Let's Talk Money: How to Make Money as a Content Creator with Alyne Tamir: An EOFire Classic from 2023

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. are brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. On today's classic episode, we'll be breaking down how to make money as a content creator. To drop these value bombs, I brought Aline Tamir and EO Fire Studios. Aline is a creator with over 3 million followers who has visited 92 countries. Videos cover travel, social media issues, finance, and more. Aline hosts retreats for female entrepreneurs in Success Circle, a weekly intimate mastermind, and works with brands like the United Nations, Microsoft, Facebook, Disney, and more.

0:37And today we talk about how you deserve to make money, but life is about relationships and enjoying the life you build, about how you don't need a big audience to earn well, you need clarity on what you sell, and how to have multiple income streams both inside and outside the creator world and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sparsing today's episode goes to Aline and our sponsors. Fire Nation, are you ready to make 2026 your best year yet? I believe it's time to start your transformation by attending the world's highest rated business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and featuring football star and entrepreneur Tim Tebow and President Trump's son Eric Trump at Thrivetimeshow.com slash EOFire.

1:13Again, request life-changing tickets today at Thrivetimeshow.com slash EOFire. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white-label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Aline, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. I would say that there is a lot to do with success and timing. And I think a lot of people think they need to create a schedule and decide when they're going to be successful and I'm going to go to law school and then I'm going to do this.

2:05But I think for a lot of personality types, including mine, a lot of success is about preparing, preparing, preparing, and then randomly something will happen where your skills are applicable and everything kind of falls into place. And for me, that didn't happen until I was like 28. So I felt a little late in the game of life, but once it happened, it all made sense. Fire Nation, I'm excited to talk with Aline today because we have a really cool conversation about making money as a content creator. And almost everybody listening to this today is creating content, wants to create content, wants to be a producer of content.

2:44So I want to start, Aline, by talking about income streams. What are the available income streams that content creators have available to them? Sure. As a content creator, I would say once you start making money, you should, as with any type of income, you should diversify. So you should have a few income streams where you are investing your money outside of the creator world. for example, real estate or the stock market, et cetera. And you should also have your income streams that have to do with being a creator. So the obvious streams that you have as a content creator are ad revenue. That's one that everybody knows about, right?

3:21You get a million views, you have a CPM, the amount of money you make per thousand views, and that's your ad revenue. It depends on the country you live in. It depends on the topic. If you work in finance, you're going to make way more money per million views than if you work in, I don't know, travel, for example, would have a lower CPM. So brand, uh, brand deals is the second one that people know about. Uh, brand deals would be, for example, if I partner with, so I work with safety wing, safety wing is a travel insurance company that I really like. So when I travel, I use them and then they say, Hey, let's do a brand deal.

3:56You do a cool post about us and, uh, your great experiences with us. And then in exchange, we will pay you, right? This is a brand deal. So this is another way people kind of already know about. And I would say the best way, in my opinion, to make money as a creator is to make it actually directly from your community as opposed to from brands or ad revenue. And the reason I recommend this is because I feel like it's easier to control. Whereas a brand deal or ad revenue depends on views, right? And it's really hard to predict how many views you're going to get, what the algorithm is going to do.

4:29Brand deals depend on, you know, partnering with a brand, making sure you have a vision they like, blah, blah, blah. It's kind of a pain sometimes. You can still do both of these. In addition, I think you should also have make money from your community. So the way that I've done this is, um, courses. So I have learned a lot of things as a creator and I created courses about how to create content. And this provides a lot of value to my audience and they love them and it builds community and it helps them build their careers and get jobs. It's very cool. Another one would be live communities. So I do like a mastermind called success circle and it's a smaller group, only 20 people.

5:06And we meet every week and we have cool guest speakers like you or other people who come and kind of give workshops and trainings for them. Another thing I do is retreats. So I do something called dearly retreats and these are for mostly female entrepreneurs. Sometimes we have men as well and they're all around the world. And we go to like Scotland and do a digital detox or we go to Dubai and do an entrepreneurship training. And these are really fun because I get to meet and connect with my audience, but I'm also able to make a living that is sustainable without me depending on a brand or views, if that makes sense.

5:46Fire Nation, a lot of great things here. Let's kind of go over some of them. Ad revenue plus CPM, that's cost per thousand views or listens, like whatever metric or platform that you're on. Different brand deals. And that's something that I do agree is more appealing for a lot of reasons if you can go after that because you can really do some cool custom things with those brands. Courses, coaching, masterminds, retreats. You can even create like a SaaS product, like a software as a service. If you see that people that are consuming your content are always struggling with this one thing, well, if you can create a SaaS product that's solving that problem, that can be a great start to a great revenue stream.

