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How to Make Money as a Creative in 2025 (breakdown and advice) | orenmeetsworld | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: How to Make Money as a Creative in 2025 (breakdown and advice)
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Video Transcript
In this video, we're going to talk about
the future of making money as a creative
and the best ways to make money right
now in 2025. This is important because
the nature of creative work is changing.
We have this dynamic of creators and how
they make money and non-creators while
at the same time we have this trend of
everything becoming content. Every
marketing team is thinking basically in
terms of content and less in terms of
marketing. And then this idea of where
the money is. What are people actually
paying for from a skill set perspective
as AI takes over? As jobs begin to get
commoditized, as these weird
generational shifts happen in the
workforce, I'm going to walk through all
that. I'm going to walk through how we
got here, like why creative work is so
fragmented right now. I'm going to talk
through the opportunity and kind of
what's happening in this idea of
creative strategy, creative direction
today, and how you stack up skills and
actually become useful enough to execute
in it. We're going to go through AI and
what's actually happening and what you
should care about and not. a topic I
don't often go super deep on, but it's
worth discussing here. Talk a little bit
about how I see this and why working
with so many brands and creators kind of
enables this vision. I'm going talk
about the steps to take to put you in a
position to make solid money and to feel
like you have a futurep proof career
inside the creative space. Let's lock
in. So, first I'm going to introduce
this concept of creative strategy is the
little brother, little sister to
creative direction. And it's a really
important concept for today's world
because it's about how to go from a
creative with a certain skill to someone
who can strategically apply that
creative to how things move on the
internet in multiple ways. And this is a
really important concept because this is
the most in- demand skill in 2025. Now,
I'll detail this more at the end of this
video, but I'm actually going to do a
little live Zoom that you can hop on
where I'm going to do a training based
on this concept. You'll see the link is
down below in the video description. But
first, how how do we get here? So, if
you look at this chart of the modern
creative, we have what used to happen.
So, if you were a non-creator, you
didn't make content. And this video
isn't going to be for people that make
content or want to make content. It's
just a small chunk of it, but basically,
if you were a non-creator, you had your
salary, whatever you make from your
work. And then, typically, you would
have a side hustle. You have a lot of
people that say, "Hey, I am I'm a
painter or I am a copywriter or
whatever. I'm going to have some side
work or I'm going to have an
entrepreneurial side hustle." And you
have a pipeline of being able to have to
get clients and work for that. you would
do through having to traditionally
market that business. And this is still
the case today. If you are not a
creator, you have to figure out those
same exact two things. Now, if you are a
creator, it's a much different set of
economics. You have your actual salary.
In a lot of cases now, people are also
paying creators at their company.
Bounties like the way Alta does or
additional sums of money to actually be
involved inside the creator economy for
the company they work for. But then you
get money from the platform. You can get
money from the Tik Tok creator fund,
from YouTube. You get money from
affiliate doing things like Tik Tok
shop. You get money from brand deals and
getting sponsorships and you get money
from the services pipeline just like a
side hustle. If you are a freelancer,
you're a designer, you're an
illustrator, whatever it is,
videographer, you still get your
freelance items as well. So, Creator has
expanded the ability for creative people
who understand social media to basically
get more money to get more leads. And
it's also made some of the most useful
people inside the marketing economy
increasingly self-reliant, able to make
a lot of money on their own versus
having to rely on work for it. But what
if you don't want to be a creator? We'll
get to that in a second because it's
kind of an awkward time right now.
Creative work is broken because these
creative functions have a massive gap.
What do I mean by creative work? I
basically mean like if you are at a job
or a company, whether that is a doctor's
office or as an agency or that is a big
product company or whatever it is, if
you are in the marketing department or
the creative department, if you make
photos, videos, design, any level of
copywriting, growth, marketing strategy,
communications, most of that I feel like
falls in the lump of creative work. But
there's an issue there. And the issue is
that the kind of younger people can't
progress. The generation gap is too big.
The older generation doesn't understand
social media and so the game has changed
a significant amount. So mentorship you
would have gotten in previous
generations when work was kind of
continuing to change but the people who
are in charge understood it. You could
kind of get a valuable like mentorship
based system at work where you learned
on the job. Now there's a gap between
where there's a workforce that kind of
understands how the modern world works
and an older generation is educating
them that simply does not and also
doesn't even know how to speak to that generation.
generation.
