We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Daisi Pollard Sepulveda a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Daisi, thanks for joining us today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

I’m a firm believer in being able and being prepared to monetize your creative work from day one. So when I started Daisi Jo Reviews I was thinking about monetization. almost immediately which is very different from how many of my peers think about earning a living in the content creation space. Conventional wisdom believes that you must build a large following before monetizing. So there’s a lot of seeding content and doing brand deals for trade before a creator thinks about pitching to brands.

I was relatively early in the content creation space when I started Daisi Jo Reviews. and there weren’t many known best practices for influencers to create and convert traffic so you had to try a lot of different things. The very first thing I did was seed content on my site and youtube channel using whatever brands I had around the house that I thought people (mainly women) would be interested in knowing about. Since I didn’t belong to any affiliate programs I didn’t try to monetize the posts and videos I would create. Instead, I leveraged the content I created to get clients to pay me for creating content and distributing it through my channels. I used a number of different marketplaces to do this such as Upwork, Fiverr, and a few of the blogger marketplaces that were around at the time.

Once I had a good body of work and learned more about Google and Youtube, I worked on getting monetized on Youtube and incorporating ad placements into my content. I also created a media kit that I could pitch to brands. I think I accomplished this all within 6 months.

If I could’ve done something differently it would’ve been to understand Search better and seed more evergreen content. A lot of the content I created at the time was based on very trendy products. I got lucky with a few products that turned out to be long trends due to overall brand popularity but I wish I had thought about this earlier in my process.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I started my career in fashion and beauty very young. At the age of 13, I started working as a model doing commercials and print work for brands and retail stores that were very popular at the time. I’ve modeled for brands such as Glamour Magazine, Sephora, LA Fitness, 1-800 Flowers, Netflix, Old Navy, Gap, and Amazon among many others. I’ve worked as a model for most of my adult and have also ventured into other businesses along the way – one of them being Daisi Jo Reviews. In 2005 I was crowned Miss Jamaica International and went to represent Jamaica in international pageants in China, Japan, Phillippines, and Malaysia. I’ve been a spokesperson for several organizations including Ponds Unilever Asia, Jamaica Tourist Board, Phillippines Tourist Board, Caribbean Classic Golf Invitational, Give Kids A Shot Gala, and the Meningitis Foundation of America. Between modeling and pageants, I had a lot of exposure to what was happening in the digital space with social media becoming increasingly more important to so many industries like media and retail.

Daisi Jo Reviews serves as a discovery pipeline for consumers searching for high-quality beauty, fashion, and lifestyle products and services. We work with brands in creating narratives that showcase products to their target demographic. So we’re B2B2C. For brands, we help them reach segments of their customer base. For example, audiences tend to follow specific influencers and content creators based on how they relate to them or how they’re inspired by them. A hair brand may want to reach my audience because they realize that a lot of their target customers follow me for hair tips because they want to know how I achieve such long, healthy hair—knowing that I have direct access to this customer base and that they are influenced by what products I use for my hair incentives the hair brand to work with me. Our clients include major brands such as Laura Mercier, Bliss Beauty, Carbon Health, JustFab, Kate Somerville, Kiss Products, WeWork, and Clorox.

In addition to working with brands to reach new customers, we help customers make buying decisions by creating reviews and tutorials of products and services. We also create courses, books, products, and events for our audiences as well.

I’m most proud that I stuck with it through so many changes and evolutions in the digital world. Running an online platform and social media channels is extremely hard. I want our clients to know that we’re committed to digital media’s long-term journey and being a trusted source for product reviews and knowledge.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I have 2 stories.

Not very many people know that I started Daisi Jo Reviews while I was going through a divorce. I was also pivoting away from a spokesperson contract I had at the time with the Meningitis Foundation of America and I wanted to replace my income from MFA with Daisi Jo Reviews. It was like I was leaving a marriage and the security of a steady paying job and leaping off a cliff into the unknown all at once. Working on something new during such a transition in your personal life is extremely stressful. However, it was also a great distraction. I just consumed myself with focusing on building and growing Daisi Jo Reviews and when I wasn’t working on it, I focused on learning as much as a could about content creation and the overall industry.

During the pandemic, I think we all had to pivot in some kind of way. It was both a great opportunity for Daisi Jo Reviews and challenging. It was great having so much of a captive audience for such a long period of time as social media usage was at an all-time high. However, the demands to continuously produce content while also dealing with the personal implications of the pandemic was hard. Right before the shutdowns we were doing a lot of events and that was driving a ton of attention for audience reach for us. So we were in full event mode and had to rework absolutely everything that we were planning to do that year. I think one of the biggest takeaways for me was that before the pandemic I used to think that it was an option to just create content in a bubble and that social interactions in real environments were an option. Needless to say that after staying in the house for almost 2 years, I no longer believe that is a possibility. We also had to pivot our sales strategy during that time. Engagement on social became much more important and we had to illustrate that we could do that.

Does your business have multiple or supplementary revenue streams (like a ATM machine at a barbershop, etc)?

Daisi Jo Reviews makes money in a few different areas. We sell advertising which includes things like banner ads, sponsored posts, paid placement on our social media channels, google AdSense on youtube, etc. I include newsletter advertisements, in that bucket as well. We also make money from affiliate partnerships. We categorize separately since it’s a revenue line we have more autonomy over in terms of where and how we monetize the affiliate. We produce publications in the form of ebooks and courses that we sell to our audience base. This revenue line is new for us so we’re excited to see how it grows. We produce brand-sponsored events and are working on launching a podcast in the next few weeks. We also earn from speaking and hosting fees.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.DaisiJoReviews.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/daisijorevie4ws
• Facebook: Facebook.com/daisijoreviews
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/daisi-jo-reviews/?viewAsMember=true
• Twitter: twitter.com/daisijoreviews
• Youtube: youtube.com/daisijoreviews