Melanie Wilking-Ekeler moved to California at 17 to dance professionally, the same period she first watched friends turn platforms into paychecks. “You’re working with all these amazing brands,” she remembers thinking, and it looked like nothing she had considered a job before. She and her sister started posting dance videos online not long after, a habit that has now run for roughly a decade.

Since then, her content has moved through several distinct identities without becoming several different accounts. What began as dance videos expanded into football and game-day content tied to her husband’s NFL career, then pregnancy content, and now newborn and family content, all layered onto a growing affiliate and brand partnership business across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, LTK, and Amazon. 

“There’s so much more to me than just being a dancer,” she says, describing the moment she stopped treating her platform as a single-topic account. That refusal to specialize is the throughline connecting everything that follows.

The Notification Storm That Started It All

Melanie traces her career’s real beginning to a single viral video with her sister, one that arrived without warning. “Her phone just kept going off and going off. We thought it was broken,” she says. “This has never happened before. Maybe we have something here.”

What followed was not an immediate business, but a slow recognition that an audience, not a follower count, was the asset worth building. “Back when social media was maybe a little newer, it was all about that number, like, how many followers do you have,” she says. “Now, it’s about how strong your community actually is. It really doesn’t matter how many followers you have. It’s, do you have a loyal audience that you’ve created a relationship with and a trust with.”

“Audience before opportunity” became her operating principle. Brand deals and job offers followed the audience rather than preceding it, and she credits that order for everything that came after, including a monetization stack that now runs on several tracks at once.

Refusing to Stay in the Dance Box

Melanie describes feeling boxed in when her content stayed narrowly focused on dance, and her response was to widen the aperture rather than pivot away entirely. Football content came from her husband’s NFL career, pregnancy content came from her own life, and each addition brought a new audience segment without discarding the last one.

She posts the same videos across platforms, treating cross-posting as a strategy rather than laziness. “A lot of times people only follow me on TikTok or only follow me on Instagram,” she explains, so the same video reaches genuinely different audiences on each platform.

Timing complicates the plan. Trends move fast enough that hesitation kills them. “You have to hit it while it’s hot, otherwise it’s over,” she says, recalling videos she scrapped because the moment had already passed by the time she filmed. She manages that by keeping a running log of drafts ready to post during gaps, balancing spontaneity with a buffer against dead air.

Turning Affiliate Links Into a Two-Way Conversation

Affiliate commerce did more for Melanie than generate commission. It solved a problem dance content never could: a lack of real exchange with her audience. “There’s really no communication with your audience,” she says of her earlier dance-only era. “I’m not actually talking to these people.”

Answering questions about outfits and products, first informally and then through LTK and ShopMy, changed that. “That was a way to really communicate with my audience and have the DMs back and forth,” she says, calling it a stronger foundation for community than dance videos alone had offered.

The financial payoff took roughly a year of consistent effort before her first booked deal through LTK, a partnership with Abercrombie she calls a dream brand. Three or four years in, affiliate income and brand deals now reinforce each other directly, since platforms like LTK and ShopMy let brands see her conversion and click-through rates before booking her. “I feel like they both go hand in hand and have helped each other,” she says.

Handing the Negotiation to Someone Else

Melanie is honest that negotiation is not her strength, and that admission shaped how she built her team. Usage rights (whether a brand wants a video live for 30, 60, or 90 days) change what a fair rate looks like, a detail she says most creators do not consider until someone points it out. “I like to do the creative stuff. I want to leave the negotiation to them,” she says of handing that job to management.

Her reasoning is personal as much as strategic. “I’m from the Midwest. I’m a people pleaser,” she says, and finding a team willing to hold a rate firm gave her cover she could not give herself. The fit took trial and error, and she is matter-of-fact about walking away from arrangements that did not click.

That same instinct for control extends to how she vets partnerships generally. Melanie warns against situations where too much of a creator’s life, housing, management, and community all trace back to the same people, leaving no room to work independently. “If you’re needing to get permission from anybody, if they’re telling you can’t do certain things that you know that you want to do, then it would, in my personal opinion, be a good time to maybe step away,” she says.

The Fitness App Is the Newest Stack

If she had to start over on one platform, Melanie says Instagram would be it, pointing to DMs, story links, and affiliate integration as the reasons it functions best for sustained conversation. She is similarly unbothered by social commerce fragmenting further. TikTok Shop, LTK, ShopMy, and Amazon, in her view, are not competing for a single winner. “I think they’re all gonna stay put for a long time,” she says.

That comfort with multiple simultaneous revenue channels is exactly how her newest venture came together. Daily story posts about her own workouts built an audience that asked for more, and Melanie eventually built “Move with Mel,” a fitness app offering strength training workouts. It followed two years of testing, first as a website, before launching roughly two weeks before this interview.

She notes that the app did not require a new audience so much as a redirection of the one already asking questions. “They maybe were just following me because of my dance videos, or following me for whatever,” she says, “and it’s like, oh, wait a minute, I didn’t know she has an actual app.”

Staying the Escape, Not the Algorithm

Melanie’s advice to creators chasing virality is a warning against the exact trap her own strategy avoids: mistaking numbers for a business model. “If you try to chase a numbers game of virality, then you’re going to either burn out quickly, or maybe your mental health may decline,” she says, arguing instead for content built around genuine interest, since virality without substance rarely survives a career.

That same instinct for sustainability runs through what she wants her platform to mean over time, independent of whichever format she is using at a given moment. She describes wanting to be a counterweight to an internet she sees as increasingly negative and divided.

What she wants her platform to stand for once her content shifts again has nothing to do with dance, affiliate links, or apps. “We’re a happy place, and we’re your escape from your day of maybe not so great,” she says. 

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