← Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades
Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades
Ep 82. Making Money as a Creator in 2025: What’s Working Now (And What’s Not)
00:23:48
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Are you feeling totally lost on how to actually monetize your social media? Like, you're doing all the things, you're posting consistently, you're following the trend, you're showing up in stories, but the money just isn't following the effort.
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Guess what?
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You're not alone. So many creators feel like they're stuck in this weird middle space right now. Like they're growing an audience, but they're not quite sure how to turn that into income. That's why I'm bringing back this episode. It's one of the most practical and powerful conversations I've shared on how to start monetizing your content without needing a huge following or a complicated setup. Welcome to another episode of Call Her Creator, powered by Stan, my go to platform for selling digital products, building your email list, running challenges, and so much more. If you're ready to finally turn your content into cash, Stan is hands down the easiest place to do that. If you want to get your free 14 day trial, you can go to Stan Store. Call Her Creator free trial from yours truly. Now, before we jump into today's episode, I've got to share this week's Instagram update because it's a big one. Instagram just rolled out a new restriction on trial reels. So if you've been using that feature to test new content or repurpose videos with less free restriction, you'll now only be allowed to post. I think it was, it was between like 10 to 12 trial reels per day. That means you need to be super intentional about which reels you're choosing. You know, you don't want to just flood your feed with daily trials anymore. This is likely Instagram's way of cutting down on the spammy, low effort content because I have seen people abusing this feature. But it also means that creators need to shift from quantity to quality very fast. So if you've been relying on trial reels to grow your reach, this is your sign to revisit that strategy, tighten up that message, and make sure every piece of content is tied to your bigger brand or offer.
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Today we're going to be diving into revenue streams for creators, content creators, influencers. We see it all over the gram. I made X amount of dollars this month on Instagram, but but a lot of the time we're just left hanging there like, how did they make that money? So today we're going to dive into different avenues of social media marketing that you can use to make money. Now, specifically, these tips are going to be for Instagram, but a Lot of these ideas can be used for, honestly, any social channel. So grab your notes and let's get into it now. Before we get into the social Media Update of the week, I want to ask that, that if you're listening to this episode, please do me a favor and click the download button. I need you to stop right now. Press download to this episode, to this podcast. It helps me and my team measure the success of how we're doing and it helps me show up for you guys week to week. So download this episode now. The Social Media Update of the Week. This is, this is a big one in my opinion. But I've been saying this all along. Honestly, I feel like a lot of us IG creators gurus talk about this a lot. But it's, it's finally in writing, in proof from the Instagram team. So, according to Instagram's content team, posting reels longer than 90 seconds can actually hurt your reach on the app. This was one of the several notes shared by the IG crew over at a creator event in New York City last week, at which Instagram CEO Adam Mossery answered various questions about the platform, the algorithm, what, what they're working on, et cetera. Now, this note begs questions like, why would Instagram even let you post reels longer than 90 seconds if they're going to hurt your reach, or if people don't want to watch them? To clarify, the current maximum post links for reels created in the app is 90 seconds. Yes, but you can upload longer clips. Instagram has been experimenting with 3 minute clips, 10 minute clips, but evidently there's some research that's come out that those experience have not been panning out so well. So, so people are being advised not to do that either way. I've never really been a fan of reels longer than 90 seconds. We have to understand that people's attention spans are so fast and at the end of the day, the algorithm is reading your watch time. So if people are almost completing watch time, that is a good signal that your reel is performing well and it's going to make the algorithm continue to push it out to more and more people. So if you have like a 7 second reel, then they only need to watch like 5 seconds of it for it to look like they almost completed it. Or they need to, you know, watch the full seven seconds and they've completed it. Whereas if you've got a 90 second reel or longer, you've gotta keep their attention for a pretty long time. And that's, that's hard to do these days with things the way that they are and stuff right at our fingertips. So you want to stick to those lower, lower count reels. So I typically keep a max of 30 seconds. When we started sharing snippets of this podcast, I toyed around with like a minute long, but those were just so hard to really reach, like a lot of views. So I started cutting them down even more. So now we try to keep them at like 30 seconds long. Now, I believe if you truly have something of value that you want to talk about, then of course you might need a longer reel. But at the end of the day, if your goal is reach and watch time, then you need to aim for shorter reels. That's just the way that it is. Now, I do know this is an Instagram update. As far as TikTok goes, it's a little different over there. I know that they do longer TikToks. I think there was. I can't remember how long they were, but I know that they were getting some gaining some popularity over there, which is why Instagram started testing it over here. But at the