UGC creators make short videos that brands run as their own ads and posts. You film on your phone, you get paid for the video, and it may never appear on your own profile. That’s why follower count barely comes up. A brand hiring you is paying for how you come across on camera and how clearly you can explain a product, and someone with 300 followers can be very good at both.
We review creator applications every week, so here’s what we’d do if we were starting from nothing.
The kit you need
- A phone from the last few years. Clean the lens first. You’d be surprised.
- A window. Soft daylight on your face beats most cheap lights.
- A quiet room. Bad sound loses more applications than bad lighting does, and soft furnishings help.
- A basic editing app. Cutting clips, trimming pauses and adding subtitles covers most of the job.
If you buy one thing, make it a small clip-on microphone.
Make three sample ads
Nobody has hired you yet, so make your own work with products you already own and like. Aim for three videos of 20 to 30 seconds, each in a different style:
- A talking-to-camera review, with a clear opinion in the first line.
- A voiceover across product shots, to show you can hold attention without your face.
- A demo that shows the product doing its job from start to finish.
Each one needs a hook, a problem, the product and a reason to act. Label them as sample work. Implying a brand paid you when it didn’t is a quick way to lose trust, and the person reviewing you may well know the brand.
Pick two or three niches you can talk about without faking it. A parent of toddlers, a marathon runner and someone who has tried every sleep remedy going all have something specific to say. “Lifestyle” doesn’t tell a brand much.
What we look for
When we vet a creator, we’re working through a short list. Is the audio clean? Does the first line land within a couple of seconds? Are you looking into the lens? Do you sound like yourself while saying something specific about the product? A slightly wobbly video with a clear opinion beats a beautiful one with nothing to say.
Pricing your first jobs
We can’t give you one market rate, because it moves with niche, country and experience, and anyone promising you a set income is probably selling a course. What you can do is work backwards from your time. Say a 30-second video takes you three hours, counting the brief, filming, editing and one round of revisions. If you want to earn $30 an hour, that’s $90. Those figures are made up, so use your own.
Extra hooks, raw footage, paid usage and exclusivity can then be add-ons, because each one is more work for you or more value for the brand. Our plain-English guide to usage rights explains those terms.
Read the brief, then read it again
The most common reason we pass on an application is that it doesn’t answer the brief. If a brand wants someone with curly hair who has tried three leave-in conditioners, tell them about your curly hair and the three conditioners. Two specific sentences will beat a paragraph about how passionate you are.
Last, the boring part. Treat this as a small business from the first job: read contracts before you sign them, keep your invoices and receipts, and find out how self-employed income is taxed where you live. Then apply. Your first three videos will embarrass you in a year, which is a good sign.