Explore UGC platforms for brands in the United States.

Defining user-generated content

User-generated content (UGC), is content in the form of images, texts, testimonials, videos, and such, that is created by a person who is not an official representative of your business. To better explain this, UGC is produced by consumers, users, or in other words, unpaid contributors, and it can be categorized as the digitalization of word-of-mouth marketing.

This type of marketing content provides potential customers with an unbiased opinion of a brand, thus giving it an authentic image. For this reason, it is a great addition to a brand's marketing strategy to offer authentic endorsements that build trust and engagement, while simultaneously enhancing brand awareness. However, understanding the importance of UGC is not an issue today, instead, the problem lies in discovering efficient ways to gather user-generated content. Keep reading if you'd like to find out the solution! And for an additional 5 platforms, check out our UK UGC article. 

What are UGC Platforms, and how can you utilize them?

A UGC platform is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) that is designed to manage, collect, and advertise user-generated content. It is essentially an online marketplace or community where brands and content creators can collaborate and create content. Some brands may not have a large enough user base to be able to gather UGC, therefore these platforms offer a space where UGC content is sourced easier. Creators can utilize the features of these types of platforms to curate content and share their experience with a product or service. In return, they will either receive recognition, be able to collaborate with a brand, and receive rewards or other incentives. On the other hand, brands can use this software to display unfiltered and authentic customer content in order to increase brand visibility and boost trust.

To better understand some benefits UGC platforms can offer creators and brands, have a look at a few main points below:

1. Collect and Display User-Generated Content (UGC): UGC platforms collect all forms of content such as images, videos, or text generated by their customers. They then showcase this content and connect brands to creators with relevant material in regard to a brand's campaign requirements. Other than offering brands an easier method to discover talent, UGC platforms also allow brands to choose from plenty of content created by consumers and share it on other sites. To add to that, it is quite cost-effective in that your brand will be able to enter a variety of markets and reach countless creators without being limited by price or geography.
2. Build Trust and Credibility: Having authentic content serves as social proof for potential customers looking to analyse the credibility of your brand. A UGC platform will connect you with content creators who develop material that specifically meets your brand's requirements, hence eliminating the search process for UGC. This can result in brands being able to display UGC content quicker and at a larger scale, hence boosting their authenticity and making their brand more trustworthy to potential users. Studies show that brands and retailers have both observed an 81% increase in brand trust with the use of visual UGC. Correspondingly, 73% of shoppers claim that UGC increases their purchasing confidence, which is most likely due to its relatability, credibility, and authenticity. 
3. Engage with Your Audience: Relative to the point above, by building trust and credibility, you simultaneously enhance your audience's engagement. Sharing a creator's content of your brand and responding to comments regarding it generates a sense of community and loyalty. But by utilizing these platforms, you can do just that with less effort required.
4. Build Your Audience: As a UGC creator, when using UGC platforms, you will be able to grow your own audience due to the countless opportunities you have to work with diverse brands or vice versa. The more visibility your content gets, the more you will be able to build your portfolio for larger businesses and the more your followers will feel inclined to trust your insights.
5. Run UGC Campaigns: The platforms allow you to launch UGC campaigns that content creators or, in other words, customers, produce material for. This material is generally made up of creators sharing their personal experiences with a brand's product or service. However, on a UGC platform, this type of content is created by individuals who are using the platform for incentives or recognition. As a result, these campaigns eliminate the process of scouting for new creators and instead allow your brand to filter through applications.
6. Time-saving: As you may have already realised, by offering a community of creators and tools that help you connect with them, these UGC platforms have significantly decreased the time it would otherwise take brands to discover talent.
7. Safety: Seeing as these websites follow their own security measures, you are able to avoid applying a few of your own. Some UGC platforms automate contracts between creators and brands or provide a space where contracts can be shared and signed.

With these seven benefits in mind, let's have a look at some helpful UGC websites you will be able to utilize for your brand.

Top 10 UGC platforms for your brand's marketing campaign

Tribe Dynamics

Tribe Dynamics is an influencer marketing analytics platform for brands looking to gain better insights into the digital content created by influencers. With Tribe Dynamics' software and service, you can tap into the potential of influencer marketing. Some of its main benefits are tracking and measuring influencer brand mentions across platforms like TikTok and Instagram, gathering data on your existing influencer relationships, and measuring the performance of your campaigns. On top of that, you can study your brand's performance over time within its industry, within its location/region, and compare it with the performance of its competitors.