end of the day, we got two different apps, two different audiences, so what might work somewhere else won't work here. So I say stick to 30 seconds or less. In my opinion, 30 seconds is still longer form and I don't want y' all to sleep sleep on longer form. But Instagram has advised us stay away from 90 second reels. It will not do good for your reach. Review of the week this week comes from my therapist, Kelly. Guys, if you have not left me a review yet, please go do so over on Apple or Spotify. I will highlight your review on one of my podcast episodes. This one can be found by my therapist, Kelly. Thank you, Kelly. So she says, I'm a child therapist new to the IG world. I just started listening to call her creator. Branding and marketing was not at all a part of her clinical training. So I am a total beginner here. Yes, I understand that Kaitlyn is super knowledgeable, articulate and so, so generous to give us all these amazing tips for free. 99. I love that. Thank you so much. She also said I follow both of your pages for content inspo. So thank you for that too. You are so welcome, Kelly. Truly, like, this gives me so much love and passion to share tips around social media on Instagram pages on my YouTube channel. I've got a private Facebook group called Instagram for Business. This is just what I do in my free time. Like people ask like what do you like to do for fun? Oh, I like to post on social media. It's just what I do. It's what I love. And I'm hoping that with you guys listening to this podcast, hopefully you can find that inner fire in yourself to share about things that you love and make money while doing it. So, Kelly, thank you so much for what you do. I personally am a huge advocate for people that help children, whether they're struggling mentally, physically, whatever it is. So many kudos to you, girl. You're changing the world. Now for today's episode, how exactly are creators and influencers making money from Instagram? That is the golden question. From brand partnerships to consulting. I actually got a lot of this data from Later. Later surveyed 350/US based creators and influencers on how they monetize their channels in 2024. So I'm going to share the results with you guys before we dive in. I want to summarize some of the fun findings with them because I found them really interesting. So the first takeaway is 91 of creators and influencers have between 1 to 5 revenue streams. So I think this is very important to point out at the beginning of this episode, not one of these revenue streams is like just go all in on xyz. No, they, they're very honest about having different sets of revenue streams. I know myself as a creator and influencer at this point. I have many different streams of income. I think that's why like my parents, sometimes my friends don't understand what the heck I do. So I have to like tell them. But I make money from brand partnerships, from digital downloads, from a membership, from done for you services with my social media agency, Influence Marketing Studio. So I'm not just making money from one thing on Instagram. It's a lot of different things. I don't know if I mentioned affiliate marketing too. Don't knock it till you try it. I also make some money from that as well. So we're going to kind of talk about all those different revenue streams in a little bit. But 91% of creators, that's almost a hundred percent of them say that you need between 1 to 5 revenue streams. I'm sorry, they don't say that you need them, they just say that they have them. So keep that in mind. 94% earn from brand partnerships, making that the most popular revenue stream among influencers and creators. I can totally understand that. As far as my own revenue streams come in, brand partnerships is a very big part of that. At the end of the day, like If I really wanted to, I could probably make just influencer marketing my full time job. But I like doing all the other things and I like making money. So I do more than just brand partnerships. Affiliate marketing and freelance content creation, including user generated content too are tied as the second most popular revenue streams. Again, talking about affiliate marketing, I make some good money just from sharing like about the products that I already love and use. Now keep in mind, when you are doing affiliate marketing, I think it's pretty icky if you are promoting products that you really truly don't believe in. So make sure that you stick to things that you know and love. We'll get into that a little bit more later on in the episode. And then the last little finding I found 99% of influencer and creative revenue comes from short form video content. So almost 100% of that revenue that they're making was from a reel or a short form content or I'm sorry, a short form video. YouTube short, whatever it is, they're on video. So. And that's how I grew my business. I got on reels, I made them work, I had so much fun doing them and now I've got this full blown business because of my Instagram reels. So I am a big advocate for short form video and getting yourself out there. Okay, so some of the best revenue streams for creators and influencers this year according to later study. Let's get into them. So number one for revenue streams is brand partnerships. Now brand partnerships is the highest earner across niches and followings with 94% of surveyed influencers and creators cashing in. Now if you are a smaller creator or you're just getting started, take this info with a grain of salt. I never want, you know, becoming an influencer to be your end all be all. Because at the end of the day like yes, I love my brand partnerships, but I totally am making money without those things. I don't particularly need that to make a living. I've built a really great business from digital offers done for you, services, coaching, memberships. So I don't need brand partnerships. But it is really nice to have becoming an influencer though that shouldn't be your end goal. You can totally make money, maybe even more money by creating and selling your own digital goods. Not to say that brand partnerships aren't nice, but I've never ever want to make anyone feel bad or less about themselves because they haven't scored a partnership deal yet. So just