The BEST UGC Tutorial For Beginners in 2026

0:00In this video, I'm going to show you how you can do UGC full-time in 2026. How to get started, how to do the entire thing, a toz, and how easy it is now that I'm on the other side. I used to be a creator for Whoop, Kane Footwear, and a bunch of other consumer fitness brands. But now I'm on the other side, and I get to see exactly who is hiring what creators through my platform, Artekch, and I want to show you guys all that information so that you guys can get

0:21hired easily and do content full-time. The main problem right now for brands is that there are not enough good UGC creators. We see this every day. We have all these different creators on platform, but only the best ones that are consistently going viral make all the money. For instance, this is Aiden. Aiden has a bunch of different viral videos for different apps. His best platform is Tik Tok where he's got 50K followers and averages at least 17,000 views a month. There are two types of UGC. There's organic and there's paid ad UC. And we'll go over the biggest differences in this video because when I was a creator and I started, I was

0:51getting paid 4K a month for only five videos a month with one of my favorite brands. Now, those deals are harder to get and you have to have a personal brand and a few other things and I'm very excited to talk about that. So, this is going to be a fulllength UGC course completely for free with everything you could possibly need. I'll show you how to make your portfolio, which platforms are the best to get deals from, how to grow your personal brand, and more. And later in this video, I'm going to show you why we actually turn down a lot of the creators that we work with, and how you can make

1:18sure that you're not one of those bad creators. Let's get into it. Okay, so first things first, before you even start working with brands or applying to deals or making a portfolio, you need to understand why brands would actually pay for UGC. And the main thing is that UGC just makes them money. So they want to pay you a little bit of money. They want you to make a video and then they want to make more money than what you paid or what they paid you for that video. In order to be a good UGC creator, you have to get results. So you can do this

1:43through going viral for a brand or through making paid ads for a brand. Traditionally, UGC was only making paid ads for brands. Now they have something called tech or organic or canvas UGC. There's a bunch of different names for it, but it's when you make an account and you post to that account for a brand, you go viral and you get paid

1:58thousands of dollars every single month. Different creators like the consistent retainers with organic UGC. I personally don't. I like doing higher one-off deals that are consistent for like 6 months. So remember UGC, you're making videos for a brand and the brand is then taking those videos, running them as ads, or you're posting them on a brand new account branded for that brand. This is different than influencer marketing because in influencer marketing, you the influencer would be paid to post on your own main personal brand channel and you would be leveraging your audience and results in order to help different

2:28people see that brand's product. Marketing very simply is communicating your product to an audience as wide as possible or as effectively as possible, whatever the goal of the brand is. The cool thing with UGC is that you don't need to have a huge personal brand. It's just not that important because UGC again, the brand takes those videos and puts money behind them through Meta or Google or Tik Tok or any of the other ad platforms and all you have to do is make the video. No one even knows that you're doing this. However, it is actually kind

2:54of important to have a personal brand. When I started UGC, it wasn't that important. But now, having a personal brand allows brands to whitelist your content. Which means, let's say I have 50K followers on Instagram. If I post a collaboration with a brand, I just did one for SpaceX AI. If I post that video, I can give them the ad code and then they can run ads on that video from my account, which means my followers who are going to trust me more are going to see that video first as an ad. So, brands love to do this right now. It's how they get the highest converting

3:25videos and they're kind of getting both influencer and UGC in one cuz it's a paid ad. It's sponsored, but it's also kind of an influencer post on the main page. So, if an influencer converts so highly, why would a brand choose to do UGC and just get the videos instead of paying an influencer to make a post for them? The reality is that content creators now are extremely good across the board. And when you're doing meta ads, you don't need a top tier influencer to make that ad. You just need a video that converts really well and you can pull anyone off the street to make these videos. And that's where

3:54you commit. So, UGC creators are regular people just like you and me, and we just make videos for brands. And because they are authentic, organic, and feel like we're the actual users of a brand, those videos can do as well as an influencers's video. But the best part for a brand is, of course, it's much more cost effective. [music] So, remember, when I started, I only had 10,000 followers on Tik Tok and about 2,000 on Instagram. And Whoop still wanted to pay me like an influencer for those five videos. So, I was getting paid about $750 on average. So, $3,750 every single month for 6 months. I got