How does it work?

Tribe's metric calculates Earned Media Value (EMV), creates engagement reports, measures your campaign performance, discovers influencers, and many other benefits you can receive when you create an account and pick a pricing plan most befitting for your business goals. Once you have completed this step, you can begin to observe influencers within your brand's niche or you might even be able to view already existing content of your brand. Should have found influencers you want to reach out to, Tribe Dynamics provides email templates or social media integrations for you =.

After having reached out and built a partnership with certain influencers, the brand can begin its influencer marketing campaign. Once the campaign has been launched, the performance tracking and monitoring can start.

To find out more about the features Tribe Dynamics can offer your business, have a look below.

Key Features

• Influencer search: Tribe Dynamics has a customized content stream of influencers that your brand may not know of yet, but can see on your feed when being tagged in their content. Another way to discover influencers is through their tags of other brands or hashtags.
• Client Partner: your client partner on Tribe Dynamics will help you throughout your influencer journey on the platform. They are there to answer your inquiries and improve your experience on the site by gaining a better understanding of their software. The client partners also help brands set an attainable benchmark for their growth.

Content Capture

• Targeted: At Tribe Dynamics, they display and organize content made by creators that are relevant to your brand.
• Comprehensive: With this feature, they can capture brand mentions across various social media platforms such as Instagram, IG stories, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and RSS Feeds.
• Customizable: They have highly customizable tracking that you can tailor to the needs of your program. This content tracking feature allows you to avoid missing any mentions of your brand, hashtags, or products.
• Organized: You can organize, sort, and filter the content created by your influencers into dedicated activation. This means you have specific feeds to better understand and report on your own initiatives. Furthermore, you can access and obtain collected influencer marketing data on your posts, influencers, community, products, and more.
• Tracking: Tribe Dynamics will benchmark your performance against direct competitors and industry trends. You will also receive data regarding your brand's performance by region and across key global markets in regard to its influencer marketing strategy.

Analytics

• Post-Level Metrics: Tribe Dynamic's post-tracking technology measures the impact of the content posted and calculates data like estimated impressions, total engagements, engagement rate, and earned media value (EMV)
• Influencer & Relationship Data: their software analysis: how frequently influencers post your brand, the EMV of your influencers, demographics of your audience, etc…
• Community-Wide Data & Segmentation: this helps you view your influencer community size, the EMV totals driven by your community, etc…

Search & Discover

• Discover: helps you see influencers that have mentioned your brand yet are not being tracked by you.
• Content Filtering: helps you narrow down content and filter posts.

Benchmarking

• Brand benchmarking: tools that will monitor your brand's influencer marketing performance.
• Community benchmarking: compare your influencer community with metrics like engagement rates and posting frequency.
• Industry benchmarking: compare your metrics with those of your competitors and even with your industry as a whole.
• Regional benchmarking: tracking and measuring your program across domestic and international markets.

Filters + Feeds

• Community Filtering: filter by follower count, campaign involvement, favourite products, and so on.
• Content Filtering: filter posts by date, types of influencers, keywords, etc..
• Custom Feeds: create custom dynamic feeds for better organization and to be able to easily measure and benchmark the impact of your brand's updates.

What is the pricing?

Tribe Dynamics has pricing offers for different campaign sizes. They have 3 package options you can subscribe to where your needs will be met;

• Micro
• Established
• Powerhouse

The Micro package is $1500/monthly or $29,200/yearly, the Established subscription is $2,750/monthly or $46,000/yearly, and the Powerhouse package is $4,000/monthly or $74,000/yearly. It's safe to say that the pricing is more befitting for larger brands rather than smaller ones.

On top of that, Tribe Dynamics also offers add-ons, therefore prices vary depending on your choice. When accessing their website you are able to see these packages and their main features, however, in order to receive the price of each, you must download the pricing chart or request a demo for customizations. To better understand the differences of each package, let's have a look at each.

The first subscription is the Micro package, which consists of a foundational set of tools used to manage an expanding creator marketing program. Some of these tools include; community management, content tracking, market insights, and support. This campaign size can manage up to 750 influencers, but to better understand what each tool offers, have a look at some main features below.