6:25And I want to talk about specific strategies, Aline. Let's talk about how a beginner can start with their own content creation and grow their views, grow their followers, grow that base. Like with anything in life, there's that famous TED Talk, but this is a concept that predates the TED Talk, of course. You need to start with your why. So why are you becoming a creator? Then I can tell you how to become a creator. If you want to become a creator to make money, then you need to decide your vertical and your content based on that being your goal. If you want to be a creator, I became a creator because I care about social issues.

7:02So I wanted to meet, uh, to reach the biggest audience possible with the social issues I cared about. I actually did not care about money when I started. I didn't even think about money, which is really funny because now it's a big part of my job. Um, you have to think about, do you want an audience only in one country, right? Do you want only in the United States? Do you want international? What ages do you want? Then you kind of create your content strategy plan. I think most people just kind of create content and they're like, let's see who likes it, which I think is an inefficient approach.

7:33I think the better approach is to think, why am I creating this content for real? Because I have so many students, I teach content creation, I have thousands of students, and I see the ones that actually continue and succeed are the ones that have a strong reason, they're doing it, a strong motivation. If you're just doing it to do it and you don't actually care, you're not going to succeed because it's a very hard thing to do content. It's a very competitive world. And the two words you need to remember that, you know, if you ever have taken a course with me, you're just sick of hearing this, but consistency and improvement.

8:06It's the same with content as in anything in life. If you are consistent and you make content on a schedule, like even if it's just twice a week or something for five years, you will succeed in some way. If you are also improving on each piece of content, just a little bit, change your sound design, um, learn how to use better sound effects. Um, learn how to put a, a lot like a color correction, uh, learn how to script better, find a better person you're featuring, find a better angle. If every video, you only change one thing and make it better in like three years, if you were consistent, you're going to have good content, right?

8:42Whether you started making terrible videos or not. Let me break in here because I want to hear a quick story of maybe one of your clients, somebody that's in one of your masterminds, who's done just this. You're like, you know what? They started out with nothing, but they were really solving a real specific problem. They created a great solution or maybe be the number one solution to a real problem in a specific niche, avoiding the marketplace. They kept at it twice a week, three times a week. They were consistent. They were doing their thing. And over time, they built something special. What did that look like?

9:14I'll give you two examples. I'll give you a super relatable example, and then I'll give you kind of the extreme version of what could happen. So one girl, her name is May. Her username is TalkToMay. She came to, I think, my Bali retreat like pre-pandemic, three years ago or something. and may when she came was very interested in content and when she first started making videos her videos were very similar to my videos because of course I was teaching her she had not found her own style yet and may I would watch her like from afar right because I have a lot of students I'm not hands-on with everyone over the years I would watch her from afar uploading and uploading and being consistent and like some videos were not good I will say it to her face some were not good but they existed right and some you could feel her energy you could feel that she was like waning She was weakening.

10:01You could feel she was about to give up a few times. But she didn't give up. And that's the difference between her and other people. She came back to another retreat in Dubai a year ago, literally, December, one year ago, almost to the day. And on that retreat, we do these things called hot seats. So if any listeners don't know, it's essentially you sit there and then your group gives only you feedback for 20 minutes. And her hot seat was about, I really want to become a full-time creator, but I don't think I'll ever be able to make enough income to quit my job. her income at the time was I don't know I'm gonna make up a number because I don't remember let's say 5 ,000 euros or whatever and we sat and we calculated what she had started making as a creator and she realized she was very close to actually replacing it but she just didn't believe that she could do that every month she was like oh no that was just one month I can't do that next month but by sitting in the hot seat and having people who are supporting her she realized she could and she literally quit her job the next month and now she's a full-time creator she lives in Ireland and she helps small businesses, um, create reels and content to promote their businesses.

11:01And it's so, it's like such a beautiful story because she was working at like an eyeglasses company before and she didn't like it. She was like a normal person. She's from Brazil who moved to Ireland. Um, another example that that's one that I like to use because it's so relatable. It's like a normal person, a normal job, a person in a new country, an immigrant, right? Another example is these two women named Fatima and Daniela. Five years ago, me and my partner, my partner is Nas Daly. He's a really big content creator. We went to Peru and we had a meetup for my partner. And, you know, 500 people come, we stand in line, we take selfies with everyone.

11:36So we don't remember them. Then I hold a retreat in Albania, a coworking retreat. And two women who came were from this meetup and we had, they had a picture with us together and they had no followers at the time. They just were inspired, but they were consistent. They made travel content. So talk to me does business content. She does like how to make content for, um, you know, small businesses. They do travel budget content. They're Peruvian. They do it in Spanish. Now, these two women who were consistent and started traveling and started creating these great YouTube videos, uploading, you can see their upload schedule.

