gonna be your most significant income stream. And likely the income stream is gonna allow you to take all this and do it full time. So in this final quarter of this year long plan, we're gonna lock in your brand deal strategy. Okay, so step number one, you're gonna need to make a media kit. You could format this like a little catalog of your offers, sort of like I have, but you could also design it as like a pitch deck. Ultimately, it's probably gonna be a PDF that includes your audience demographics, stats about your recent reach, an audience size and your rates for sponsored content. You want it to be quick and easy to read for brands, but you also wanna take the opportunity to pitch yourself and explain why they should work with you. Okay, so the next step is to optimize your content to get brands to notice you. Ideally, you're gonna want brands to come and pitch you. That's the dream, right? Like an inbox full of brand deal requests. Getting that to happen is definitely a slow, steady and strategic process. The most straightforward and easy way to do this is just to start regularly tagging the brands that you use all the time in your content. Like let's say, for example, you're making an Instagram story about your skincare routine. Obviously, you're gonna wanna tag the brands of the products that you feature. But in addition to that, you also want to craft the content on your page. Be like a little bit of a mini portfolio for brands. Basically, once these brands do start stumbling across your profile, you wanna have content there that proves that you're good at creating high quality content that shows their products in a good way. Okay, and step three is to start pitching those dream brands. Like I said, ideally you want brands to come to you, but part of the natural process of this is going to be doing some pitching as well. You've got a good portfolio on your page, brand friendly content. You've made a nice media kit. Try to put that all together and reach out to the brands that you'd really love to work with. I find the best way to get their contact information is to DM them and say that you have a proposal or you'd love to pitch yourself and who would be the best person to contact. And if that fails, you can do some LinkedIn creeping and see if you can find a staff list of the brand that you wanna work with and see whose title says like brand partnerships manager or influencer marketing manager. And company email addresses are usually formatted like name at company.com. So you could like do that. Not gonna lie, this is like a slow and arduous process, but it can be the way to get started and get your first opportunity. So sometimes things just take work. Okay, so in all of these steps, I think you'll find the resources included in my content creator starter kit to be pretty helpful. You've been seeing me use them in clips throughout this segment actually. It includes my media kit template. So you can just copy my format that's been getting me brand deals for years now. It's also got my brand partnerships tracker, which is so helpful for tracking pitches and follow-ups and contract details. And in January, we're actually gonna be releasing my brand pitch email template. So you can copy and paste the same format that I used to pitch brands. As with all of our new releases and additions to the content creator starter kit, if you've purchased it in the past, you get it for free. So if you buy it now, you'll get all the future upgrades as well. And of course the star of the content creator starter kit is my 12 month plan to going full-time as a creator, which this video is based on. So if you want the full in-depth steps, including like worksheets and prompts for you to work through, that's where you can find it. So I'll have that linked in the description if you wanna check it out. All right, so like, I know this can feel like a long and discouraging process, but the truth is you do need to invest your time, energy, and creativity into this for months before you really start to see results. Anybody who tells you otherwise is probably just trying to sell you on a dream. Like in my experience, like it really does take time and effort, it's not easy, but I can tell you from personal experience that it is very much worth the wait. I've been a full-time creator for five years now and it is absolutely my dream job. I'm so grateful that I get to be creative and make videos every day. And it's especially wonderful that I get to encourage other creators to do the same. If you're still watching at this point, I just want you to know, I believe in you. You can do it, you can pursue this. And also thank you. Your support and your attention means a lot to me. So thank you for watching. If you wanna see more videos from me about how to pursue this creator journey, especially going into the new year, watch this one next. And once again, thank you so much for watching. Like truly, I appreciate it so much. I hope you're having adventures and following your dreams and I'll catch you in the next one. Bye.