How I actually got into UGC — and how I’d do it again from zero

I didn’t grow up wanting to be a “UGC creator.” When I started, that title barely existed. There was no roadmap, no course, no girl on TikTok breaking down media kits. I’ve worked for massive brands, hiring creators, but I’ve also been a creator myself.

And here’s what I figured out, mostly by getting it wrong first: the work that actually pays you isn’t about being the prettiest girl on the feed, and it is not about your follower count. It’s about social proof and conversion.

I had one cheat code most creators starting out don’t have. Before I was ever pitching brands for myself, I’d been on the other side of the inbox. I sat in the brand seat. First, doing social media management. Understanding how to create branded content that leads to sales.

Then, influencer marketing, reading creator pitches, deciding budgets, choosing who got hired. I’ve worked on organic social and content for skincare brands, on full social strategy and UGC for paid ads. I’ve also managed and pitched on behalf of other creators, negotiating their rates for them. Brand side, talent side, creator side. Three seats, same industry.

So when I tell you what gets someone hired, I’m not guessing. I’ve literally been the person deciding.

And the single biggest thing is your portfolio and how well you can paint a picture. If you don’t have a good portfolio, landing partnerships is brutally hard. If you do have a good one, brands come to you already half-sold. Your portfolio needs to be content-heavy. Less about you. More about proof.

Brands hire UGC creators to do exactly two things: generate revenue and create social proof. That’s the whole job. If you can do those two things and ignore literally everything else, you become very, very hard to say no to.

When I was on the brand side, those were the only two questions actually running through my head: Can this person make us money? Can this person make us look trusted? Everything else, the cute intro paragraph, the “I’m so passionate about your brand,” was noise (and I honestly would just ignore it).

So here’s my biggest piece of advice: study content that already performs. Recreate it in your own style. Build a portfolio so visual, so obviously built to sell, that saying no to you feels like a mistake the brand will regret.

And underneath all of this, there’s one number that quietly decides how valuable you are.

EMV is the metric that decides how valuable you are as a creator. In plain terms: it’s the dollar value your content generated for a brand, measured against what that same reach would have cost them in paid advertising.

Say a brand hires you for $1,000 for one video. That video goes out and does the work of a $4,000 ad campaign. You didn’t cost them $1,000 — you made them $3,000. That makes you a 4x EMV creator. And a 4x creator is a good creator, which means a 4x creator gets rehired.

Some brands will also estimate your CPM, which stands for cost per thousand. The math is some version of your impressions multiplied by an estimated cost-per-thousand, or a flat dollar value assigned to each like, comment, view, or share — for example, a benchmark of roughly $0.10 per like on an Instagram post.

Simpler: Every like, every save, every share has a tiny price tag stapled to it. At the end, they add it all up to see what your post would have cost if they’d had to buy that attention with ad spend instead of earning it through you.

Influencer-created content generated an estimated $236 billion in earned media value in 2024 alone, and that number climbs every single year.

If you’re a creator with high EMV, you get rehired. You get rehired, you get put on retainer. You get on retainer, and suddenly you have the kind of brand relationship that compounds — where the work comes to you instead of you chasing it.

A one-off video that doesn’t perform will rarely get you hired again. And that’s not the brand being cruel. That’s just business. They are not going to rehire someone who can’t generate them revenue.

The brand goes into its quarterly review to discuss marketing budget and what that budget actually produced. Your name comes with a number attached. If that number helped them hit their outcome, you stay. If it didn’t, you’re gone not because they didn’t like you, but because you aren’t making sense for their business. Nobody in that room is thinking about how how pretty your content was.

This is exactly why your portfolio and your content matter more than your follower count.

Most UGC platforms and most brands genuinely do not care how many followers you have. They care whether the content converts. I would rather have a creator with 800 followers and three videos that clearly drove sales than a creator with 80,000 followers and nothing to show for it.

I’ve also watched a real shift: more and more brands are deliberately leaning into smaller creators, because the ROI is so much bigger. They can hire someone smaller for less, get content that converts just as well, and pocket the difference. Small is not the disadvantage you think it is. Sometimes it’s the entire reason you get picked.

Keep this stupidly simple. Brands are scrolling through hundreds of these a day, so the easier you make it for them to say yes, the more often they will.

Your portfolio should have:

• Your name. Very minimal text linking to all your socials. Your email. Clean, up top, takes 0.2 seconds to find.

• Then content. Lots of it. Very, very content-heavy, in different formats so they can see range — talking videos, product tutorials, ad-focused content built for paid spend, and organic-style videos that look native to a feed.

Build it like a traditional website, so the brand can scroll it top to bottom like one. The brands hiring you want to see everything in a single scroll — not click through five tabs to find what they are looking for. Canva is my favourite place to make this, and you can do it completely free.

I organize mine by niche, and I’d strongly suggest you do the same. (Exactly how to structure that is one of the first things I break down below and it’s a simple shift that’s gotten me hired fastest.)

List the brands you’ve worked with so far. If you don’t have any yet, that’s completely fine — just add them in as they come. And if you don’t have a single client video to start with: go into your own house, find a few things you genuinely love using, and make content around them. You will have to do some things for free to build this up, and free is not a bad word here. It’s strategy — as long as you’re doing it with intention, not just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something sticks.

I need to be clear about one thing, because there’s a real misconception floating around that this industry is oversaturated, or that there are simply too many creators now to break in. I don’t believe that. I’ve watched too many people prove it wrong to say anything else: if you actually follow a real framework instead of guessing, you can get a brand deal. I know that sounds like a big claim. I’m making it anyway, because I’ve coached creators to success too many times for it to be luck.

I’m going to hand you the actual framework — the part I use, the part that’s gotten my clients and me paid:

• The niche-by-niche portfolio structure that makes it is easy for brands to find what they’re looking for.

• The difference between ad-focused and organic content — and the specific, slightly sneaky way to find out exactly what’s already working for any brand you want to pitch, using a free tool, in under five minutes.

• My exact seven-day, zero-budget plan to build a portfolio that actually converts, from nothing, this week.

• The outreach script I actually send — close to word for word, plus the follow-up and how to find the right person to send it to.

• The three portfolio mistakes I see constantly that tank conversion, even when the content itself is good — including the one that’s costing you all your negotiating power.

Everything above this line is the why. Everything below it is the how. If you’re serious about turning this into actual income instead of a hobby, this is the part that gets you there. If you are a paid sub, send me your portfolio, and I'll tell you exactly what's killing your conversion and what you should change/add!!