4:27two more contract extensions and I worked with them for almost 18 months. It was crazy. But the reason why I got that deal, it wasn't completely random. I was making personal brand content about the things that I already like to do. I like to work out. I like to run. I like to lift. So, I made videos about Whoop and the products that I like to use. Whoop saw that video, knew that I could communicate the product effectively, which again is marketing, and then hired me to make more videos for them so that they could use that skill and send it across the world to more people so that they can make more

4:57money. So them paying me about $4,000 a month was a very small price to pay for those five videos because they were making hundreds of thousands of dollars and arbitrageing that difference. And once I learned this, I left my sales job. I just did more UGC. I signed with an agency and I just ripped videos and did content full-time. I ended up getting close to like I think it was like 16 18k a month somewhere in that range. And it was awesome. It was kind of like the best day of my life when I got that first deal. I did cry, you know, it was super emotional because I

5:23didn't have to do sales anymore, which is like the worst thing ever. I hate sales. I don't know how people do it. So, you know, I kind of want you guys to experience that same thing as well. By the way, that's why we built Artekch. Rtech is our own creator platform that helps creators track, manage, get deals on platform, and also gives you some tools that you can improve your content with like a viral predictor tool. You can learn personal branding through all of the top creators on Artekch right now. So go ahead and check it in the app store if you want. We have literally a

5:48free version. There's no reason not to do this. It's by far the best tool on the market. I put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into it for the past year. So go check it out. It's going to make your life way better. So the problem with a lot of UGC beginners is that they try to pick a niche. This is not what you should do. What you need to do first, even more important than your portfolio, is getting case studies. And you may think, well, how do I get a deal if I don't have case studies? Like, you know, how does that kind of work? The reality

6:11is you just need to make three videos, put them on a profile platform like I don't know, Sideshift or Launchpoint, any UGC platform, put your videos on there, these three like fake UGC videos, and you can get hired working with these brands on that platform, get deals and case studies, and then you'll find your niche over time. So, initially, I thought that my niche would be something like dating or fitness or whatever. It's not until brands actually reached out to me that I realized what my niche was, which was fitness over time. But that only becomes true after you kind of work with a bunch of different brands and

6:42then you kind of get guided down your path. So don't worry about the niche yet. Just worry about getting and landing deals on different platforms. By the way, I'm not a fan of cold outreach either. Don't go send emails to a bunch of brands hoping that they pick you. Just go on platforms where they're already hiring for exactly what you're going to do. Like if they're hiring for a creator and you apply, you could get that deal. If you email a brand that's not doing UGC or they're not looking for it, it's obviously a much harder sell to get them involved. So like don't do that. Another thing that you need to

7:08know about UGC is that you actually do need to be pretty professional. This will easily separate you. Most people in UGC honestly are early 20s. People that want to make 510K a month and like not go get a normal job. Okay? So, if you want to do 10K a month from UGC, you need to be professional. Reply on time, timely. Text all the time, follow up, be the squeaky wheel. That is how you're going to get deals and stay consistent and stay in front of brands. So, that's number one. Be annoying. Reply to brands on time. The next thing is don't miss a deadline. Don't miss posting. Ask for

7:37help. Asking for help is incredible alpha. A lot of people are not willing to do this. If you're willing to ask for help, people are going to help you. It's one of the craziest laws in the [music] world. Hey, can you help me do this? How many people are going to say no to that? Not many. And the most important thing is you do not need a nice camera like

7:53this. Okay? All you need is your iPhone. It's actually best because it seems like it's authentic in the moment. So, your iPhone is all you need. You don't need special gear. If you want, you can focus on better lighting. I'd recommend that. Like, this lighting for this video is not even the best ever. It gets the job done and that's what's important. A lot of people think that saturation is an issue in UGC right now. But what I want to show you is that there are not that many good creators that are actually pulling in a ton of views per month through UGC. Bryson is one of them and

8:20he's doing over 500,000 views per month. So, he stands out. Bryson will get hired for any deal he wants. Issue with saturation is that you can't be a bad creator anymore and do UGC. But why would you want to be a bad creator and do UGC? So, you're going to have to learn. You're going to have to grow. They're going to have to develop a new skill. And my hottest take with UGC is that a good UGC creator is not going to stay a UGC creator for long. They're going to move on and become a creator manager, content strategist, or maybe