Community Management

• Relationship management
• Tagging and Custom fields
• Posting History
• Messaging

Content Tracking

• Brand Mention Feed
• Initiative & Campaign Tracking
• New influencer discovery

Market Insights

• Competitive monitoring of 1 brand
• Access to Tribe research and Industry reports

Support

• Implementation & Training
• In-App Product Support
• As Needed Client Partner

Should you not choose Micro, and go for the Established package instead, then you will strengthen partnerships and advance your analytics to support a top-tier influencer marketing program and community. All tools offered are the same except that with the established package you are able to track up to 2,500 influencers, have competitive monitoring of up to 5 brands, and have a Proactive client partner.

Lastly, if you pick the Powerhouse campaign package for your business, then you will receive extensive insights and data to scale your influencer marketing program and community. The difference in this package from the others is getting to manage 5,000 influencers, have competitive monitoring of up to 10 brands, and like the established package, have a White Glove client partner.

All packages include Instagram stories tracking, TikTok content tracking, and influencer search. Should you feel that you need additional tools for your UGC marketing plan, you can choose from:

• Additional Competitive Reporting
• Additional Influencer Tracking
• Ephemeral content tracking
• Industry Insights reports
• Additional and Customized Data
• Additional influencer search

Aspire (known as Aspire IQ)

Aspire is an influencer marketing platform that assists brands in discovering creators, managing campaigns, producing ads and driving revenue. With some of the features they offer you are successfully able to track the performance of creators and measure the ROI of your influencer marketing campaign.

How does it work?

Aspire, firstly, connects marketers with relevant influencers using a recommendation engine. They streamline the process of discovering, communicating, and working with influencers. If you'd like to actively seek out creators, then you can search for them by typing in a keyword, or a particular demographic or metric. The dashboard on which you can manage your communications with influencers is a highly efficient tool for managing relationships and customising workflow. Additionally, your analytics dashboard shows you your earned media value (EMV), return on investment (ROI), and other reports like campaign insights. Some of their features, like no fees when transactions are made on the website or being able to turn campaign content into paid ads, can be highly motivating for their creators.

The brand recently rebranded itself from Aspire IQ to Aspire as a way of simplifying its name, humanizing the brand, and in a sense, to sound as effortless as their software. They have also highlighted some of the new features they have implemented. With these new features, you can show the influence of your campaigns on your business growth in both the short and long term, apply customizable workflows to build engaging campaigns, and build or foster relationships that will grow your brand.

New Features:

• CRM designed for influencer marketing: upload and rearrange your community of influencers, create custom fields, and build custom automation.
• No Sign-up: Influencers do not need to sign up to use the platform any more. Many of their functions go through your email now.
• Email integration: You can integrate with your Gmail or Outlook and continue communication with your team of influencers. This way, you can track influencers even if they haven't or have signed up to the platform.
• Shopify's e-commerce integrations: You can view who has already purchased your products or services.
• Custom landing page: customise your landing page to your campaign(s).
• Custom workflow: Customise your workflows to fit your needs and state your requirements by outlining the steps the influencers you work with to adhere to. For example, if you'd like a long-term contract, then you can set it as a requirement for influencers to complete digital term sheets by specific dates and complete content licensing agreements.
• Seamless integration on Shopify for easy product delivery: You can utilize Aspire to manage your brand's order system on Shopify by handling payments, shipping, tracking information, and all in all eliminating the manual processes for your brand.
• Generate promo codes automatically: With Aspire's Shopify integration, you can produce promo codes for the influencers in your program and track their success.
• Monitor affiliate sales and reward based on performance: Create affiliate links, so creators can track important conversion milestones like email signups, downloads, sales, etc... You can pay your influencers based on the number of conversions they have.

Key Features

• Influencer Search
• Creator Marketplace
• Campaign Management
• Content Management
• Sales Generation
• Measurement & Reporting
• Activity Dashboard
• CRM
• Influencer compensation

What is the pricing?

Aspire offers brands three different pricing plans. You can customize the price for each plan and if you do decide to purchase, then you must be aware you are subscribing to an annual commitment. Paying by the year is most beneficial as their software offers your brand a long-term plan and solution.