mindset, get that outta your mind. Like you don't have to have these brand partnerships to be successful in the creator space. Now I do know a really awesome website for big and small creators that can still partner with brands and either make money or get free content or, or I don't know. There's a lot of goodness that comes from a reach. Get yourself out in front of more people. And it's called Brands meets Creators. I fell in love with this company like I think it was a year ago. I stumbled across them and I've worked on both. The brand part because of my agency. We will try to find influencers for some of the brands that we manage. And then I've also done it on the other side where I am the creator and I've scored really good product that otherwise I would have had to pay for. And I've also gotten paid to like shoot UGC content or maybe I did like a partnership where I talked about their brand on my Instagram channel. So you don't have to have a certain amount of followers. You don't have to have 10,000 followers. You could start with like 200 followers. You might even be able to start with zero, who knows? But get on there, make an account, check it out. I love the people over at Brands Meets Creators. They truly are making a place for creators to monetize on their creations. Number two, affiliate marketing. So fun fact here. The affiliate marketing industry is expected to reach $36.9 billion by 2030. That's showing massive, massive, massive signs of growth. If you're new to affiliate marketing, here's basically what it means. Affiliate marketers get paid a commission or referral bonus for referring customers to their company or their product. The commissions typically range like 1% to 20%. But I've had affiliates where I make 30%, 40%. It really just depends who you're doing affiliate marketing with. But when it comes to affiliate marketing, there's one thing I want you to remember and that is to expand. Meaning you need to diversify your affiliate earnings with different brands, different platforms, different content. So for example, as a social media coach, I have affiliate relationships with a ton of different like social media tools, maybe a growth tool, maybe a video editing tool, maybe it's phone cases, cuz we use phones for short form video. There's a bunch of different types of industries that I work with, but they all have one thing in common and that is that we all share the same type of audience. So it makes it okay for me to branch out to all these different industries brands. So keep that in mind when you're Doing affiliate marketing, you do not have to put yourself in a box. You don't have to pigeonhole yourself to one industry or one product. You can expand here. There's also a guy that I follow. I've talked about him before on the podcast, but he is an affiliate marketer and he works with a bunch of different brands. He's more of a lifestyle, so he has like hair and then he has MRR and then he has something else. So don't feel like you only have to stick to one person. But I will say try to find things that relate to your overall niche so that it's not one weird that you're promoting things. I one time had been asked, I might have talked about this before, it makes you really uncomfortable to talk about it, but I was once asked to promote a certain toy on my channels and it just did not align with my audience. They were going to pay me some good money too, like thousands of dollars to promote this, but I was just like, no, it doesn't align with my audience. I don't want to turn people off. I don't want to be remembered for that. So pick things, industries, products, services that relate to you and your niche. Now had I had a different audience, maybe I'm working for of then that would have made perfect sense. But I am a social media coach helping businesses. That was not what I needed to promote. So just keep that in mind. I turn down affiliate partnerships all the time if they don't align with me or my business or even like what I believe in as a person ethically. So keep all of that in mind when you are deciding who to work with for affiliate marketing. Number three for the best revenue streams for content creators and influencers is consulting or coaching or freelancing. So offering one on one services or private coaching can be a really great way to provide value and make the big bucks. So to provide one on one services, you'll need to basically price your time. So like what is your time worth? When I first started coaching, I started offering an hour zoom session, one on one for me and a business owner or realtor and and I charged 300 bucks for the hour. And so we'd spend that hour together strategizing their social media, breaking down who their audience was. I'd really do like a nitty gritty everything in an hour, let's strategize and make you money from Instagram kind of session. And it was 300 bucks. Now I charge a little bit more because I've been in the game for a few years and you need to obviously price what you're worth. But the easiest way for you to get your foot in the door as a creator honestly in any industry is to sell your time. I, I've had like therapists talk to me about how they could make money on Instagram. I'm like duh, sell one on one sessions. I've had teachers ask me how they can quit their full time teaching job and become content creators. Hello. Help them organize their classroom. Talk to them about activities you do to stimulate children's brains. Whatever it is that you're good at, that's what you can charge your hourly time for. I've even, I've tried to get my husband to do this for real estate. He's a realtor. Like charge people to tell them what to do, consult with you. But some people like to do this stuff, some people don't. But if you want to make some extra income, one on one coaching is honestly the easiest way to start. I also will advise maybe like a done for you service. So maybe you're really good at using an application like Dubsado. This is just an example that I'm thinking of. There's this girl that will go into Dubsado which is basically like a CRM and she'll update and organize everything for you. And I hired her as like a VIP day. I think I paid her like 1500 bucks maybe. And she went in and set up like my workflows, organized