New business ventures can be exciting, stressful, fun, maddening, or sublime. What they have in common either way is that every new venture presents a myriad of opportunities to learn valuable lessons. These hopefully won’t come with a steep price, but even if they do, the lesson can make the price worth paying.
Katiana Kay has learned plenty of lessons about online modeling in the short time she’s been doing it, many of them about the industry’s business side. Here, she shares a couple of them.
It’s Okay to Manage Oneself
Some people create content because that’s their passion, and they have little interest in all the business stuff that also goes on. For them, working with a manager or an agency is a perfect way to hand over that part to someone else while they focus on creating content.
Katiana, however, decided that she’ll manage herself. She found that approach worked for her, so much so that she even tried to start a management company. That didn’t work out too well, so she returned to being a self-managed model.
This lesson comes with a caveat. It’s hard to do it all alone. Katiana has a business partner and other people around her who are there to help.
Getting in the Easy Way
When looking at the pictures and videos of those who have been at it for years, it would be easy for new models to feel intimidated by the sheer production value of the content they see. It’s clear from every one of those photos that there’s been plenty of resources thrown into creating it. In turn, a new model might feel that getting into the industry is something that needs large investment.
It doesn’t have to be like that, though. Katiana managed to get to a half a million Instagram followers without working with a professional photographer, for example. Most of her photos are shot with an iPhone, either by Katiana or by her friend. In lots of cases, people already have all the tech they need to get started.
The caveat here is that they’ll still need to invest time. Online modeling is a time-consuming profession because every photo that surfaces online is a product of hours of shooting and editing.
Keep the Eyes on the Prize
It’s easy to speculate about when an online model does everything right, creates great content, develops a following, and cultivates it. What’s the next step? It couldn’t have been all about building a following just for the sake of doing it, right? Models don’t need a plan for what to do when the numbers start soaring, but it surely doesn’t hurt to have one.
Being successful at online modeling and doing it professionally means earning from it, and there are plenty of ways to do that. Katiana, for example, has the goal of creating her brands and businesses and then using her following to promote them. That’s the kind of thing that’s good to plan for as soon as the opportunities start opening.
It could just as easily be the sole reason for getting into modeling, too. Katiana’s dreams are about entrepreneurship and helping people, and modeling will help her fulfill those goals.
To keep up with Katiana Kay, follow her on Instagram at @katianakay.
