 It is currently Friday, kind of a later start to the day. I woke up like around 7.30, 7.45. And as you saw, I'm like the clips at the beginning of the vlog. I had my morning coffee. I love the days where I can just enjoy my mornings and take it slow. There is nothing that I hate more than having to set an alarm for super, super early and then get up and immediately just have to get ready and rush out the door. And I'm just really not a morning person. Like I honestly, if I can naturally wake up early, that's great, I love that. But I just don't feel like my brain operates at full capacity before like 10 a.m. I'm just a natural night owl. And it was just always really hard for me, like in school having to get up so early and be at school by 7 a.m. And I knew in my adult life, once I had my career, it was a big goal of mine to have flexibility in my schedule so that I didn't have to be forced to wake up super early. So I'm really proud of myself for achieving that and being able to make that happen, at least for the time being. So yeah, like I was saying, I got to enjoy my nice, peaceful, slow morning and then I watered my plants, took my dog out for a walk and then I went to the gym in my apartment and got a workout in and it felt really good to just get that out of the way. I kind of have a lot to do today and it's gonna be a really late work day. So I knew that if I just waited to go work out later in the day, I would end up probably never getting around to it. So I wanted to just do that first. Today is going to be mostly a YouTube work day and it's gonna be all computer work. So normally on the days when I'm just working on my computer, I will not bother doing my makeup. I will usually just work from my bed or on the couch and I am just in bummy clothes looking like a mess. But I'm actually going and teaching a blowout class with one of my coworkers later this evening. So I figured, you know, I wanna get myself together, look presentable for that. And if I'm gonna be doing my makeup at some point today, I may as well do it earlier. So that way I can take advantage of it and like have makeup on for longer. And I'm filming this video. So why not have some makeup on? But yeah, I just thought it would be fun to share what a work day in my life can look like because of what I do, not every day looks the same, not every week looks the same, which is what I love personally. I get really bored if my routine is exactly the same week after week. I like having variety in my week. I feel like to me it just keeps life interesting. Okay, I'm ready. Here is my little office. I don't have a designated office space. I just live in a one bedroom apartment and it just isn't worth it for me and doesn't really make sense to like rent out an office space somewhere. My apartment does have a clubhouse with some office space. So if I ever really feel like I'm just having a hard time focusing and I just wanna like get out of the apartment and just be somewhere else, I can go use that space or I could go to a coffee shop or something like that. But I feel like for the most part, I'm totally content and I'm the most comfortable just working from my couch, honestly. I got another client booked for next weekend. That is exciting. I am a very visual kind of person. So in order to keep my life organized because it can be kind of a lot. You know, I have personal life things, my own personal appointments. And then I also work at the salon doing like my hourly front desk work. I also take hair clients. And then I have all of my online stuff, all the social media stuff and that also branches out into multiple different things. So it can be kind of a lot. And I feel like if I don't have everything super organized and written down, I just get really overwhelmed and then I forget things and it can be very stressful. So I have just a regular blank notebook. This is just kind of my brain dump. So if I have certain like content ideas, video scripts, like for sit down videos, like, okay, what kind of points do I want to hit? What do I want to talk about? And then I have a physical planner and then I have my highlighters so that I can color coordinate everything. And then I also have a Google calendar where I get a little bit more specific. So on here, I have everything that's in the physical planner, but then I also have what I'm gonna be filming when, when I'm gonna be posting each video, like what is gonna be due when. Oh, and then I also have my calendar on Vagaro that has all of my hair appointments, like any clients that I have. And I know that that might sound kind of crazy and like way too much to some people, but I don't know, this is just how my brain works. This is what works best for me. I had a really productive week this week, so I don't have too many like pressing things, no super tight deadlines. I'm pretty good on everything and I'm pretty caught up, which is nice, but I'm gonna check my email. That's something that I will always do, like first thing so I can stay on top of it. I will have a pretty good amount of unwritten emails every single morning. They can get really overwhelming and then you don't wanna miss something that's important. I'll get emails from brands, from clients, requesting appointments. Okay, so got all the calendars updated, got hair clients scheduled that requested appointments, handled all of my unread emails and that I also was responding to YouTube comments on my most recent video. Now I am going to edit a video. I currently have three videos on my computer that are ready to be edited. Two of them are unsponsored videos. One of them does have a sponsorship in it, so I'm going to edit the sponsored one first because when you have a sponsorship in a video, you have to submit it to the brand