some things for me and it was like a one and done. She did it, she's done with me. And then of course she could have upsold me to maybe like a digital download or something, whatever she was selling. But I thought that was really smart on her part and it really helped me as a business owner. One thing, when you are selling these done for you services or your coaching, whatever it is, set up a store like Stan. I wish I would have had that sooner in my creator journey. I probably would have made even more money because it's just such a easy one stop shop. They click a button, they put in their payment details and then I get alerted like so and so has paid for a coaching session. Here's when she decided to book with you. And it's just so easy, so seamless. And I highly recommend Stan. I just, I love them. If you really want me to go into greater detail about coaching and digital products, we'll talk about that in a minute. But coaching done for you services, that kind of stuff. How to monetize. I do have a dedicated episode 11 called how to monetize your Instagram and make money from home. That is a really good starting point. After you listen to this episode, go Back to episode 11 and listen to that because I'm going to tell you how I started my workflow, what I use, the tools I use, how much I charge. I will break it all down for you, girl. Like I'm doing a breakdance right now. You just can't see me because I'm on video. All right, Number four is selling products. Selling digital products. So while being an influencer or creator is its own full time job, clearly it's its own full time job trying to keep up with that algorithm. 26% of surveyed creators leverage their influence into their own business. So that's basically what I do. Social marketing queen. She is an influencer, she is a creator, but she also is a sales girl. She likes to sell her digital products. Her done for you services. Whatever it is that I can think of that week to sell, I'm going to sell it and I'm going to make money doing it. So selling digital products is a really easy way to make money. You make something one time in Canva or whatever design tool you want to use and then you put a price tag on it and you sell it. I know a lot of you guys have seen, you know, people selling PDF guides on Instagram, or maybe they buy that MRR car and they resell it and make money that way. That is selling digital products. Now there's a really cool thing with Stan called Ask Stanley and you can basically have him scrape your social media content and make a freebie for you. Or maybe you take that freebie and you add in some added value and customize it and you put a price stamp on that and you sell that baby. But there are so many ways to make your first digital products. All it really takes is some time. But this is the way that I made my first $10,000 was from selling my own digital product on my sand store. And it was heavenly. And if there's anything like if someone is just getting started, yes, I talked about coaching, but if you don't feel like, if you're not confident enough to show up and talk to someone, then think about maybe putting a digital offer together, whether it's a PDF guide or a checklist or something like that, start selling that. Maybe get confident with people buying it and telling you how good it is. And then you get into coaching. I don't know, whatever works for you. So those are the top four ways to make some kind of income on social media. Now what I did not touch on was things like memberships. Memberships is a huge piece of my revenue. We have an Instagram membership where we sell. We basically provide people with trending audio clips with the prompts and then camera templates and a monthly content calendar basically like their social media. Do it yourself in our membership and I make a really good chunk of change doing the membership. So I highly recommend memberships. My Reels challenge is my digital offer. I've made really good money from that. Coaching probably is the fastest way to make a lot of money because that is a higher, higher ticket offer. But also, you know, when you're selling higher tickets, it's harder to sell that because you're charging someone $500 versus $39, you know, so you gotta have a strategy in place there. But when it comes to selling this stuff, I do have two tips that I wanna leave you guys with. And the first one is diversifying your earnings. When you are just starting out, focusing on one channel, going all in hard on Instagram is what I've done. But now I've started diversifying and posting on YouTube, posting on Facebook. Now I don't just have coaching. I have a digital offer. I have a membership. I have done for you services. So diversify, spread yourself out, make more money. Bring in different streams of income. I know that there is like an entrepreneurial quote out there that says something about if you want to get rich, it's like you need to have several different streams of income. And that's totally true when it comes to the creator economy as well. So diversify yourself. And then tip number two is charge your worth. Do research. Think about the time that goes into whatever it is that you're selling. Selling. Don't underprice yourself. If you underprice yourself, you are going to burn out very, very quickly. I know that when I was doing the coaching services, I was getting a ton of them at the beginning, but I was burning myself the crap out. So I had to increase those prices and take on less coaching calls just so I could have a peace of mind and make sure that I stayed in this for the longevity of it and didn't burn out too quickly. So charge your worth. It will help you to stay afloat as a creator and as a business owner. Anyways, I hope you guys liked this episode. This one was near and dear to me just because it's, it's what I do and I truly just want you guys to make money doing what you're passionate about what you love to do. So if you liked this episode, please leave me a review. Please download the episode, send it to a friend. We need my podcast to get in front of as many people as possible. I want to be the girl that people go to to learn how to make money online. So thank you guys so much for being here and I will see you guys next week. Bye.