How to Make a STANDOUT UGC Portfolio (FULL FREE GUIDE 2026)

0:00In this video, I'm going to explain how you can start your own UGC career and go from zero to $10,000 per month in income without having a following and without being a crazy influencer. This is how I left my corporate sales job to do content full-time as a career. I've been sharing it on social media lately and a lot of people have been asking me, "How do you start a UGC portfolio?" If you don't have any experience, this video is for you. If you want a fulllength free UGC course, go ahead and go to my YouTube channel. I'll have it linked here or in the description and that'll

0:27explain how to actually do UGC from A to Z so that you can get everything done. This video is specifically for how you can make a UGC portfolio so that you can make $10,000 per month as a creator starting from zero. I've had a lot of people on my Tik Tok and Instagram page saying things like portfolio five times a day performance money first 10K first 30 days easy just grind yada yada yada and the truth is it can actually be that easy. We have creators in Content Circle, which is my UGC community, like Nash, who went from literally $0 to $13,000 per month as a creator in three

0:58months time. We also have creators like Thomas Lart. Thomas ended up doing $10,000 in his first 32 days doing UGC. Does this mean this will happen for you? No. But it does mean that I've seen it many times and I've done it for myself. I've done it for other creators and I'm going to show you how you can build a UGC portfolio so that you can get that exact same outcome. And knowing what I know now, I would have 100% done this earlier and left my corporate job sooner. But it takes time to figure things out. So hopefully you can implement everything and stay till the

1:23end because at the end I'm going to give you a little secret that many people don't know about UGC. So this right here is my UGC portfolio. Now again, I've done over $100,000 from just this portfolio alone. And I haven't even updated this in over a year because it's been so solid. But if I was going to update it, this is exactly what I would do. First, your first page, you need to have your name. Make it clean. Make it right on top. Then also have your social links hyperl right here. And then use a picture of you. Again, this shouldn't be like a professional headsh shot. It

1:50should be more of like a creator feeling to the picture. It should still be nice, but it doesn't have to be very, very over- the top nice. And then you want to immediately put social proof. I put brands that I've worked with right here. Again, Whoop was my first case study. I ended up doing $4,000 a month with them

2:04for 18 months. Fantastic case study. They were really happy. I was really happy. They ended up cutting me because I went a different direction with my content instead of fitness, but it was a great partnership while it lasted. And then you also want your contact information and also where you're located. And then right away get into the videos. The brands primarily care about how good your videos are. So I have four different styles of videos

2:23here. And I also have more social proof. I have two types of social proof. One, I have a uh how many views I've done on my organic page. And then two, how much money I've made a company via sales from the links that I've used. Now, if we were to compare this $10,000 in sales number from organic versus how much they actually made using my videos, putting it behind ad spend, this number is most likely millions of dollars, which means every day they're spending thousands and thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars on ad spend. And usually companies are looking at a 3 to 5x

2:55return for ads as long as they're trying to scale profitably. Now, these videos specifically, we have Whoop on one side, and then we have Rugged Maniac, which is another thing that I did. Then we have unlocked and then we have whoop again. Now all these video styles are different. So what I like to do is showcase the fact that I can do different video styles. This is a voice over. This is another voice over. This

3:17is a talking head organic viral post. And then this is a green screen. Okay. So these video styles pretty much cover everything you're going to be asked to do. Um green screen is great, talking head organic is great. And voice over is more traditional meta ad UC. Now, if I wanted to make this better, I would make not just one page dedicated to videos, but I would probably have those four videos, another four videos, another four videos, and just keep putting case studies of brands that you've worked with, proof, social proof, what company they were, how good those videos are, and just go and go and go and go. I

3:48think like 12 to 15 videos would probably be really good here, a good sweet spot. Fortunately for me, because I am known in this space, I really haven't had to update this at all, and it's been great for me. So, there's that, too. And then for here, we have a case study. Okay, so an actual case study in a portfolio is 100% what brands want to see. They don't want to just guess and wonder if your content will convert for them. They need to know that your content will convert. So make that

4:12easy for them. Give them actual numbers. Primarily, you're going to be speaking to marketing people. So they want to know rorowaz, which is return on ad spend. They want to know ad spend, total budget. They want to know how long it ran for. They want to know total sales. They want to know all these numbers. If you need help making a specific case study, take literally anything that you've done. Like if you've ever had a viral video, use that. If you've ever like contributed to a friend's viral video, use that. Like literally anything possible that you can use to make a case

4:39study right here is extremely important. But I'm going to show you at the end of this video how you can get away without having case studies in order to land your first few deals. And then again, I have another case study on this page. These are screenshots, not videos, of how well my videos actually performed for Whoop and another company. The

4:54important thing here is social proof. You're selling now. You're not just trying to go after vanity metrics and gain a following. You're actually trying to convert a viewer to a buyer. And that is a totally different process. So, it's important to show case studies showing that you can do this. You haven't done this yet. Again, we'll get to it at the end of the video. So, when I first

5:11started with Woo, this is a funny story. I ended up getting an email from them and they asked what my rates were. And I'd never been asked this question before. I had like 10,000 followers on Tik Tok and maybe 2,000 on Instagram. So, I ended up doing was messaging my friend JD Runfar, who's a, you know, famous influencer creator now. very good athlete. And I said, "J, what do I tell them?" And he said, "Tell them you'll do one video for 500 or you'll do three videos for or four videos for 1500." So you would get one off is what you would tell the brand. And so I did that and

