I've been running a social media travel affiliate project for a week under the bourge. My observations.
I'll start with the backstory, since a lot of newcomers have come in lately. Now I am doing my own project in English about travel affiliates. And I've launched social networks for the site - traffic will need to be attracted from somewhere.
Focused on 3 platforms: Inst, TT, YT. I post vertical videos up to 1 minute on all of them. Shorts are the worst in YT. In Inst and TT it's about the same. 792 views is the maximum so far. One subscriber per week on each network. Success
The process is similar to the Google sandbox. Warm up the account, build trust. Actives from viewers give a great signal to increase reach.
Tools
I've been taking a few courses on generative networks for the last month. In my work I use Midjourney or Krea for images + Kling 2.5 to turn them into videos. Upscale is also in Krea. Music in Suno - you need a license for commercial use.
Voiceover in ElevenLabs, they give 10k tokens on free-tariff. Editing in CapCut. Prompts are written in a separate project in Claude, who is trained to write according to the necessary formula.
I buy tokens in Krea on a regular basis, they run out very quickly. You need to take a powerful monthly tariff at once. That's why UBT from social networks (conditionally free traffic) is not so free. Although the entry threshold has now been lowered to a minimum.
Approaches
You can go into social media either as a crafter, when it's more about the picture. Or as a marketer, when it's more about meanings and hooks.
I started as a creater and did the frozen visual for a few days at a time. But quickly realized it wasn't picking up, so I switched to a different mode. Generations for 10 seconds collect well if you think about the concept beforehand.
Today I finally prepared a strategy for publications for the month ahead. This will make life very easy and bring more order. I plan to generate once a week and then post evenly.
What are the different types of publications:
- coverage
- emotionally
- image
- selling
Invisibility
Easier to generate will be those who have their own visual taste or art education. Food photography skills help me: light, color, composition, angle, etc.
But if you know you really like the style of, say, Wong Kar Wai, you can scrape footage from the movies and make a moodboard for Midjourney to generate in that style.
Emotional pits
Burnout is inevitable in the creative process. Burned out means you burned out
Stages
- When you don't know how. You try, you don't succeed. After another failure, you get discouraged. You need systematized knowledge.
- No subscriptions to services. You need a lot of them, and tokens burn out quickly. You spend a lot of money on tests. You don't renew for the next month, and the process dies out.
- I bought the course. Started to get it, realized how to make hyper-realistic. Now I need to get it done, no excuse. It takes discipline.
- Only visuals without meanings don't work. Turns out you need some kind of strategy. Hooks and bytes on the asset.
- The agony of creative choice. It's the final pit. When you know how to do everything, but you don't know what to choose. You need a concept: strategy + visuals.
I take these pits as a sign that a new phase has begun. Development.
Random
- I'm marking AI
- The experts' lifehacks didn't work
- It's trending at TT to make carousels with pictures.
- Turned on the «load in high resolution» setting.»
- Signed up for themed accts
- They won't sign up for an empty account.
- If you get likes immediately, your reach goes up.
I'm excited about what I'm doing. My horizons are expanding and new skills are being added. I plan to continue this further. It would be good to add full horizontal videos for YT.
I'll throw in some examples of my AI movies in the next post so as not to be unsubstantiated. There will be simple and complex generations with my comments.