Starter: This plan is made up of key features and tools that brands need to improve their influencer marketing. Some essentials of this Starter pack are:

• 100 active collaborators
• Core integrations like Shopify or Slack
• Limited access to branded creator content
• Access to customer success and support

Pro: The Pro package offers you tools that are adept at managing large-scale influencer programs. Some of these tools are:

• 250 active collaborators
• Core integrations like Shopify and Slack
• Limitless access to branded creator content
• Access to customer success and support

Premium: The premium pricing plan and final one, offer a solution for companies interested in collaborating with multiple teams.

• 500 active collaborators
• Core integrations like Shopify and Slack
• Limitless access to branded creator content
• Access to customer success and support

Intellifluence

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Intellifluence is an all-in-one influencer marketing platform that provides a digital space where brands and creators can collaborate and discover one another. This is a rather affordable influencer marketing platform where brands can create and manage their campaigns along with their creator relationships.

As for influencers, joining the platform is free, and collaborating with brands solely depends on your personal profile and alignment with the brand's requirements. With over 200,000+ influencers, the platform saves time for both influencers and brands by removing the need for cold outreach or filtering of each user one by one. With Intellifluence you can achieve the goal you have set for your brand, whether it'd be growing the number of bloggers talking about your app, or increasing visibility on app stores for different devices, and so on. 

How does it work?

Once a brand creates its campaign and launches on the platform, influencers will be able to discover it and apply to it. With the features offered based on the plan the brand has chosen to pay, they can track influencer payments, filter influencers, facilitate direct communication with creators, and use the flagging feature to highlight any issues related to the collaboration process.

Their Reports tool produces valuable insights regarding the brand's campaign performance, as well as the number of pitches sent and transactions made. As a brand, you utilize data for better-informed decision-making by identifying what has made your campaign successful and which products have greater popularity.

The Discover Tool helps brands search for influencers that will align with their needs or specific criteria like location, collaboration history, or specific niches. Based on certain metrics, social platforms, or budget requirements, you can use the Discover tool to easily filter out influencers that do not align with your conditions.

This is just a general summary of what this UGC platform is capable of. To have a slightly better understanding of what it offers, have a look at some of its key features.

Key Features

• Campaign Wizard
• Report Tools
• Campaign management
• In-App messaging
• Categorize Influencers
• Enhanced speciality & Influencer Targeting
• Multi-brand support
• External client & customer support
• Push Notifications
• Blogger outreach plan
• No long-term contracts (you can cancel at any point)
• Access to 232K Influencers.
• 18,000+ active bloggers

What is the pricing?

Intellifluence has a pretty straightforward pricing plan. Although it is free to join the platform as an influencer, there are still different pricing options for small businesses, marketers and agencies, and large businesses. Intellifluence offers 4 different pricing options:

• Free plan: The first pricing plan is free, with a few key features such as 1 active user, 1 active campaign, 5 maximum influencer applications to your campaign, 5 maximum influencers you can pitch, self-management, and unlimited access to 19k Influencer offers. To find out about more features that are available with this plan, you can visit their website.
• Starter pack ($99 monthly): This option is perfect for smaller businesses. A few key features for the Starter plan are having 1 active user, 3 active campaigns, 50 maximum influencer applications to your campaign, 50 maximum influencers you can pitch, 1-time campaign health check, self-management, and unlimited access to 19k Influencer offers. To find out about more features that are available with this plan, you can visit their website.
• Regular plan ($249 monthly or $2,390 yearly): This is great for both marketers and agencies as it offers more active campaigns, marketplace applications, and so on. Key features for the Regular plan include having 3 active users, 10 active campaigns, 100 maximum influencer applications to your campaign, 500 maximum influencers you can pitch, 2 times campaign health check, self-management, and unlimited access to 19k Influencer offers. To find out about more features that are available with this plan, you can visit their website.
• Advanced plan ($599 monthly and $5,750 yearly): all features a customizable and the platform does all the work for your businesses. This plan consists of all the features mentioned in the regular plan. In addition to the features of the regular plan, the Advanced pack is also fully managed, and you get an unlimited amount of campaign pitches, campaign checks, marketplace applications, and active campaigns or users. To see more features for this plan, visit the platform's website.

