We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Allie Dear. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Allie below.

Alright, Allie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with what makes profitability in your industry a challenge – what would you say is the biggest challenge?

Content creation seems to have a ton of potential monetarily, but the toughest question to me is what you are willing to do to make that money. One of the fundamental questions I ask myself when considering how I want to work with brands is how related the brands need to be to my niche, and how my followers will perceive that partnership.

I am a woodworking and DIY content creator and I follow lots of other creators who are sharing similar content. I have watched as they partner with hardware stores, paint companies, stain companies, lumber suppliers, etc to complete their projects and these are companies that I would absolutely LOVE to work with someday. But then I have also watched them partner with brands to promote pimple patches, nutritional supplements, clothes, meal kits, teeth whitening strips, skincare products, etc. To be clear, I am not saying this is a bad thing at all, but this is where I am just unsure of how to feel for my own account.

A few things to consider:

When you partner with a DIY company like a hardware store or paint company, for example, you have quite a bit of work to do. You will most likely need to complete an entire DIY project over the course of at least a few days, often weeks. There is only so much of that you can do since it is time consuming and high effort physically. When you partner with more of a “lifestyle” brand, like for example for a teeth whitening strip that you have used and loved, that content is so so much quicker to produce. You don’t need to complete any projects, you just film yourself talking about the product, why you love it, and how to buy it. When trying to figure out how to make your social media profitable, you have to consider that if you only take brand deals in your niche, especially such a time consuming one like DIY, you will probably not be profitable, or at the very least it’ll be a large challenge.

Does it even matter if the ad is related to your niche? Yes, it’s really simple and flows really naturally to mention the paint company that sponsored you as you work on building out your new bedroom. But what if it doesn’t flow naturally, and instead you take a break from painting your room to talk about the meal kit that is saving you lots of time? Or the skincare product that you have been using and that you love? Is that a problem? Can your viewers see it as just another form of advertising, and as a way for the content creator they love to make money and continue to share their content? Or will they be annoyed with this “interruption” and unfollow you?

I haven’t decided how I feel about this, and I could really see both points of view. For me personally, I am never annoyed when a fellow DIY content creator shares something outside of their niche, provided that it is a genuine recommendation of course, but I worry about branching out on my own account. This is something I hope to find more clarity on as I get more experience working with brands.

Allie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My whole life I was training and planning to take over the financial planning business that my parents started together. Never in a million years did I think I would be sharing woodworking and Home DIY projects on Instagram with people I’ve never even met.

I grew up around my parents’ business and loved the thought of helping others form a plan for retirement. I went to the University of Miami and studied accounting with a minor in finance. I interned at a couple different companies in their accounting departments and then graduated early with a nearly perfect GPA and went to work with my mom (my dad is now retired) to start learning the ropes. I took and passed the CPA exam (Certified Public Accountant) and a few different financial advisor certifications as well. On paper, everything was going smoothly. What I’m not mentioning is the crying sessions every Sunday night as I dreaded going to work on Monday, the near panic attacks I would have when I had to call a client I hadn’t met yet, and just the general unhappiness that I was experiencing as I was trying to wrap my head around the fact that everything I had so carefully planned out for myself just wasn’t working.

My family is extremely supportive, and when they could see that I wasn’t happy, they encouraged me to find something else. I went to a public company and started for a brief period on their accounting team before transitioning to the customer success department as a financial analyst on the operations team. I honestly fell in love with the job – I loved helping others understand the financials of their projects and loved the challenges that came along with data integrity and management. I was promoted to a senior analyst, and before long I was in charge of setting up a system to measure and analyze a key metric that the public uses to evaluate a software company’s success. By all counts, this was again a role that was going super smoothly…until it wasn’t. I started to feel that Sunday dread once again, and was getting quite overwhelmed and stressed by the sheer amount of work that needed to be done each day. While I felt I was good at it, I just wasn’t happy. I needed a change, and now that I had some experience working on a team at a larger company, I thought maybe things would be different if I gave it another go with my mom and our family business. Leaving the team was sad, but I felt good about the decision and the future.

Long story short, the excitement waned pretty quickly. I decided to take a break between leaving my job and starting the new position with my mom of about a month. While I was home, I had more time to notice small annoyances around the house, one of which was our pantry. It had these wire shelves that made it so anything I tried to place on them would wobble back and forth, or fall through the holes. We went to visit my husband’s mom for awhile, and she has always been someone who has built things herself, something I was incredibly unfamiliar with. This time, she was showing us this furniture piece that she had built to disguise a litter box inside while supporting a large fish tank on top, a truly custom piece. It looked like something you would purchase at a store, and I just couldn’t get that out of my head. When we got home, I thought maybe I could give something like that a try. I started researching how I might update my pantry, and honestly just became obsessed with the planning of the project. I told myself that if I messed it up, I could always hire someone to come fix it, and that would be my sign that maybe I just wasn’t handy. Mind you, I had never used a power tool in my life and had absolutely no experience with this sort of thing, but the internet can make you feel like you are prepared for anything. After over-researching (no one is surprised) I went to Home Depot, bought lots of supplies and some wood, borrowed a few old power tools from my dad, and got to work. When I say I have never felt so accomplished, I mean it! I had so much fun, and the project honestly turned out better than I ever could have imagined. From this point on, I was hooked.

