The FTC has done an excellent job helping influencers, brands and agencies better understand how to safely promote on social media. However, many brands have yet to rigorously follow these disclosure guidelines as closely as they should.

A few months ago I published an article entitled, “Three Ways to Show Brands You Care.” Having worked with thousands of content creators, I pinpointed three common traits of the content creators that take brand partnerships the most seriously and consistently prove they care about the success of their sponsors.

There’s a lot of information out there about how to become an Influencer, or how to grow your influencer business. But one step you should consider aside from planning your Instagram photo color scheme or editing your YouTube videos is how to protect yourself legally.

As a creator, it is important to show brands that you care by building strong relationships with the ones that support your channel. For one, the income brands offer can help you turn YouTube into a full-time career. Secondly, your fans want to see you promote brands you believe in. I always recommend creators find a handful of brands they truly love, build genuine relationships, and then come to mutually beneficial long-term partnership terms. Jumping from brand to brand causes distrust in your audience and in my experience, that distrust leads to poorer results for brands. It is a negative cycle you want to avoid at all costs.

Creating content takes a lot of time and resources. The last thing any creator wants is to have a brand request a reshoot or significant edits prior to publication. And vice versa, the last thing a brand wants is to miss their content calendar / budgeting goals because videos require significant changes. It is in everyone’s best interest that videos and integrations meet brand requirements on the first round of approvals and that publication is not delayed. Here are three ways I have seen highly professional creators “take control” of the content creation and review process to ensure a quick and easy approval process.

Should creators license their content to brands? The last time you walked into a company’s office, did you see a video studio? Probably not, right? It is hard for brands to create entertaining video content for their audiences. With more than 80% of the content consumed online today being video, it is increasingly important that brands communicate to their customers via video.

Influencer marketing is developing into one of the three most important marketing channels for Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) brands. For many years Google and Facebook were the only two marketing channels that mattered and influencer marketing was a nice to have. Today, influencer marketing is becoming an increasingly important part of every Direct-to-Consumer brands’ marketing strategy.