Um what the segment
and in between you kind of get this
millennial generation who are a little
frustrated with their fiscal scenario
but also that creator generation we
point to above. Most of the savvy ones
and this is my story for sure went and
got money on the creator side as well
and kind of removed themselves from this
equation of even being in the mix for
that mentorship level at all. But
without anyone to teach the younger
generation how to do what they do better
or how to engage in typical corporate
strategy, the younger generation is
finding it really hard to progress
inside their careers. And at the same
time, there's a second potentially even
bigger problem and that's that for about
the last decade, we've been taught not
to think of things as good or bad or
even call out if they perform or not.
There is this kind of lack of opinion
that's become really important that you
don't want to call a campaign bad. You
just want to kind of move on. You want
to call someone out for their bad work.
The focus has been on not having an
opinion lets you skirt by, lets you not
get in trouble for having an opinion.
But this is a really really bad thing in
creative work because a lot of it isn't
actually objective. You would think
because it's creativity. It is, but it
really comes down to does it help sell a
thing or not? Does it move a company's
goals forward or not? And when you
develop this kind of era of people who
do not want to have an opinion, they
have not been able to develop and defend
their own amount of taste. Because the
important part about having opinions is
then you have to defend them. You have
to say if it's right or wrong, you have
to engage in that conversation. you have
to be right and be rewarded for being
right or be wrong and be penalized for
being wrong. But now there's just been a
basic addition a generation of work that
hasn't had to do that. And so now what
we end up in is is this graph here where
we have creative work in business. And
there are basically businesses that
don't enable content in their
businesses. They don't post really well
on social media. They don't run really
well on ads or kind of living in an old
world playbook and they're at the bottom
of the scale. They're they're screwed.
And you have in the middle you have,
okay, we have a business and we're
posting creative work. We do the basics.
We're on Instagram. We do it, but we
don't really do it well. And that is the
majority, right? And that's companies of
all sizes and scales who engage with
this. Maybe it helps achieve their
goals, but not actually good at it. They
don't get it. And then you have
optimized creative work and optimized
business content where people who really
understand what's happening in the world
are taking action and they're doing that
with influencers. They're doing that on
their actual social media platforms.
They're doing that with paid
advertising. They're doing that with how
their brands interact with culture or
how their creative work does. By
creative work there, I mean like if you
are an artist, if you are a videographer
for whatever it is and you you're
photographer and you get mad at the
algorithm because you're posting and it
doesn't work, it's because you're not
optimizing. And whether you like it or
not, you can present your creative work
and you can get a lot of attention if
you just focus on it. And that is the
zone of opportunity right there is being
one of the people that get it that say I
can take things from posted creative
work or just basic business content to
the optimized version of that. Whether
you're doing that for a creator, whether
you're doing that for your own creative
career, or whether you're doing that for
a company, because that is the gap that
we're missing with a generation that's
too old to be able to actually
understand it, and a generation that's
too young and doesn't quite have the
experience or acumen to actually act on
it yet. So, how do you get there? So,
right now, one of the problems with the
old paradigm of creative work is in
places like agencies and more
traditional companies that focus you on
one skill. I am a designer. I'm a
videographer. I'm a copywriter. We're no
longer in a one skill world. And that's
why people get frustrated a lot working
with agencies a don't get it and b have
all these people there that are kind of
forced into these roles that aren't
really that useful anymore. People don't
need single skills. They need multiple
skills. They need a layer of insight on
that which is basically how to think and
some level of experience that really
relates to strategy like how things move
in the modern world. And then funnels,
how people convert into buying things
like online and in person. And if you
have that and you have some level of
discipline and process in what you do,
all of a sudden you become super
valuable. And you'll see it, you'll see
it online all the time. People are
constantly hiring for creative
strategist, creative director, head of
growth, even just growth marketer. And
so the issue becomes, okay, if you know
that that's the route and the best way
to really learn is by doing, how do you
actually do it? So let's start with this
current scenario. You used to have a
marketing budget back in the day. And as
a part of that marketing budget, you
would have content. We're shooting for
social media, doing a campaign shoot,
whatever it That would be a portion of
your marketing budget. But savvy
companies today are actually switching
that completely around. You have a
content budget. Marketing is content.