12:12They are uploading every week, at least once, right? They are consistent for years. You see their videos get better. You see their scripts get more fun. You see their edits get better. And now they have, I don't know, 3 million, 4 million followers. They're the biggest content creators in their country. And that was all in a few years. So wherever your listeners are now, I think the cool thing about content is you can literally change your whole life in a year. And that's what I did. I grew from zero followers, not zero, nobody has zero. I had like a thousand or something to a million in one year.

12:45And I am like a normal person. So it's doable. It's not easy. I dedicated that whole year and I worked my butt off and I did nothing else except focus on content for one year. But then at the end of the year, I had a million followers and I had an amazing community and I had a whole new life and career. Fire Nation, I hope this inspires you because these are real examples from real people who put in real work. We're going to talk about negotiating tactics. We're going to talk about actually growing followers, how critical that is and specific numbers around that, and so much more when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

13:25Fire Nation, are you ready to make 2026 your best year yet? Are you looking to learn the proven processes and success systems that have been used to create thousands of millionaire success stories? See thousands of success stories and testimonials from real people just like you who Clay Clark has mentored and coached into prosperity at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Clay's proven business coaching program is month to month and it costs less money than hiring a minimum wage employee. Yes, it's month to month and it costs less money than hiring a minimum wage employee. Schedule your free personal 13-point assessment with Clay Clark himself today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire.

14:03Because Clay only takes on 160 clients and only allows 300 attendees to each business conference, you will interact with Clay directly. See thousands of real success stories and learn about attending the Thrive Time Show two-day in-person workshop featuring football star and entrepreneur Tim Tebow and President Trump's son, Eric Trump, today at thrivetimeshow.com slash eofire. Become the next success story. Schedule a free consultation and request tickets to join football star and entrepreneur Tim Tebow and President Trump's son, Eric Trump, at Clay Clark's next business conference today at thrivetimeshow.com slash eofire.

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15:39So visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial and see why thousands of businesses are switching. That's highlevelfire.com, where marketing, sales, and automation finally come together. High Level, join the revolution. Aline, we're back and so many people, they stress about the number of followers that they have. Can you make money with zero followers or do you literally need millions or is there some sweet spot in the middle? Yeah, I literally created a mini course called How to Make Money with Zero Followers because I think there's a huge misunderstanding that you need a lot of followers to make an income.

16:21The reason I gave these two examples earlier of May and Mises, Fatima and Daniela, is because May has a smaller following, still big compared to a normal person. She has maybe 30 ,000 followers or I don't know. I don't look at her TikTok, only her Instagram. Let's say 30 ,000. Mises have millions, right? But she still makes a full-time income that she's very happy with, with those 30 ,000. It's not about the number of followers. It's about who your followers are. If you have only a hundred followers and you have a product that is a thousand dollars a month, you know, whatever that is, this is just a random example and 10 % convert, you're making 10 K a month, right?

17:02So I'd rather have a hundred followers who convert than a million followers who don't convert to be part of my community or who don't, who brands or advertisers don't want. If you have a niche following, right? Like all tennis players in California, you will get all the tennis sponsorships, right? Even if you only have 10 ,000 followers and they are all tennis players, tennis players are rich. If all the tennis players in California follow you, every brand that wants to work with them, physiotherapists, equipment companies, whatever, whatever tennis people do close, they're all going to pay you and they're going to pay you a lot because they know you're going to convert, right?

17:39So that's another thing when it comes to why are you growing your social media? Do you want numbers for vanity purposes? That's okay. If you do just admit it to yourself, right? Are you doing it because you want to get customers for your business? Then you need to have a very specific strategy. You don't want just anyone following you. You want specific people following you every day. I get, let's, let's say every week I get a thousand followers. I also get 950 unfollowers, right? So over the years, people are going to unfollow you and follow you depending on whether you are providing what they need or want.

18:15Okay. And you can make the same amount of money with a smaller number of followers as a big amount of followers, as long as you know exactly what you're selling. Like, how are you going to get this money? Is your strategy brand deals? Is it affiliate links? Is it you have a small business? Is it that you have a brick and mortar you want them to visit? right? So these are all the things you need to think about. And for example, I'll give you a real life story because I know it's, uh, these are intangibles, but downstairs in my house in Dubai right now, there is a man named Sergio. And I met him in Albania on a, I was speaking at a conference and Sergio was one of, you know, hundreds of people at this conference, but he was helpful and he was helping me get shots and he was being friendly and he was useful.

18:59He made himself useful. So then he was like, Oh, you're going on a road trip. Can I come? He came on my road trip. And now we're doing a work exchange and he's living in my home in Dubai for free, like having the best life ever because he provided value. He only has 3000 followers. And he did this before me. He did it in Albania. He stayed for free, like a castle for like a month and was doing all these adventures and fun things because he provided value even with only 3000 followers. Now, is that the guy that helped you out with the audio right before? Yeah. Yeah. So So there you go, Fire Nation.