5:40Whoop was like, "Yeah, that sounds great. We'd actually like to throw in some UGC videos." And I was like, "What is UGC?" And they're like, "They're, you know," I didn't say that, but I looked it up and it was like higher quality edits, edited videos. And since they didn't say no, I said, "I'll do two UGC videos a month for $2,000." So $1,000 per video. So, I had like two organic posts and two UGC videos, um, plus a sponsored post. So, there's five videos in total, and it averaged out to be about $750 per video, which came out to $3,750 a month for 6 months. That was my

6:09first contract. And so, that's actually where these numbers come from. But what I'd recommend now is get rid of this. Get rid of this whole section. And it should just say contact me for rates and have your contact information here. And the reason for that is because when I was doing this, UGC meant one thing, and it meant meta ads. But now it can mean a bunch of different things. Organic UGC, U AI UGC, meta ad UC. There's all these different terminologies now. So what I would do is just say contact for rates because that will improve your reply rate, but it's not necessarily going to

6:40harm you. So yeah, I would totally get rid of your actual specific rates here because you're going to be priced out and maybe there's a brand you really love to work with. You don't want to get priced out from that opportunity. So I would remove it and just put contact rates. Also, this is like traditional meta ad UGC stuff. In terms of deliverables, you don't really need this, honestly. Um, it kind of looks good. And here in this section, I would say we can do either, you know, meta ad UC or organic UGC. It's kind of up to the brand. So, you can just put some

7:08deliverables here. Um, I kind of like how it looks. It kind of fills the space, but yeah, this this section could probably just say contact for rates. And then at the end, we also have more social proof. um and all of my contact information plus you know a different link now there's a LinkedIn link okay so that is essentially it for the most part now to actually make this portfolio which maybe you're wondering how you actually do that so now we're on Canva and I'm going to show you how you can literally make your own UGC portfolio one thing that's super helpful here with Canva is that there's already so many

7:41people that already have done this before so if you just go into template section you can search up UGC portfolio and you'll get essentially a readymade a UGC portfolio right off the bat. So, you can kind of click through this and look at ones that you think are best. I think this one looks pretty good. There's a lot of words and text there, though. I usually prefer something very simple. My

8:00goal is to have a ton of videos on mine. A lot of this is kind of, you know, content slop to make it look good and sell, but I don't really love how these look to be honest. So, I just actually found my UGC portfolio template, and if you guys want this, I can just put it in the description so you guys can use my exact portfolio. Again, change the rate

8:19section just to say contact for rates. But there you go. Just put it in the description for you guys. By the way, to actually make these videos, just go promote anything in your house. So, for instance, this is a dog collar right next to me. Just go promote a dog collar and make a video on it. Your videos are

8:34not going to be amazing when you start. The most important thing is to have something in your portfolio so we can go get those starter deals. Now, let's go show you how to get the starter deals. Now, this is a platform called Sideshift. And I work with Sideshift. They're amazing. There's thousands of creators on here. It's fantastic. And I actually own an app. The app is called Artekch. And I use UGC to promote my app. So, this is a little snapshot to our first month or so of doing UGC. Um, but we've been able to get, you know, over a million views, maybe a million and a half views. And I know actually we

9:04have a lot of views aren't being tracked. So, we probably have a couple million, if not three million views at this point. Um, which is awesome. Why this is important for you is because you can become a creator and you can go on Sideshift and apply for deals like my app, Artekch. By the way, Rtech, if you're curious as a creator, it helps creators make better content so that you're not just guessing at what brands want and also what can go viral. We have three different modes. We have UGC, Tik Tok shop, and viral. So, for making UGC content, it'll help you make really, really good content that'll make you

9:34more money. As a creator, you can go in and apply for literally hundreds of different opportunities to work with brands and apps. Apps are the easiest barrier of entry so that you can actually start making content as a UGC creator. The first thing you want to do is just lock up a deal because once you have a deal, then you can put that brand in your portfolio and then leverage that to get higher paying deals. The problem becomes with most people that they make a UGC portfolio, but they don't have enough social proof of working with brands to get better deals. Once you have a couple brands from a platform

10:03like Sideshift, then you can go take those and the next brand you talk to, you say, "This brand's already paying me. You know, I'm only going to take a video or a deal for $500 per video." Now, normally you get paid around $ 20 to $50 per video for organic UGC and then you get a commission on top for how well those videos do. Let me show you an example account. So, this is Josh. Now, Josh is a UGC creator for my app, Artekch. Initially when we started with Josh because he was in content circle which is my UGC creator community. He was willing to start with us at just a

10:34$2 CPM. But Josh is an incredible creator and this was a great steal for us. So I obviously gave him a bonus as soon as his videos started doing well and I paid him way more than that. Okay. But I think it's important to start just getting a deal. If you're a creator, just get a deal. Doesn't matter necessarily what the rates are. Take one, get the experience. Start building your portfolio out. By the way, Josh has a lot of incredible content creation tips and he's done a great job promoting Rtech. So Josh now gets paid $1,000 per month base pay for one video a day. And

11:04then he also gets $2 per thousand views based on how well his videos get. So for instance, this video right here got $525,000 views. So, he would get $2 per thousand views, which comes out to about $1,050 just from this video on top of the other thousand that he gets base pay plus $2 per thousand views for every other view that he gets on here. So, just to recap everything cuz I know it's been quite a lot. The most important thing when you're starting out is to build this UGC portfolio. Once you build this, you are good. Now you can go on platforms like Sideshift and begin applying taking

11:38those brands that you're working with on Sideshift and then adding those case studies back into your portfolio. And then you want to start growing your personal brand because once you're growing your personal brand, you'll get a lot more inbound from brands. And then once you do that, you want to go into your Instagram or Tik Tok bio and put your email there so that brands can contact you. This is as simple as it gets and I really hope this helped. Do you guys want more help? Just DM me on Instagram, send me your portfolio or anything that you need and I'd love to help you