Creator.co

This platform is a digital space useful for managing creators and campaigns. Using Creator.co, brands and creators can collaborate, communicate and grow together, all while earning money. With their easy-to-use dashboard, you can access creators, campaigns, payments, and data all in one place.

How does it work?

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When you sign up for this platform, you will be able to scale and automate influencer campaigns. On the other hand, as an influencer, you will have a much less difficult time discovering brands that align with the type of content you create and are also actively seeking out collaborations. As a brand signing up to Creator.co, you will have access to 250 million influencers from platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter, and so on. Having this type of access to influencers helps you raise brand awareness, increase your revenue, and generate more engaging content. Having a dashboard with all kinds of features that help you manage your creator partnerships, payments, communication, content, and data makes your business operations all the more efficient. As a brand, once you build a campaign brief and make it live using the features of the subscription you have paid for, creators are able to apply, and you can activate the ones you want. When you are in the process of building your campaigns To better understand how this platform works, have a look at its key features listed below.

Key Features

• Creator Search Tool
• Creator campaigns management
• Expert account Managers
• Influencer recruiting
• Data analysis & campaign analytics
• Influencer Whitelisting
• Reports
• Dashboard
• Influencer Scoring
• Influencer segmentation
• UGC Management
• Creator hub
• Audience Analysis
• Content Approval
• Collaboration
• White-label ready
• E-commerce integration

What is the pricing?

The pricing on Creator dot Co is separated into two different sections, one being for brands and the other for agencies. The pricing for brands is divided into 4 categories:

• Self-Serve ($460/month): This plan includes basic features such as creator discovery, content-only campaigns (gifted and paid), giveaway/contest campaigns, advanced creator insights, social listening, and email support.
• Start-Up ($1795/month): This plan includes all the features in the Self-Serve plan, plus an account manager, campaign strategy, monthly health checks, basic recruitment, and a newsletter feature.
• Trailblazer ($2695/month): This plan includes all the features in the Start-Up plan, plus creator management, 2x recruiting, bi-weekly health checks, and a dedicated Slack channel.
• Bespoke: This plan is customized to meet the needs of individual brands. It includes all the features in the Trailblazer plan, plus additional features such as A-list talent, experiential campaign management, hyper-targeted recruiting, and weekly strategy calls.

It is important to note that you save 15% on all monthly pricing if you choose an annual subscription. However, since this platform also offers pricing plans for agencies, keep reading to find out more.

The pricing for agencies is divided into 3 categories:

• Boutique ($7,495+ per year): This plan is for up to 5 brands. It offers a cost-effective solution for managing multiple brand programs. You get up to 2 free brands when you start, up to 5 team users, up to 250 creator profile exports per month, and you can also add more brands as you grow.
• Power House ($14,995+ per year): This plan is for up to 10 brands. You get everything offered in Boutique and on top of that, you get up to 4 free brands when you start, up to 10 team users, have an increased number of creator exports, and can scale up with more brands.
• Global ($28,995+ per year): This plan is for an unlimited amount of brands. You get everything already offered in Power House and on top of that up to 10 free brands when you start, an unlimited amount of brands and team users, even more creator exports, and white-label ready.

In addition to the brand or agency subscription fee, there is a one-time onboarding fee of $395 for all plans. Furthermore, you have different prices for Ad Ons such as:

• Affiliate Integration ($95 per month + commissions): You can reveal your program to 175,000+ micro-influencers.
• Social Media Ads Management ($1495 per month + % of budget or just commissions): Their team will build a Social Ads strategy for you which includes boosting and whitelisting influencer content.
• Social Media Content Management ($1995+.per month): Their in-house brand strategies will work with your brand to create a successful content strategy for various social media platforms.

Bounty

This is a relatively new platform that automates UGC and manages creator marketing on TikTok or Instagram. Other than generating UGC, it also, ensures your content meets your own requirements. The content for Bounty is posted by creators only to TikTok or Instagram, however, it can also be run as Spark Ads, be downloaded, run in ad campaigns on other media platforms, or it can be run in email campaigns. Bounty makes its mission to offer authentic content, and they do so by targeting small creators who might otherwise struggle to secure brand deals with well-known companies. As the founder of Bounty, Abe Wolke, has claimed in an interview with Techcrunch, “We’re focused on unlocking the long tail of creator marketing, serving the micro and nano creators”.