8:45even launch their own app like I did. But once you're at that place, you have unlimited options. So saturation is only real for people who are not that good and they're not breaking through to become one of the best creators. This means that you need to lock in very, very hard for two to three months and really become a quality creator. You need to study. You need to see what's working well. You need to look at Facebook ad libraries for companies that you're working with. Look at their highest performing ads. Ask them for help. All of these different things to make sure that your outputs are actually

9:16much better than everyone else around you. So, what's special with our techch, our platform, is that our creators are actually trained by us inhouse with our app. So, if you're a creator on RC, you get access to all the best trainings, all the best deals, and that stuff shows up here when you're making videos for brands. For instance, this is Cece. So, Cece is a friend of mine. She's an incredible UGC creator. She works in a community and agency with a girl named

9:39Mackenzie Marsh called Creator Current. And if you look at Mackenzie's page, she's pulling in hundreds of thousands of views on different videos. She's incredible, okay? And the reason why she's so good is because she really worked and focused to improve on her content over time. If you're able to do this, you'll separate yourself and you'll be able to ask brands for whatever pricing you want. And so when a brand is hiring through our tech, they'll be able to see, okay, CeCe is doing at least 130k views per month. She doesn't even have a ton of followers. I could probably get her for a good price and she's going to deliver. So they get

10:08to see all this social proof right away. And it makes it really easy for them to just invite her to a campaign and she's good to go from there. AI UGC is probably not going to change UGC. So we've had this concern for years. The reality is there are certain use cases where AI does convert really well. I've seen it myself. I've seen the dashboards. AI UGC can work. However, the people who are using AI UGC are just UGC creators. So, if you're good at UGC and you don't want to be the face, you can just use AIUGC to make the content for you. Now, Meta and other platforms

10:41don't love this. However, over time, I don't know how they will be able to stop it. The lesson is if you're a good marketer and you're good at selling and you're good at making content, you can either do that yourself with your own personal brand, which is more important for yourself long term like we talked about, or you can just do your personal brand, which is going to be better for you long term. So, it's up to you. AI UGC, it's probably going to be good, but I don't know if it's going to be here forever. So, now that you know more about UGC, right now we want to focus on

11:05what actual content brands want. Okay? So, you need to create brand content that makes them a lot of money. You can have an amazing portfolio. You can send incredible emails to brands, but if your content isn't exactly what they want, they're not going to hire you. The number one reason your content is not working is because your hook is not good enough. I struggle with this myself. I have about 200,000 followers on social media, and when I'm struggling or my videos are not hitting and going viral, it's always because my hook is just not that good. If you make a good hook, people will watch your video. So, a good

11:36way to make a good hook is by talking about something that's extremely broad and high tamp. Noah Bermudez is one of the content coaches inside of Rtech. He has over two million followers. If you want to watch his Go Viral course inside of Rtech, it's free. Just go download it and watch it like right now. It's only a few minutes long, but he'll explain how to make a really good hook that builds a cult-like following resulting in millions of followers. One thing that we like to do in our content is creating an open loop hook. So, when you create an open loop, what that means is, you know,

12:03if I was having a conversation with you, I'd be like, "This is an open loop." and I would pause and I would just, you know, kind of sit there for a second and you're like waiting for the answer. That's the same feeling that people need to have when they're doing content with you is they need to be sitting there waiting for the answer. It used to be you could give a hot take or a spicy opinion and

12:24that would work really well for content. It's not the case anymore because people are kind of tired of the content rage bait stuff. What you need to do instead is create that curiosity loop where people are just consuming your content and they want to know like what what point you're getting at. kind of keep them along, kind of rehook them, even bring them back in, and then you can deliver the payoff at the end of the

12:41video. So, that's a great way to do it. Typically, you don't also want to introduce the product too quickly. Let's say you're doing a good hook, something like Grockbot is literally insane. It could work, but it's kind of quick. It's better to say, "My friend just showed me something that's like pretty much changing how I look at content. Like, look at this." And then you show the product because that hook creates that curiosity loop that people are willing to watch. That makes sense. And the idea here is you want your content to feel