19:32You know, Aline couldn't figure out her own audio. So she had to call in this guy who's staying at her house and boom, he helped her out. And that's just one of the things that he's doing to get this free place. He's being helpful. And I think that's really important to think, Fire Nation, as you're hearing everything that is being shared today is the power of identifying a niche and saying, I'm going to become the dominant player in this niche, like that tennis example that makes so much sense. People are going to come to you. So yes, the vanity numbers can be like eye dropping for a second, but do they really mean something?

20:04Or do you want to say, I want to identify a problem that's not being solved, create the number one solution to it and become the best in this area. And then everybody's going to come to me for brand deals, for sponsorships, et cetera. And speaking of which, how can we start working with brands who are looking to gain exposure via our content creation? What does that process look like? There's a few approaches to this. there's the outbound approach, which I'm sure you guys have talked about a lot. And there's the inbound approach. So the outbound approach would be me reaching out to a hotel or me reaching out to a brand and saying, Hey, I had this proposal.

20:41I hate outbound. I hate it. I loathe it. I feel like it's a waste of my time. It fills me with fury because I feel like I waste all my time on these proposals and then they can just be like, no. And then I spent so much time on a proposal. So I personally do not focus on outbound. I focus on inbound. So I wait, I am like the flower. I am the flower and I bloom and they come to me. That is my approach. So I just make sure I am visible. I make sure I am creating cool and good content so that brands and companies see me and they want to work with me. So for example, I run retreats. And when I decided to, excuse me, originally host retreats, I didn't know anything about retreats.

21:22I never even been to a retreat. I just knew I wanted to get together with a bunch of cool people and go to a cool place and learn together. So one of my goals was, cause I was doing my whole manifesting vision, vision boarding stuff in my brain was my dream. Like my unbelievable dream would be that hotel brands reach out to me and offer me to stay with my whole group of 20 people at their resort for free, just because they think it's such a good brand association. And I was like, this is crazy lean, but whatever, I'm going to put this in my brain. Guess what happened last year? Best Western reached out and they have all these, like, I forgot what they're called, but like best Western plus, essentially, they're these like really nice best Westerns across the U S and the world.

22:02And they were like, you can pick any location you want and host one of your retreats there for free. And this was like an aha moment as Oprah would say for me, uh, when you build a strong brand and that's the way I do it. I build a strong brand that others want to associate with, right? Dear Aline is an obvious brand. It's feminist. It's women's rights. It's, um, financially being responsible. I encourage people to invest. I encourage people to invest, uh, in themselves and their health. And I encourage them to invest in the stock market, right? All the investing. Uh, this is a brand that is, you know, very clear.

22:43If you didn't know me, but you followed me for a few weeks, you would probably immediately know what I like or dislike, right? I like secondhand things. I like sustainable things. I like adopting animals. I don't like, you know, wasting money. I don't like spending money on dumb things. Like I don't like, um, I don't know. I don't know what I don't like. I like most things, but I think you get my point that there are two ways and you need to decide what is your way. Are you going to do outbound or are you going to be the flower that attracts people? Are you going to build a brand or are you going to be a service provider, right?

23:15A service provider might need to do more outbound at the beginning. If your skill is that you're a drone pilot at the beginning, nobody's going to know you're a good drone pilot if they don't see your drone shots, right? So you need to create a nice email. I talk about this in my money course, right? When you're pitching a brand, what do you need to do? You need to give case studies on this podcast. You asked me for case studies because it makes it easier to understand. So when I email a brand, I still do outbound once in a while. Um, I attach photos of past brand collaborations. I attach my media kit with examples of things that I've done.

23:47You need to make it easy for people to work with you. You don't want to make them do the work. You want to have it all set up and they come and get it. Now, one thing we talked about prior to the break was negotiating tips. What are some real negotiating situations you've had with brands? When they've come to you with an offer, like, well, what about a free stay? And you're like, well, what about some real money? What does that actually look like? So I teach about doing something called the hamburger method. I am not the world's best negotiator. In high school, at my first job, I was given my first paychecks.

24:21I worked at Hollister. And they told me, you have to pick up your paycheck from your manager. You have to go up to them and ask for your paycheck. I was so shy around money that I never put down my paycheck. I just never got paid because I was so shy. I didn't want, I didn't, I didn't, Oh, I don't want them to think I'm just here for the money. Like a lean, it's a job. Of course you're there for the money. I was so embarrassed that I never picked it up. And so that's something I have been working on for the past 10 years is like money mindset. Um, so now I'm at a point where I do something called the hamburger method when I am negotiating via email or things like that.