That is campaign choose for social
media. Throwing an event. The primary
goal of the event is the content that
comes out of the event, not the event
itself. You're investing more into your
retail experience. You're investing more
because you want people to create
content in that retail experience. And
there's a smaller subsection of ads that
are using content. Those are the two
landslide most important things for any
company right now. Everything now, all
the other skills, positioning, design,
etc. all gets rolled into content. Now,
you can be afraid of this or you can
lean into this. But where creatives
really thrive is leaning in and skill
stacking. So, you start with one skill.
Every creative needs at least one solid
skill. Videographer, designer,
copywriter, whatever that is. You get
you're solid at one thing and then you
need at least some secondary amounts of
skills. And what I mean by secondary is
a lot of this is kind of easy. Now, if
you were a copywriter and you're using
chatbt and claude pretty frequently and
you kind of know what you're doing and
you have any degree of background, like
you can accomplish a job that would have
taken you years to learn prior and
whoever wants to comment or argue that,
oh, I have this experience, I
experience, no, it doesn't matter. There
are kids who are going to run circles
around you who are able to use those
tools effectively. So, if you have your
one stacked skill, videography,
something you can't replace as easy, and
you stack one of these softer skills on
top of it, another good example being
like, hey, actually, I know how to use
the back end in Shopify. skills that
sound hard, but then in reality, like
when you're in the back end of Shopify,
it's pretty easy to use. You get one
good contact on Upwork, you can expense
back to your company. It's actually
going and filling in anything requires
you to modify liquid or whatever. You
have a fully built workflow. And if you
have that basic setup, then the whole
world revolves around organic content
strategy and paid content strategy. So,
this is my chart of creative strategist
to basically creative director. If you
master this chart is how you if you're
good at this chart is how you get to
level one. How you master this chart is
how you get all the way from a
strategist to a creative director. So
what everyone needs to be able to learn
and focus on who wants to succeed in
this climate is this basically one is
pillar strategy. So if you want to
succeed in making organic content for a
brand or even for your own content you
need to have pillars. The way I break
down pillars for every client project I
do is you have four content types with a
style. So hey I do one shots about
travel. You do sit down yap videos
breaking down your product formulations.
You do carousels that you know are photo
dumps of behind the scenes. Whatever it
is you are testing four things at any
given time. You are evaluating that
stuff monthly and then saying, "Is this
a pillar that we keep, a pillar we need
to improve, or a pillar that we need to
get rid of?" Then you have a improvement
framework for the ones you want to
improve to say, "We're going to get
better. We're going to get better by
changing the format. We're going to get
better by making better hooks." If
you've developed a strategy for that,
then you've gotten good at shoot
execution at the actual making of the
content, whether you're shooting it or
whether someone else is. What was the
research that went into what you're
going to accomplish when you're shooting
a shoot or you're doing a campaign? How
do you brief all the people involved or
how do you script when you actually need
to write stuff out? And then what are
all the logistics? What all needs to
happen? What's that big checklist of we
have the lighting and this deliverable
and this goes to the editor and here's
all the things that go into this and how
we make a budget etc. And you add to
that last piece of a creative network.
Who are UGC people and creators? How do
you get them? Who are designers and
editors that can do work at various
price points that were able to help
people achieve their vision? And then
what are influencers and other creatives
that help make campaigns and things
really go? And if you have a core of
this, you are a creative strategist and
you have a job that's really in demand.
If you are amazing at this, you're fully
up to a creative director and you can
shift the nature of what a company can
look like. Then the same thing applies
to paid. There's all the organic
content. Everyone talks about organic,
but paid is just as effective as a
strategy. I have multiple brands that
aren't even good at organic. Doesn't
matter cuz they're good enough at paid
to make a whole business off of them.
And this doesn't apply to just selling
things that are on Shopify, right?