13:05really organic and natural and normal. So you want it to feel like real content before it feels like an ad. And sometimes what works well is just be like, "Guys, honestly, this is an ad, but like this is a product that I use. I like really like it. This is a very underrated hook that you can use for organic social that works well." Then what you need to do is show actual solutions. So once you've introduced kind of a pain point or a problem, then you can show that product being the answer that solves that problem. kind of just teaching the consumer, the customer, why this product is good for

13:33them. Okay? You're not selling them quite yet, but you're showing them like, "Hey, this this works. This is what I use. This is why I use it." yada yada yada. Visual hooks are really good here. So, if you want to use proof, that also works well. And the cool thing about visual hooks is that they're low-key pretty easy to do, especially with CPG, ecom, consumer package goods. All you have to do is like show it on your face, show before and after. You can use AI to kind of like mess up your face a little bit. Oh, I have acne. And then like you show before and after and it's like not

13:58real. People do this all the time. You know FTC if you listen to this like I'm sorry I just I'm don't shoot the messenger. All right. This is this is what people do to make money with ads. And then the most important part, the reason why videos actually convert is the CTA. So if people see the value,

14:11you'll get people that convert for sure. But if you want people to really buy something or leave whatever they're doing right now, go to Amazon or go to the checkout link or whatever and and buy, you need to have both urgency and scarcity. So, what I would say, this is literally one of my favorite brands, but honestly, the only thing I hate about them is how quickly they sell out. And last time I checked their site, they only had like 20 left. So, I would go right now while you still can. So, that type of CTA where you're really telling

14:35people like, "Hey, now is the time. Like, you have to go right now. That urgency and scarcity is what builds up a really good product so that it can sell." So, the most important thing now is building your portfolio. There's unlimited ways to do this. You can do base 44, which is what a lot of people like lately. Uh, you can use Canva. I have a Canva portfolio template in the

14:54description if you want to just copy it. It's super easy. My personal best social media advice for creators trying to build a portfolio is to just send brands your personal brand. This doesn't work if you're brand new, of course, but your personal brand. Let's say you have 5,000 10,000 followers on Instagram. You speak really well. You're doing talking head content. You're active. That is what brands want to see more than a portfolio

15:16template. You know what I mean? Portfolio templates, yeah, they work. Media kits are cool. you want to show your rates and stuff, fine. But if it's a new brand and you get introed in a group chat, just say like, "Yeah, this is my IG." And you show that you're averaging like 100 250k views a month as a creator. They're going to be interested in that more so than the portfolio probably because you're actually going viral on your personal brand. It's a lot harder. However, let's just talk about the portfolio because if you are a complete beginner, it's a very very easy place to start and uh it's

15:45kind of bread and butter. You know, you can't go wrong. So, what I'd recommend is using that portfolio template from Canva in the description. Go in there, make a really casual, nice picture of yourself as the cover photo. Shouldn't be like a head shot or anything too professional, but just like a nice picture. Then you want to link your socials and you want to put contact information. And then you want to put a title of what you do. I'm a UGC creator for fitness brands. Um, I'm an influencer and I make UGC content,

16:09whatever. And then your socials linked. Make them buttons so they're clickable. and then put your contact information, your email plus your phone number if you're comfortable with that. So, this is my actual UGC portfolio template right here. So, again, very cool, casual, big. Uh, you want to have your socials linked. You want to have a little description of what you do. And then you want to have, you know, where you're from and your email. Most

16:31important thing after that is videos. Get right into the videos right away. That's what brands actually want to see. So, right here we have different example videos I've done for brands that I've worked with that have paid me to make content for them. So, we have a voice over video, voiceover video, talking head video, and a green screen video. These are three formats that can work for you at any time. I'd recommend getting comfortable with them. If you want a guide on how to make these, just DM me on Instagram. I have guides for you. And then after that, you want to go to case studies. Case studies are

16:56extremely important. You should be doing case studies pretty much all the time because case studies are the brand puts themselves in the case study shoot, right? They're like, "Okay, well, what will this actually make me? Like, how much money will I make from this?" And that's where case studies come in. I always put screenshots of social proof that I have like how many likes I've gotten, how viral my videos are going, stuff like that. I really recommend doing this. It's super easy and um it's actually kind of better than showing videos sometimes because you're just showing a bunch of likes. And it's easy because if people whitelist your content

