Daria Astanaeva Of Dariaast Consulting Inc On Five Ways For Influencers To Monetize Their Brand
Paid Partnerships with Brands. You can work in partnerships with brands where they give you their product or service and in exchange, you get money and/or product. The key thing that you need to understand here is that the brand is paying you to get access to your audience and for you to “vouch” for them in the eyes of your community. Basically, they are buying the level of trust that you have between you and your community. You can use any social media channels, including Threads, TikTok, Instagram stories, reels, and in-feed posts to partner with different brands of different sizes.
As part of our series about “How Influencers Can Monetize Their Brand”, we had the pleasure of interviewing Daria Astanaeva.
Daria is a personal branding coach for entrepreneurs and content creators. She helps them monetize their social media presence, regardless of however many followers they have.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit more. What is your “backstory”? What brought you to this point in your career?
Thank you so much for having me! I am so excited to share my journey with you and your readers. I’ve been in marketing space for 8 years and my corporate job background is in influencer marketing management and public relations. I then decided to build my own company and started offering influencer marketing consulting for businesses, built a talent management agency for influencers and a personal branding coaching business to help content creators and entrepreneurs build a profitable personal brand.
Can you share the funniest or most interesting story that happened to you in the course of your career?
It’s not the funniest story but when I first decided to create my online course Influencer Marketing Academy, I invested over $15,000 into making this course. My goal was to make it absolutely perfect — and because I was so hang up on my perfectionism, I completely forgot that I need to promote the product on my social media channels and ask my audience if this is actually something they needed. Well, they didn’t! This online program only generated less than $1,000 back in revenue. But in retrospect, I am really glad that this happened because it taught me to let go of my perfectionism and imposter syndrome and focus on promoting my product. And the next coaching program launch I did in 3 months generated over $17,000 with 4,000 followers!
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
I believe that the world would be a better place if we could finally let go of our perfectionism and imposter syndrome and focus on showing up autnentically and sharing our stories transparently. I am a big advocate for vulnerability and I made it a big priority with my own social media presence to talk about my entrepreneurship and content creator ups and downs, failed launches, a big drop in my monthly income and navigating work life balance. I think that many problems come up for us when we compare ourselves with unrealistic standards that we see online. And if we can all start openly and honestly sharing what this journey to success actually looked like, I think the world would be a much better place.
You have been blessed with great success in a career path that many have attempted, but eventually gave up on. Do you have any words of advice for others who may want to embark on this career path but know that their dreams might be dashed?
Do it scared. You will never be 100% ready or fear-free to start that business or start posting on Instagram. So might as well start trying while you are navigating your fears.
None of us can achieve success without a bit of help along the way. Is there a particular person who made a profound difference in your life to whom you are grateful? Can you share a story?
When I just wanted to start my business, I was so scared of leaving my stable 9–5 job and going on my own. I remember talking to my husband about how scared I was and all the uncertainty that is laying ahead of the journey I am curious to take. However, I was so scared of failure, it was paralyzing. He then looked at me and asked, “Well, what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” “I would open my business and give my 2 weeks notice today”. And I did.
It is hard to be an entrepreneur and a content creator, because you are going through this work solo and you don’t have colleagues or a manager to report to. But when you have a unconditionally loving and supportive partner, it is much easier to be building your dreams. And I am grateful that I have mine in my corner.
So what are the most exciting projects you are working on now? How do you think that might help people?
Right now I am working on building my coaching business so I can serve even more service-providers and content creators to build their own personal brand and impact the lives of their community. Thanks to my business, I get to work with different industries like photography, wedding planning, personal finance, spirituality and wellness and create offers that solve the audience’s pain points without actually having to be a part of that space.
What are your “Top Five Ways That Influencers Can Monetize Their Brand”.
1 . Paid Partnerships with Brands
You can work in partnerships with brands where they give you their product or service and in exchange, you get money and/or product.
The key thing that you need to understand here is that the brand is paying you to get access to your audience and for you to “vouch” for them in the eyes of your community. Basically, they are buying the level of trust that you have between you and your community.