Applies to getting leads for a local
business to basically any type of thing
you sell, even software. All comes down
to paid funnel as well. But with this,
it's the same idea. How can you take
whatever creative skill set you have and
be like, I know how to brief creative
concepts and bring them into the world
you can run as an ad. I know how to get
a volume of that, how to make more of
that, how to try more styles, how to do
more things. And you'll see these levels
like I want to talk through Tik Tok shop
for a second. So this is the basic of
what most brands deal with on Tik Tok
shop. They recruit people who are
existing affiliates and creators. They
have an open system where people can
apply for it. They have a store that
needs to get merchandise and have stuff
put in. They need to set set of programs
and bundles or deals. And they need to
take a lot of the creative that's good
from people they recruit and then run
that as ads. Take any of that good
content and try it on other ad networks
and integrate things like going live.
And you take that up a step further and
you're really running like something
large there. There's a whole team that's
gonna be dedicated to briefing and
providing information for those creators
as well as finding them, tracking them,
and developing strategies for how they
work. Taking the things that they make
and running them as other ads,
aggregating what creative looks like.
These are jobs that didn't exist 3 or 4
years ago that make a massive
difference. And what they require is one
level of creative skill set and then
just an understanding of how things work
and a desire to actually work on them to
fulfill the rest. I bring all this up to
say that your goal as a creative needs
to be I'm going to be a critical
thinker. Only the critical thinkers
survive. It's no longer a purely
creative. I'm pretty good at this skill
set. It's how can I attach creative to
social strategy or paid strategy and
have actual KPIs and numbers I run to
determine if it's going better or worse
to get me to my goal. That goal can be
any number of things. I have my own
agency or I have my own clients and I
want to help them perform and I want to
make money as an entrepreneur. It can be
I have my own business and I want to be
able to know how all these things work
so I can scale it. It can be I work at a
company and I want to get really good at
my job. Then we get into the
conversation about AI because everyone's
worried about it. I'm going to break it
down here in two columns. Doesn't matter
and has impact. Everyone thinks that oh
I'm going to come up with AI is going to
replace humans in our shoots. I'm going
to generate video scripts that are going
to go viral on organic. I'm going to run
a faceless account that's going to crush
it. Those are all bad ideas. Those don't
matter. Those aren't effective. Those
are time sucks for whatever project
you're working on. It's important to
recognize stuff like that and what to
worry about not. But then there's the
things that actually have impact. If you
are applying hooks using AI video to
your ads to test this variation, that
has impact. If you're doing really
creative ads and campaigns, you're
saying, "I'm not going to try to
replicate perfect characters and exact
humans one to one, but I'm going to
create energy based advertisements that
tell stories you could only tell with
AI." That is a useful skill set. World
building and creating these graphics and
ideas and visual tones that you can use
as part of storytelling, the way my
friend Zach has it with his app, Aura.
Excellent example of being useful.
Retouching and post-processing on side
on on photos and things like that.
Amazing skill set to have. and coming up
with angles and ideiation for how to
create good content versus relying on it
to write itself. I want to kind of
importantly call that out cuz people
waste a lot of time thinking what they
do with their career or being worried
about AI. And this right now at this
moment in time in 2025, this is what you
should and shouldn't care about. And
it's funny cuz I feel like I see the
creative world in like four dimensions.
And it's because of all the things I get
to work on, right? Like I'd be
hardressed to find anyone that has more
of a knowledge of the social networks
and what works on them organically and
what works on paid than what I have at
this point in time for a few reasons. I
have all of my content. I feed back all
the hundreds of creators and brands
inside Cut 30. I'm working on all these
paid accounts I have in work and for my
own brands. And having to actually make
a bunch of these things myself, feedback
all these others and be involved in the
decisions of it. There's just basically
only a handful of people on earth that
have that level of visibility and who
are incentivized to continue to be
amazing at it. Same thing with people
that came in to cut 30. Like Tatum runs
a sports marketing agency and she's like
filled up her pipeline by basically
breaking down strategies that people are
doing and then implying that she can
help craft those strategies herself.