17:24and brands are just putting money behind this, then they're going to get a ton of views and likes and you know, your video doesn't even have to perform cuz the brand's going to do it for you. After that, you want to go into your rates. A lot of people recommend right now not putting your rates at all and just saying contacts for rates. I don't really care to be honest. I don't even use this anymore. People know my personal brand. It's big enough where brands will message me. They'll be like, "What do you want for this video?" And then I'll just quote them like, "What I

17:47want." That's kind of how it goes once you start to grow a little bit more, which is cool. But usually for a video, I'll charge like $2,000 a video now or something like that. And then after that, you just put in your past clients and again, contact. So, it's a very simple page. It's just like social proof, you know, examples, and then uh your rates, brands that you want that you've worked with before, and contact information. Super easy stuff. This this

18:07should not take you very long to do. Again, I have the template in the description. Just like go copy that template. So, now at this point, you understand what UGC is. You have a portfolio template. Now, it's time to get your first deal. What I'd recommend doing is going on RC, signing in, making

18:19an account, and then go get deals on RC. There are other platforms you can get deals on, of course, like I'm friends with the founders of Launchpoint and Sideshift. RTC's a little bit different because it's not just UGC management. It's really like a a LinkedIn type platform in the content economy. So, people are going to be hiring for a bunch of different types of roles, not just UGC creators. So, it actually makes it easier for you to get your foot in the door because it instead of competing on purely content, you can compete on other things as well. Like maybe it is follower count if you're more of an

18:47influencer or maybe it's the fact that you have a psych degree and you're really good at direct response marketing and you you can copyright maybe like there's so many different skill sets that tie into this. I think it's important that Rekch became a platform that's bigger than just UGC. So, go on Artekch, apply for deals. If you need other platforms to go on, Launchpoint

19:03and Sideshift are also great platforms. I I recommend both of them. A lot of our creators that we work with like using them as well. But then an even more important way to get deals is by making a personal brand and talking about your experience with UGC and how it's going for you. How many deals are you getting? How successful are you being? Maybe something that you're struggling with with UGC even. And keep doing personal brand content every single day. You need to do personal brand content. I can't hit on this enough. Personal brand is what's going to separate you. So doing personal brand content, having an email

19:31in in your bio and saying, you know, email for rates, stuff like that is going to help you succeed more than you could possibly imagine because most people don't even know like if I'm scrolling and I look at someone's account and they don't have an email, then I don't think I can email them, put an email there and I suddenly think, oh,

19:47I could email this person for this role. That's how brands think. But I personally wouldn't spend any time doing cold email outreach. I think it is a waste of time. go on the platforms or ask for introductions. You know, our agency, we also have an agency called Content Economy. We work with tons of different brands. I'll show you right now. So, Content Economy has 940 trained UGC creators. I think they're the best UGC creators on Earth. I've seen them make so many good results [music] for different brands. Like, this is a guy who just joined, you know, he's already doing, you know, like what is that

20:18$7,000 between, you know, his in his first six weeks of doing content in UGC. Sabrina just hit her first 10K month doing UGC. And that's just on one platform alone. Catherine went from a UGC creator to actually doing agency work for brands. So now she is the one managing and hiring UGC creators. It's actually a lot better. She makes a lot more money doing that than she would just being a creator, which is something you could do too. By the way, if you are a brand, you can hire people through our tech for this. This is like this is the idea is all of this is the content

20:45economy. We want you to see that. And then we have guys like Luke who were creators and now they're getting flown out to SF to potentially run growth for startups in San Francisco for the biggest tech companies funded by YC. Like that is really cool as well. Jonathan closed about $20,000 of retainers this month. James just took up $8,500 worth of deals in our community as well. So we have all these deals and creators are just getting them from going to the job section and applying for different deals. So we put deals in here all the time. This is also on our techch. They're kind of the exact same