How does it work?

When creators sign up to the platform, they can purchase a product from the selections of brands on the website and then create featured content with it on their TikTok or Instagram. It is important to note that creators must be 18 years old or older to use Bounty. If the tagging of the product is done right, the creator will begin earning a $1 per 100 views. However, the first two days are crucial since the better the content performs within those hours, the more the creator will be paid. This is because the pay-per-view decreases after the first two days since views increase, and Bounty wants to make sure that the return is fair for both creators and brands.

Fortunately, creators keep the entire 100% of the revenue they make, since Bounty's revenue relies on subscriptions from brands. Additionally, creators can earn more if Bounty reuses their content, for example, they can license it to run as a TikTok Spark Ad. A TikTok Spark Ad is an ad format that allows you to leverage organic TikTok posts in paid marketing efforts, such as placing an ad spend on UGC content. To better understand how Bounty works for brands, we need to understand some of the features it offers them. Bounty helps brands with activation, seeding, storage, managing ads, and creator discovery.

What exactly do we mean by Activation? Activation is the reward for customers who share their purchases on TikTok or Instagram. Through activation, you make it known that users can share their opinions on your products to platforms like TikTok or Instagram, via Bounty user experiences. However, creators have 7 days to post content from the order delivery date, which is then activated via the SMS drip campaign. Payments to the influencers are made once their content has been approved, which may take up to 15 days, and then they need to wait 2 days (48h) after the content is posted to be paid for views.

Seeding involves the automated process of gifting and order creation to both new and existing creators. This means you can configure gifts through any item from your Shopify inventory, or you can offer a one-off post if the creator already has your product. On the other hand, invites are customized message flows that are meant to incentivize people to join your community of creators on the platform.

Moreover, Bounty has great storage space in that you can automatically download or save content in high resolution. The platform has a content Library where you can view the content approved for your brand. You can combine filters in the library, like most views or last month's posts, to discover the best-performing posts. To know more about each post you can click on them and view metrics gathered from TikTok, Instagram, and Bounty.

A highly useful feature is the management of Spark codes directly on Bounty. A spark code is a code used to promote user participation in particular campaigns. Using the Content Library, you can request spark codes and download content that's been approved. Should you want to run a TikTok video as a Spark Ad, the first thing you have to do is get a Spark Code by requesting it from the creator. Bounty will then take over by managing the outreach to the creator and by providing the creator's Spark Code to you.

Last but not least, with its discovery features, you can access Bounty's creator network. On the Shop page, creators can seek out brands to purchase from and then create content for. Bounty's creator network aids your brands in discovering creators who have an account on the platform but are not affiliated with another store. You can interact with creators by engaging them via the product gifting feature.

Key Features

• Streamlined discovery
• Customer and creator recruitment
• Engaging and re-engaging creators
• Performance tracking & monitoring
• Instant usage rights
• Fully managed creator experience
• Only offer services to the US & Canada
• Dashboard
• Data analysis & metrics
• New Assets: number of approved videos
• Individual video metrics
• Gift Metrics

What is the pricing?

When you set up your account as a brand, you will need to set a budget for the amount you can spend on user-generated content for the month. This budget can range from $1,000 to $10,000. Depending on the plan you have set up, you will have a monthly subscription cost and price per video (PPV) cost that covers SMS notifications, content reviews, and transactional fees. Bounty bills you through Shopify according to your regular Shopify billing schedule.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Can an influencer be a UGC creator?

Of course! An influencer can also be a User-Generated Content (UGC) creator. In fact, there are quite a few influencers who already do this. Some Influencers create and share content on their social media accounts, about products or services they have purchased. 

Do UGC creators get paid?

Yes and No. Some UGC creators who share their own experience with a product or service, such as reviews, do not get paid for this content. However, UGC creators directly working with brands on UGC platforms can get paid! Sometimes the creators are only compensated with incentives like free products or other rewards.

How to become a UGC creator in 2023?

Becoming a UGC creator is quite simple. All you need to do is share your experience with a product or service on whichever social media platform you use. You can also, share this experience on review platforms! You do not need a following, or a professional background to begin. All you need to do to begin is create authentic content and use relevant tags to increase your views. A great way to begin getting brand deals is to leverage any UGC platform and apply directly to brands’ campaigns there. 

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