Same thing watching people like in the
in the first cut 30 there was a brand
called Tales that went viral a few times
on Tik Tok and he stopped posting
organic the founder but then basically
relayed the things he learned about how
to make a good organic video into their
like super successful paid content
strategy or even someone like Jasmine
she was a few co cohorts ago in cut 30
where she runs like a successful Tik Tok
shop does founder content her own brand
content and then has obviously like
affiliates and all things that come from
shop but knows as a founder that she has
to think about content and learn as much
as she can to enable all those parts of
her business and just interacting and
working through with all those people
and seeing how they progress and doing
that over hundreds of times like allows
me to kind of see how impactful these
skill sets become when you know how to
move between those worlds and then just
how few people can actually get there
without doing it. And so what is your
route to be able to say, "Hey, I'm a
creative at one point. I want to get to
one of these higher paid positions or
these really in- demand skill sets
that's going to help me in my career."
So first you need to put yourself in a
position to get skill A. No one can help
you with that. You have to go become
photographer, videographer, designer,
copywriter, and be good at it. If you
haven't hit that yet, come back to this
video once you are. Then you need to put
yourself in a position to test organic
content and then paid content at some
point. Whether it's with you, whether
it's at a job, whether it's with your
own organic content or with a brand.
There is no bigger skill set right now
than being able to actually test and
figure out what works there live on a
project. Like being able to be a social
media manager, being able to be in the
conversations around what paid media is
being run, like get in the mix there.
And again, you can run that for your own
organic strategy or use that for a
smaller person, but just getting the
core skill set. And then becoming busy
enough to develop a bias for action.
This is a big thing I noticed is that a
lot of people that have dealt with that
creative block that comes where they
just don't get enough done or living in
their own world when they start working
70our weeks on some big project that all
goes away. They inherently have bias for
action. Everything inherently gets done
because they're so busy not to. And
developing that by just really
committing to getting into something is
a key part of getting where you want to
go creatively. And then last, build a
toolkit. You've se heard me talk about
this in videos before, but all these
concepts and ideas and things you see
around the world, every advertisement,
every organic piece of video, everything
that works how the modern media does on
any network. Saving and organizing that
so you have a reference point to act on
is the difference between people that
can walk into any job and be like, "Oh,
why should we employ you?" Well, because
I have this toolkit of all these things
I save and organize that are proven
methods and I've tried these ones. I
would like to try these ones and this is
why I think works for your business.
That's the people that get hired. I've
made this YouTube channel to give away
lots and lots of free game around how
all these things work. And now as I look
to the future of where that's headed, I
think it kind of has to escalate, right?
Because it's almost too complicated to
be able to just be put in a video and
expect people to be able to understand
it. I think that next dynamic that comes
from this really comes more into live
into actual workshopping. And so this
next week I'm going to kick off kind of
a live Zoom around this concept.
Basically, how to create a strategy for
a brand. We'll start with organic on
this one. We'll probably get into paid
at some point too, but like how do you
actually do it? What is a exercise that
you can lead? and can we actually do
some of that live? We're going to do a
live Zoom. I'm going to include it in
the description here where I'm actually
going to walk through some of the
strategy. So, you'll have basically sat
in a call and workshopped it and kind of
done it once and said, "All right, I've
taken a step towards living in this kind
of strategist world where I can be a
videographer that also is able to like
run ad campaigns and help clients get
their end results. Or I'm going to be a
designer who understands a lot more
about making my ads impactful enough
that I can actually get in the media
buying side of things too and become a
real threat. I want to kind of start
that and kick that off kind of with a
live training here so people can kind of
experience that and we can begin to get
workshopping and take it away from this
kind of one to many YouTube where I feel
like you can hear these ideas but you're
not going to get the same resonance. So
a bit of a different type of video and a
different type of goal on this than
usual. But I'm excited to see some of
you next week to actually talk about and
work about some of this live. And I
would encourage you to go back through
and kind of rewatch a lot of this video
when you're thinking about the future of
the career and be like, how can I take
my skill set and then actually achieve
some of these things to get into a
strategist role as soon as possible.
You're going to end up in one of the
last really solid roles because it
requires critical thinking and knowledge
of so much. And I feel like the more
people that position themselves inside
that, the more that this kind of
community we have here is going to be
overall positioned for success. So, I
appreciate y'all watching and I hope to
see you at the webinar next week. [Music]
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