Creating content on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube doesn’t require a big upfront investment — and it can pay big if you build and leverage an audience.
Michela Allocca, founder of the personal finance brand Break Your Budget, got started with just her iPhone and an Instagram account. She had a friend take pictures of her around Boston, where she was living and working at the time, “and I would literally post a picture of myself and write a long caption about three steps to start investing,” she told Business Insider.
When Allocca expanded to TikTok and YouTube in 2020, she invested in a ring light.
“You have to have good lighting,” she said, adding that ring lights are “very, very inexpensive.”
Even as she’s grown her brand from a side project that didn’t earn any money to a lucrative, full-time business, her setup hasn’t become that much more complex. She still films with an iPhone and handles every part of the production process: “I don’t have an editor. I don’t use anything fancy. I just edit with CapCut.”
Like Allocca, Vanessa Ideh Adekoya is a full-time content creator focused on personal finance. She has more than 600,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel, Launch To Wealth, which she started in 2021 after a career at PwC.
“The internet has given us such a great opportunity to build things without really paying much money, and sometimes not even any money at all,” Ideh Adekoya told BI.
Here’s the two-step process Allocca and Ideh Adekoya followed to start earning money online.
1. Establish your niche and post consistent content
Owning a specific niche helps creators build credibility, Ideh Adekoya said: “You want to make sure that you’re providing content about a specific topic so that people can identify you with that topic.”
Some niches can be more lucrative than others. Finance, business, entrepreneurship, and tech tend to be among the highest-paying categories on YouTube. That’s because YouTube’s business model is driven by advertising, she explained. Creators earn a share of the ad revenue generated on their videos, and advertisers in finance-related niches are often banks and large companies with bigger budgets.
This information is available to all creators, she said.
“It’s not a secret. If you go to the AdSense website, there’s a calculator there. If you do your research, you’ll see which niches earn more money — and finance is one of them.”
Courtesy of Michela Allocca
Allocca encourages aspiring creators to make content that fills a gap they’ve personally experienced. That’s what she did. When she started Break Your Budget in 2019, “there were not a lot of women talking about personal finance online, especially in their mid-twenties.”
Once you’ve established your niche, create original content you’d personally want to consume. Allocca believes that the most successful creators are the ones “forging their own style instead of trying to recreate what works for someone else.”
Then, establish consistency.
“People will stick around if they know what to expect from you,” said Ideh Adekoya. “If you show up today and it’s great, tomorrow and it’s great, and the next day it’s great, they’ll hit the subscribe button.”
2. Monetize your platform through partnerships and digital products
Building an audience takes time and patience.
“For the first year or so, nothing really came of it,” Allocca said of her side project. “I used it as a creative outlet to find satisfaction outside my job.”
Her platform gained momentum when she expanded to TikTok in 2020. After growing from a few hundred followers in 2019 to about 1,000 in 2020, her audience snowballed to more than 200,000 by 2021.
That’s when brands began reaching out about partnerships, and she started earning money from Break Your Budget. In the early days, brands offered about $1,000 for a TikTok video plus a link in bio.
There are various ways to monetize your content, including brand partnerships, which make up about 50% of Allocca’s revenue. The other half comes from digital products, including her expense tracker and financial independence calculator.
She said she’s earned more than $1 million selling her digital products, and that income is relatively passive now that the products are created.
Of course, before creating and selling products, such as a course or an e-book, you have to spend time building an audeince that trusts you. Similar to her policy for creating content, Allocca has decided to make only digital products she personally finds helpful: “I don’t sell products that I don’t use.”
If you want to make a living creating content, don’t treat it like a hobby.
“Treat your digital project like it’s a career, and it will pay you like one,” Ideh Adekoya said. She’s intentional about every aspect of her YouTube channel, from scripting videos to word choice. “People are not just subscribing because I’m so special. Everything is calculated. I script everything. It doesn’t just happen. I sit there for hours writing line-by-line to keep my audience watching.”
Even subtle language decisions matter: “When I speak, I don’t say ‘y’all’ or ‘you guys.’ I say ‘you,’ so each person that’s watching feels like I’m talking to her. People want to hear from people they feel connected to.”