I have a good friend who is following her dreams of making a living through baking, and she is the first person I have really known to be an “‘influencer”. I have followed along as she has developed and posted recipes and baking tips on her Instagram account (go follow @bakingbycece) and have admired the way she has fought for her dreams and been vulnerable enough to share her passion on the internet, subjecting herself to strangers’ opinions and comments. I honestly don’t know what made me feel like I wanted to give this a try since I have always been someone with a tiny, inactive Internet presence, but I texted her about possibly learning more about posting online, and she was kind enough to give me a rundown of the basics. Again, not sure what possessed me to do this, but I started an Instagram account which her husband helped me name @dearityourself, and I started taking photos and videos of the pantry project to share with the world.

I collected a few followers, mostly just family and friends, but anytime I would receive a comment or like or follow from a name I didn’t recognize, I got this adrenaline running through me, and it made me push harder to continue posting and sharing projects. The most crazy thing happened…I started to not feel stressed. If you know me, you know that’s practically unheard of. I have always found something to stress about, and just assumed that it was something I couldn’t escape. Something that was just part of being me. But this new experience was showing me that I might actually be able to have a life where stress wasn’t the main feeling I experienced. I talked extensively to my extraordinarily supportive husband, and together we decided that I would give myself three years to see if I could make this a real business. I let my family know I would not be joining them, and then set off to find out the quickest way to be successful.

I had to learn two large but very different areas of knowledge – social media and woodworking – neither of which I was familiar with. To learn how to grow my social media account, I purchased an online Influencer Bootcamp recommended by a friend, and then to learn woodworking, I purchased an online woodworking course that I had seen advertised on YouTube. I continued to share my projects online as I completed the woodworking course projects, and as time passed I had family and friends reach out with project requests that started to build up. I transitioned from making course projects to working on personal, family, and friend projects, and the rest is history!

My goal in the first year (2021) was to get to 1,000 followers. At the end of 2021, I had 11,000 followers so it’s safe to safe that worked out! I grew through a mixture organic growth that comes with posting reels on Instagram and paid ads to help get my videos in front of more viewers. Since then, I have continued to grow my following, but also my woodworking and content creation skills. I have gone from never using a power tool to building a custom coffee table, a custom little free library, and my biggest accomplishment, a complete renovation of my powder room for the One Room Challenge on Instagram. I have built wood beams, tiled a whole wall, built a gorgeous floating bathroom vanity from scratch, and I feel like I am just getting started. I have just started working with brands to monetize my account, and I am incredibly excited to see where this takes me!

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I grew up in a family of truly successful people – a doctor, several CPAs, financial planners, business owners, etc. I always knew I needed to get straight As in school, and college wasn’t even a question – anyone who cared about their future would go to college. I defined success as being smart and getting one of those jobs that paid a lot of money and impressed others around you. To me, a blue collar job was somehow less, a sign that you didn’t make it.

Just writing that out makes me ashamed and embarrassed now.

I followed the “perfect” path and ended up unhappy and unfulfilled. Now, as someone who uses my hands my own physical labor to create new things, I have a completely different view of life. I no longer spend the whole week on auto pilot, waiting for the weekend to come so I can actually have fun and relax. I no longer dread getting up and going to work, because honestly it doesn’t feel like work most of the time. And the fact that previous me would look down on someone following their dreams and doing something that makes that happy but doesn’t require a college degree makes me sad for the person I was, but also so thankful for the perspective I have gained. Real success can be found by first finding the thing that makes you happy, and then doing everything in your power to spend your time on that thing, no matter what it is. If it’s finding a cure for cancer, that’s incredible, and if it’s teaching others to make their house feel like a home, that’s great too.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

I think a huge part of someone believing in you is you believing in yourself and portraying that confidence on screen. For me, that meant taking a woodworking course so I could demonstrate safe usage of tools, learn and use the right lingo, and feel like I did have some authority to teach others.

I try to be detailed and thorough when I talk to my audience, making sure I explain exactly why I am doing something a certain way, but also explaining that I do know there are other ways. I like to talk through the other ways and why I chose my way over those others. This shows my audience that I have researched and do have expertise in the area.

Forming relationships with others who do what you do is also critical. If you can have others who do what you do share your work and vouch for it, to me that really makes a difference.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dearityourself/