first before you publish it live for everyone else to see. They have to review it and make sure that it is good with them and that you said everything right and you included what you needed to include. And then if there are some revisions that they want you to make, you have to go back, either reshoot or re-edit things, send it back to them again. So it can be kind of a drawn out process. So because it's gonna take extra time before I can actually post it, I wanna edit this first, that way I can submit it and I can just get that out of the way. Since we're talking about brands and sponsored content, I guess I'll just share a little bit more about that the way that works because there are multiple ways that you make money as a content creator or an influencer. I would say though, the biggest way where we all get our biggest paychecks are through sponsored content. So that's when a brand is paying you to showcase their product or their service or whatever. It really just varies depending on your audience as the influencer, like how many views you get, what your demographics are and how big the brand you're working with is. But generally for a channel my size, for just like a 60 second product mention in a video, I could make anywhere from like several hundred to several thousands of dollars. And the way that you get offered these brand deals is as a content creator, you have your separate email address for all of your business inquiries and whatnot and you just make sure that you have that email address public on all of your stuff. So brands will usually just email me there and some brands have their own in-house marketing. So someone from the actual brand's marketing department could reach out, send an email and say, like, hey, we wanna work with you. But a lot of brands will work with a separate marketing agency. So that marketing agency will kind of be the middleman and they will reach out to the influencers and be like, hey, one of our clients is looking for social media marketing. You know, this is what they want. Are you available? Are you interested? And what's nice is once you create a relationship with the marketing agency, then they have your information in their system and then they'll continue giving you opportunities. So oftentimes it's that middleman marketing agency that I am in communication with and that's where I'll get a lot of my sponsorship offers. Which is nice because as a content creator these days, you kind of rely on the sponsorships but you wanna make sure that you're being really picky and meticulous about which ones you take because you don't wanna lose your audience's trust. You want to stay authentic. You wanna be promoting things that you really genuinely use and really genuinely like and believe in. Sometimes I also will like send a proposal to a brand. If there's like a particular product that I am interested in buying or trying and I see that they work with other influencers, sometimes I'll reach out and just see like, hey, maybe I can get a brand deal out of this but why not, right? It's something I'm interested in anyway. So yeah, that's how that works. You'll get in correspondence with the brand or whoever's handling the marketing, whether they reach out to you or you reach out to them and then they'll usually propose the terms. This is what we're looking for. This is how long we want the mention to be. This is when we want it by and this is how much we are willing to pay you or sometimes they'll ask you like, what are your rates? And then you can negotiate that. And then once you have agreed to all of the terms and all the deliverables and whatnot, then they'll send you the product. Usually they'll have not like an actual script but they'll have just like a general list of like, these are some things that you can mention, you know, in your own words. These are things that we absolutely do not want you to mention or these are certain terms that like you have to avoid for legal reasons or whatever. And then they'll usually give you your link, your discount code, whatever. And they'll be like, okay, this is what you need to like copy and paste in the description of the video. Once you have the content completed, you send it over. The brand will approve it or send it back for revisions. And then once it is finally approved, you post it, make it live and then they will pay you. It's usually not right away. It usually will be like a month or two later. I'm gonna start editing this video. It's a vlog. It's not a crazy long vlog. It's a shorter one. So I'm gonna guess probably like, maybe two to four hours altogether. The super long vlogs that are like 45 minutes to an hour long, those can easily take me like 10 hours to edit. But yeah, I'm gonna work on this for a bit. And I'm probably gonna heat up some lunch because I'm starting to get kind of hungry. I have leftovers. I got Thai food yesterday. Lunch break time. And I'm still wearing the same thing underneath but I started to get kind of cold. So I put on a robe. Drunken noodles with chicken. So while that's heating up, let's talk about the other ways that you can make money doing social media. So when you do YouTube specifically, you also make money through ad revenue. So whenever you're watching a video and an ad plays, those brands have to pay in order to have those ads featured. So the creator of the video will then get a very small percentage of the money from those ads. And even if you have like YouTube red and you don't get any ads on the videos you watch, we get a percentage like YouTube will still pay us a percentage from the YouTube red views as well. But that can be really unpredictable. Videos will randomly get demonetized all the time or you might get like a really low ad revenue payment. It goes