You can use any social media channels, including Threads, TikTok, Instagram stories, reels, and in-feed posts to partner with different brands of different sizes.
Hint: the bigger and more engaged your community, the more brands are willing to pay you for your promotions. You need to invest your time and energy in growing and building connections with your community if you want this to be your primary income generator
2 . Selling Digital Products
This is my favourite form of monetization! When you are selling a digital product, you don’t need to worry about shipping, operations, handling the product and whatnot and there is no limit to how much you can sell. Oh and an extra bonus — you gotta keep the majority if not all the profits as the cost to create a digital product is relatively minimal.
Your digital products can be a guide, a template, a checklist, e-book, template, an online journal, an online community, an Excel form — or literally anything else that a user can just access on their own online!
However, here is the catch — your audience does need to perceive you as an expert in the niche that you are selling your digital products in. For example, if you are a personal trainer, it would make sense for you to sell digital products related to fitness and healthy lifestyle but if all of a sudden you decide to sell a guide about how to feed a hamster, people might have a question or two.
3 . Affiliate Marketing for Brands
There are so many brands that offer an affiliate marketing partnership for influencers and creators. This is where instead of a flat fee payment, you are compensated in the form of commission from any sales you brought in.
When you are working with brands, you can be selling physical or digital products and they typically track it via a custom URL assigned specifically to you and/or a unique promo code that gives your audience a percentage off the full price.
It might seems like a lot or not worth it, but do not disregard this payment method just yet! If you have strong selling power, I want you to strongly consider this option. You can potentially make even more money rather than a flat fee option. Again, a strong selling power is a big factor here!
Your selling power is basically how much your community trusts you. When people trust us, they can easily buy from us. The trust process is built when our audience knows us not just as an expert or as an influencer but as a human as well. You allow them to build an emotional connection with you and thus, they can easily trust you.
And keep in mind, that you can utilize not only your regular social media channels but also your blog, your email list, Pinterest and even ads as well!
4 . User Generated Content
UGC is probably the hottest topic on the internet right now with more and more people trying to make money from their content without having a large community.
UGC is when you record content for a brand without having to post it on your social media channels. While with paid partnerships, the goal for the brand is to reach your audience, with UGC the goal for the brand is to get your content that they can use on their marketing channels.
You still, however, need to have a strong social media presence, even if you don’t want to show your face as much. Your page can be focused more on products and aesthetics but your Instagram will act as a portfolio piece for the brands to see your creative work.
5 . Mobile Videography
The world of content creation is evolving and there are so many opportunities for growth, even if you are not planning to become an influencer yourself.
However, every single influencer needs to shoot content. And yes, they all would’ve liked to do some cute video of them drinking their coffee or majestically crossing the street — but their partner is not always available (or even down to do something like this), their friend might not be as good at mobile videos, and they can’t always rely on their tripod to produce their next masterpiece.
This is where you can come in, my friend! Your job is to shoot videos of them doing various things aka b-roll or any other content they might need. You don’t edit videos for them, your job is to only shoot the content. I, personally, hire a mobile videographer every single month to walk around a city with me and shoot content for the upcoming month. Yes, a mobile videographer is an actual job!
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
If I can only pick one movement to inspire people with that would be kindness and grace. I feel like we are so easy to judge other people around us who are trying to do new things and explore new limits. And just as easily we are so fast to judge ourselves for any mistakes, big or small, we can make. I would urge people to be kinder to one another and ourselves as well and give ourselves grace.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this. :-)
I would absolutely love to get lunch with Valeria Lipovetsky. A few years ago she was a driving force behind my decision to become self-employed. She was sharing on her stories that one of her biggest fears in life is not to live up her own life to her biggest potential and it just hit me that this is exactly what I was doing back then — wasting my life and not trying. May this be another reminder to you to show up on your social media because you never know what kind of impact you might have on other people
What is the best way our readers can follow your work online?
Connect with me over on Instagram @dariaast or visit my website for the latest resources and updates. I also have a free guide 15 Ways to Make Money on Instagram that you can check out!
Thank you so much for the time you spent on this, and for your excellent insights!