21:13thing now. So, if you want to work with us like more closely, you can apply for content economy, which is this private community. Or you can go on RC and kind of do it yourself, start off, you know, for free, do your own thing, RK has tons of resources for you. So, it's pretty incredible as well. Okay, so now that you're getting deals and you're kind of on your way, it's really important to not burn out. And I've seen this happen a lot of times with different creators,

21:34honestly, and it kind of makes me sad. It doesn't have to happen. You don't have to get burned out. Being burned out comes from a lack of results and a lack of good systems. A lot of our creators that are doing 15, 20K a month, they have really good systems where they're batch recording content, which makes it

21:48easier for them over time to do well. Creators who don't have systems, they take on a lot of deals and they get burned out because every day feels like they're stressing. But good creators, they batch record instead. So, they'll set up Monday or Tuesday for recording. They'll submit those videos throughout the week. They'll even hire an editor to do all of their editing and things for them. And all of a sudden, they have a content business where they're only working like one maybe two days out of the week. and then the rest is kind of on autopilot and that's how it should be. So, if you just watched this entire

22:15video and you're not sure still what you should do, let me just recap everything for you. Okay, so the first thing that you need to do is you need to just make a few example videos. Go on different platforms like Rekch, Sideshift, and Launchpoint. [music] Put those videos on those platforms as your results, your case studies, and just start messaging brands. Like, apply for every deal you can. Get as many deals as you possibly can to start. If you get better deals, take those better deals and replace those bad deals. Keep a few good ones

22:43and get to like 5K a month to start. Once you're here, then you can kind of be more choosy. And by the way, make sure you're doing personal brand documenting this journey along the way because it'll become extremely valuable to you and to brands long term to see your results. So, at this point, you basically have two options. One of those options is that you could take everything that we talked about and go do it yourself. If you use Rtech, we built it so that you can do this yourself. It's better on my life if you use Rtech and you do this yourself and you're really efficient without, you

23:10know, obviously having to go through all these different steps and processes. We want Rtech to be the way that you can grow and scale your content career very, very simply. Now, if it's a month from now or maybe it's just you want results like right now, then you can come work with us at Content Economy. So, Content Economy is our premier group. We do have close to a thousand trained UGC creators. I do take calls as well as six other coaches every single day of the week in that community to make sure that we're watching your videos, helping you make better content, helping you actually sign deals and not just telling

23:40you what to do. We give you all these opportunities so that you can become a great trained creator and then hopefully I can hire you myself on my own projects. That's kind of the dream situation for me. We have multiple calls a week, Monday through Friday, all throughout the community from literally top creators, agency owners and brands, all recruiting and helping creators in content [music] economy right here. And honestly, if you're already doing a consistent 10K a month from content, you probably don't need us. But if you're not and you want to kind [music] of make this process really quick, we can get you on deals first week. Like really

24:12simply, this is what we do. We have all the connections and stuff, and we also just have an awesome group of people. I'd show you the main chat, but they're probably saying crazy stuff in there, so I don't want to. But we have an awesome group of creators. We do inerson events and stuff like that as well. So, if you're someone that wants to do content full-time, seriously, apply. You know, we don't take that many people every month. I personally, I think, take less than 10 every single month. But those are people that become I become friends with. I work with them. I give them my

24:35cell and I make sure that they get results. That's the only way I would feel good about running a business like this. If that's you and you want those results and you want to go quicker, apply. Otherwise, use our tech. You know, our platform is built to help creators [music] with tools that we have and with different modules and stuff so that you can become an incredible creator. That's my goal. When I got my first deal, I cried. Like literally, it was like one of the best days of my life cuz I could quit my job and do content for a career. And that's really just

24:59what I want you guys to experience as well. But if neither of those sound like good options, you can always just take my free portfolio template in the description below. Like guys, we have so many resources for you. I'm so excited. But um just go get that template. Just sub out some videos. Go apply for deals on different platforms. You don't have to use my platform. I just think it's the best one. That's why I built it. But yeah, go go go crazy. You know, like 2026 is an incredible year to do this. I

25:22think content is completely the future. I'm completely sold on it. And if you guys need any help at all, I'm always a DM away on Instagram as well or X or Tik Tok or whatever. So, thank you guys for watching. If you watched all of this, I hope it really helps. And uh we will

25:34talk soon. Bye.