based off of what they called CPM which is cost per mil, which basically means how much money you get paid per every thousand views you get on a particular video. This varies video to video. And there's a little bit of a pattern kind of, but not really like I can't ever know what the CPM on a video that I'm posting is going to be. I might have an idea of like the range, but you have no control over it. And you do continue getting paid for views even on old videos. So even if I don't post a single video for an entire month, I will still get paid from the views on videos that I already have up on my channel. Ad revenue usually is a lot better like around the holidays, but you know, it can kind of fluctuate. It's not like the most consistent or the most reliable thing, but that is another like big way we make money. Another way is through affiliate marketing, affiliate links. You might not have ever known that this product existed, but you found out about it through me. So you click my link that I'm providing to you which makes it even easier because you don't even have to go and search for the product. Here's the link and it costs exactly the same thing. There's no increase in the price, but because you use my specific affiliate link, I now will get a commission from the cost of that product. So I really like affiliate marketing. I feel like it's a win-win for everybody really because a lot of the times with the affiliate links, the brands will also provide some type of incentive. So like use my link, you'll get a discount code and save some money. And then I also get some kickback and get some commission from that too. It is now a little bit after four o'clock. That's a dog bone, by the way, not poop. But I just finished editing my video and I just watched it all the way through. So now we're going to export it. By the way, I use Final Cut Pro to edit all my videos with. So yeah, I'm just gonna wait for this video to export. It doesn't usually take very long and then I'm gonna upload it. I also need a thumbnail for the video, but like I mentioned, I was very productive earlier in the week. So I already have the thumbnail made. So that is it there. This is the website that I use to make my thumbnails, Pick Monkey. And then after you have the thumbnail, you gotta figure out what the title is gonna be. You wanna make sure that it's like eye catching and draws people in and does a good job of summarizing what the video's about and you wanna kinda think about like, what are some good keywords that you can include in that? That might be like searchable. And then after that, you have to do the video description, which depending on the video can either be like really quick and easy or it can be a huge pain and take forever. So there's multiple steps that go into actually creating the content and getting it up online for everybody to watch. The whole process, it takes several hours just for one video that might only be like 15, 20 minutes long. I think I need to make myself another coffee. I have that blowout class later today. A bunch of women from out of town are renting a beach house in the area and they just wanted to have like a night of beauty and they wanted to see if we could come and teach them how to blow out their hair and style it. So that should be fun. It's just gonna be me and one of my other coworkers. I don't need to be there till 7.30 and then we're gonna start the class at eight. So I still have a good amount of time before I need to leave, but I need to just gather up a few things and bringing a mannequin head and like extra curling irons, extra brushes, blow dryers, that kind of stuff. My hair, I don't know if you can tell but it's getting kind of frizzy. I left the balcony door open while I was working and it's super humid outside so we got some frizz going on. But I decided since I'm gonna do this anyway, let me record myself on my phone so that way I can get some content out of it and make an Instagram reel. Hey, Gail. I have two extension boards. Okay. Hopefully it will be covered with that. The lady that's coordinating everything, I originally had talked to her on the phone and she sounded super nice and like easy going. I guess I'll see you at 7.30. Okay, sounds good. See you then. Okay, it is the quarter to seven. I was editing that Instagram reel but I realized I needed to hurry up mannequin head. I have my hair kit with all of my usual tools like a blow dryer, curling iron, flat iron, clips, brushes, combs, round brushes, all that kind of stuff. That is in the car but I said I would bring a few extra things just in case. So I'm bringing my extra curling iron, foam rollers. Okay, think about all the extra stuff I needed to grab. Everything else is in my kit so that should be good. Oh, and I have a spray bottle and then my coworker was at the salon earlier today so she grabbed styling products, extra blow dryers, everything else. We had like a whole list of stuff we were gonna bring with us. I am gonna try to get some vlog footage but you never know how people react to being filmed so no promises but I'll try my best and I'll let you know how it goes when I get back. Just got home a little while ago, took off my makeup, the class was a lot of fun. I tried to get some clips but it was a little tricky because I was trying to do stuff and teach and I kept forgetting to pick up my phone to record so I literally only got those two little clips. It's 11 p.m. now though so I'm gonna get my ass in bed. I'm gonna wrap up this vlog here. I hope that you guys enjoyed seeing a little bit of what I do for work. If you're not already subscribed, don't forget to subscribe before you go. That way you don't miss out on any of my future videos and I will see you really soon in my next one. Bye.